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Comment by MrScruff | Hacker News Reader

I think the mystery of why we're not just philosophical zombies was never going to have some eureka moment, given that it's quite plain it's an emergent property. Was there a creature in history that wasn't sentient that gave birth to a creature that was? Clearly not.

The reason recent results are significant in this discussion is because:

- Larger networks are already displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't have been predicted beforehand. It doesn't have to be 'human-like' intelligence for that to be significant.

- We're getting close to a point where our models will start exhibiting something of the order of the same level of intelligence of primitive creatures.

So the wide-eyed hysteria you're seeing is really just new data points confirming what many of us always assumed would be the case.

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> given that it's quite plain it's an emergent property.

This explains nothing. Stating it's an emergent phenomenon gives us just as much information as saying it's magic. Arguably even less, because it sounds like an explanation, whereas "magic" doesn't pretend to explain anything.

> displaying emergent behaviours that couldn't have been predicted beforehand.

Same problem here. You say "couldn't have been predicted". Which is only true if you explain it away with emergence. The behaviours weren't predicted, because we don't understand how these networks work. Saying they couldn't have been predicted implies that we can't understand them. Which is a very bold statement and I'm fairly certain that it's not true.

> This explains nothing. Stating it's an emergent phenomenon gives us just as much information as saying it's magic. Arguably even less, because it sounds like an explanation, whereas "magic" doesn't pretend to explain anything.

I don't think that's the case. Of course at one level we can understand how GPT4 works, we have a working implementation of it after all. But that doesn't help us predict how it will behave, because its properties are emergent, and have to be studied separately at that level. That's not saying it's magic.

Some things will never be explained... for example what's the last digit of 22/7, and why out of all fractions around it that that particular number decides to extend towards infinity.

Reality can be unsatisfying because it does not owe us explanations.

The degree of ‘needing’ to explain consciousness is basically the inverse of the degree of ‘needing’ to explain what the last digit of 22/7 is. Hardly anyone talks about or does anything with the latter, whereas the reality of the former pervades - quite literally - nearly everything humans do and think about.

I mean, you experienced the reality of consciousness while talking about the last digit of 22/7.

If there is anything in our world that needs explaining it’s consciousness.

Reality doesn’t owe us an explanation of consciousness (obviously). We owe it to ourselves though.

Are you saying that consciousness didn’t result from, survival of the fittest, evolutionary pressure but more of a byproduct of a larger brain (network)? Like it emerged because of a larger network but was not selected for through evolution. That makes sense to me. Humans have a grotesquely large brain compared to other animals.

Edit: I wonder if there are studies that have determined whether or not new born infants are self aware or does it take time for it to emerge after the brain has been trained on its environment for a while

Why not both? Consciousness can both be an evolutionary advantage as well as naturally emerge from complexity.

The large brain was selected for by evolution, which then gave rise to consciousness.

it's quite plain it's an emergent property

That is not at all quite plain. Respectable philosophical views include the proposition it is at least as fundamental as space or time.

Respectable to whom? That sounds like magic thinking, not science.

Philosophers. That's why I used the word "philosophical" not "scientific".

Dismissing serious ideas with thousands of years of philosophical history behind them as "magic thinking" is either a failure of imagination or education; you can rectify the latter by reading up on the subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

There are many things respectable scientists believed thousand years ago that we now know are not true. Vitalist views of life and consciousness are one of those things. As of 2023, believing that consciousness is a distinct phenomenon as fundamental as space or time is a crackpottery at the level of believing 5G causes COVID.

That's a silly thing to say in the context of the links that will have instructed you differently.

One doesn't have to believe that consciousness is a distinct phenomenon that's as fundamental as space or time to reasonably argue that ChatGPT is not in any way close to any known view of consciousness. Crackpottery is being brazenly, uncritically wide-eyed about these LLM systems just because they can convincingly simulate human activities such as conversation and art rendering.

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