Brains are not required to think or solve problems – simple cells can do it

We use programming languages like C to create complex branching algorithms that are turned a linear machine code tape. Programmers generally can not understand assembly even if they understand the branching code that is turned into assembly. Even if assembly had variables, just the fact that if/else's and function calls are turned into jumps is enough to make the code too complicated to understand. It might be possible to disassemble back to C by resolving the jumps into something that is easier to understand.

Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is actually a naturally-forming high level "brain language" that is turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-level "brain assembly," but when we look at it all we see is the assembly. That what the brain is actually doing is relatively simple, but because we can only observe the output of the compiler function it appears to be insanely complex to reverse-engineer.

Then again, I don't have the faintest idea of how brains work either.

First you exclaim there is an underlying logic, then in the next sentence you say we don’t know whether it exists, which completely contradicts your claim.

Having said that, are you familiar with the purkinje cell from a rabbit that they trained to respond to timed patterns of input in isolation?

Timed pattern=input 1, delay X, input 2, delay Y, then input 3.

Definitely more than a simple on/off switch type training, but does that rise to the level of "memory"?

I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw.

Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.

We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness.

So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively.

Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.

This the right term to use here.

> Something something

If human brains have a model, then is language the transport layer on top of that? Is trying to get to intelligence via language no better than trying to get to "google" by modeling its TCP/IP traffic?

The human mind is _so much more_ than a prediction machine, and incredibly complex... All that's before you get into the way the endocrine system interacts with your mind.

A single neuron has an average of 250000 connections in some parts of the brain. The speed at which neuronal signals travel varies neuron to neuron from 2.5m/s to 200m/s.

Human minds are more than just prediction. The anterior lateral prefrontal cortex has the sole responsibility of prediction (not that nothing else does, just that the ALPC seems solely dedicated to that task) and is extremely good at it. Prediction can influence all sorts of mental processes such as most all forms of perception... But it is _not_ the same as _being_ all forms of perception. If something unpredictable enough happens in front of you: you'll still see it.

Sure there are limits to that: when focused on a task the predictive parts of sight tend to filter out visual data that doesn't match the signal you're looking for (see: basketball players passing the ball and a moon walking man in an ape suit) but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see the O's.

So sure: LLMs do a good job at basic prediction but they're nowhere near the complexity of the human mind, of which prediction is only a small piece.

(And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on 20W of power)

It's especially worse when low-quality popular science journalism promotes this notion, like this Quanta article about the human vision system working just like transformers do.

What if it is wired to think?

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra

If we are talking about which kind of complex systems (our brain, a cell, a computer, an LLM, a beehive, etc.) think and how we should note that there is nothing magical[0] in our brain that makes our thinking special and so other blobs of atoms that are not our brain can likely do things analogous to what our brain does.

This to say that explaining in reductionist terms how supposedly something thinks is not a proof that it is not really thinking. Otherwise a sufficiently intelligent alien could prove that you are not really thinking (just a bunch of ions dancing)

[0] and if there is something magical then we do understand how it works and where else it is magicing stuff.

I think these are likely different only by way of their level of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction patterns.

This CPU analogy of yours doesn’t comport very well with the article we’re commenting on, which detailed some specific experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined way that is due to their ‘wiring’, contrary to previous and maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don’t know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating events, but that really supports the idea that cells are dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly outdated notion that they’re hard-wired and deterministic.

I'm not talking about whether they are or aren't, but surely all intelligent beings would say and think they're conscious?

That introspective analysis is consciousness. Humans have just improved the same mechanism allowing for more abstract analysis.

So there's an arms race. The more brains you have the more you can model your tribe to know how to help or succeed. AND the bigger everyone's brain is the harder they are to model simply.

In this model consciousness is the "self model" or "self-consciousness" that allows you to model others opinion of yourself by having such an opinion yourself. And adjust their opinion by providing a narrative about yourself which you first have to craft, .... nd on and on with higher levels of abstractions.

So I think even if you want to make the sense that consciousness solves a lot of problems it doesn't need to, it may have been a "real" solution to a "real" problem at some point in our history. And from that point on, it was no longer important whether it was the best solution.

I do think it's fair to say that lots of remarkably complex informational problems are solved in a p-zombie way, which is to say, with every outward appearance of intelligence (slime molds solving mazes, collective behaviors of ants). So I do think evolution or nature writ large "agrees" with you that consciousness isn't strictly necessary.

1) A huge stream on sensory data only some of which gets promoted to conscious awareness.

2) Some of that raw data and other conscious outputs are persisted into working, short, and long term memory.

