We still have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness. I bet in 25 years we'll be no closer to understanding it than we are today.
I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.
I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.
There is a fallacy among non-scientists that if we don't understand absolutely all of it, it means we understand none of it. We understand most of it already.
Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.
edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they anthropomorphize. I mention this to point out that even the analogy to other humans fails when they look a little bit different.
We also have no way to detect it or to prove that it exists, other than direct experience. Consciousness doesn't affect the world in any way that we know of. I think that the most reasonable position is that if we could somehow extract the consciousnesses of two different people and switch them with each other, that neither the subjects nor the observers would notice a difference.
Unless we're dualists (which is totally valid), there's little reason to think that intelligence and consciousness (depending on how it's being defined) have much of a relationship at all.
Maybe one line of inquiry that might be able to give us some clues is if we're able to actually have people learn something like a physics equation with no prior knowledge of it while they aren't conscious of the learning of it. That might be a hard study to do with possible ethical concerns but if there's a way to design it, I could see some hope for getting closer to understanding the role/structure of consciousness.
One maybe plausible explanation might be that there's some sort of hierarchy of pattern matching there, where first you need to understand language, then mathematical language, then finally the physics equations. If you take that view, then the equations are really just extremely sophisticated pattern matching constructs. They don't have to actually _be_ the code that makes the universe-computer run so to speak, they just need to give us a precise enough predictive model that we're able to do useful things with it.
Maybe another way to put it is, we're not actually uncovering the source code of the universe, we're just looking at the functioning of the universe and extrapolating our own patterns that yield the greatest predictive power. On that view at least there are some plausble avenues for explaining strange artifacts like the time-reversibility of some equations - i.e. our patterns show that this will give predictions even if time flowed backwards, but the universe's time doesn't flow backwards because this pattern that we found is not the same thing as the actual universe. In that sense we'll never be able to actually uncover this source code so to speak, but that is just how science works - we're always looking for a more accurate theory - we'll never reach "the final theory", and even if we did, how would we know?
Might actually be easier to create artificial consciousness such that we can actually measure and more closely study what is happening.
The biological approach is fiendishly difficult. If we can barely understand how an LLVM is working, what chance do we have of trying to understand one by only looking at the raw electrical output few dozen transistors from a machine running one.