3) And your consciousness works recursively using (2) as well as (1) as inputs.

All the stuff in GPT that gets called "memory" in machine learning seems much more like (1) and it lacks any ability to persist data outside its context window so we're still missing something.

If intelligence and/or consciousness arise as emergent properties in the right sort of complex system, they will disappear from view in a low-level analysis of the causal processes occurring in that system.

Did someone say it is? Parent explicitly called it out as a by-product.

- you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal

- the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions

Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.

I don't think the biological reality is conceptually any more complicated, except that the mind and data are complex in exactly a way that completely hides the abstraction, roughly by being very good at ignoring meaningless artifacts of abstraction.

The hard part isn't imagining such a subjectivity, but imagining that I am that.

Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly.

It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it?

No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first time you remember it, every memory access of that is really you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed. This seems to be true even moments after the event.

If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code, you could sue them for criminal negligence.

And that's before we even get to the part where you find out you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see, hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed to simulate the other humans around him, so he could anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions, how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers, it's working correctly?).

You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these things. They're just the simulations.

Now, you've either been poking around in your own head, seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former, you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way, but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...

I feel like most of what we call "consciousness" is converting short term memory into selected long-term memory, facilitated by language. Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled.

As to "human intelligence", honestly, I think that human languages that let us convert our "consciousness" into a shared hallucination is the key evolutionary advantage. Human intelligence comprises a hive mind in a sense, that our experience of the world is hugely affected by the shared social experience where language transfers memory from person to person.

This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?

As to what it is, or why it exists at all, I don't think there will ever be answer to that. It just is.

Its definitely a strange thought, but it seems more likely to me than neurons or whatever other brain matter somehow produce consciousness out of thin air as soon as they some level of composition.

Pure materialism also seems very ill defined to me. The physical world is after all only observable/detectable/can be studied upon, through conscious experience. At best we can say what is real is what is universally agreed upon by all observing conscious agents. If hypothetically there were only two of us, and I said "There is no ball in front of us" and you said "There is", then what is the meaning of physical true/reality?

You can say lets use a detector. But then again, if I experienced the detector as saying false and you said its true, what do we do?

It seems unavoidable that reality is a part of conscious experience, and not the other way around.

Is this because it is a completely man-made system and not one that evolved slowly over time through natural processes?

Anyway, the strip does contain the state of the world around it: the temperature is modeled by how much the bimetal is bent. I think indeed it is a minimal example of a complex system, one that at first glance defies explanation, it seems to have purpose (keep temp stable), until you understand the inside.

Anyway, "Is a virus alive?", "Are these specimens the same species?", ... Us humans like our boxes, but at the edges they almost always go wrong.

The definition of intelligent I give is “to mitigate uncertainty.” If it does not mitigate uncertainty, it is not intelligent.

It is merely of constrained intelligence. Perhaps your expectations are too broad.

If the thermostat reacts appropriately to environmental changes then it is performing its role intelligently.

Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized, then merged with other summarized information and summarized again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and developing a unified categorizing of the global state across all it's inputs.

Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction about the future state. The summarization is energy-efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are coming. I better polish up my resume." From "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is coming I need to fight/flight".

Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a prediction because that process is much more efficient than doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and hoping I just bump into something that will provide sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be "here", and I can get lots of it.

You can apply this same model to all actions the brain directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was formed based on past information that no longer applies, and it may need to be unlearned.

Supposing I accept that, what does this have to do with thought, which is the claim that I was specifically responding to? Does Levin or James also show that this can only be done by having thoughts?

Edit: for instance, as opposed to having some non-thinking process like gradient descent, or more plausibly, some kind of hill climbing.

And then multizoa organisms can evolve once they reproduce, via processes like establishing colonies on other planets. Who knows what kind of multizoa consciousness, i.e. sense of social self these human societies would come to evolve given enough evolution via the process of multizoa natural selection?

In that sense, consciousness.social is like the glimmer of a proto-consciousness for multizoa organisms. The first sparks of a multizoa-level sense of self, that could evolve down multizoa generations into something as complex as human consciousness, but at the multizoa level.

Brain numbing stuff.

Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around on Wikipedia.

In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been asked already in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio fidelity must suck).

They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and try to see the meaning behind it.

If you want to give the exercise a try, it's on wikisource: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Gate

For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises). But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin and our nerve endings on it.

One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are artificial mountain caves.

No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with well established methods which are known for thousands of years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!)

And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced, then we start to explore what lies beneath!!

They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000 years old )

I also agree to the connection between the karmic ‘field’ and our consciousness, and I sometimes feel like I am simply guiding an observing vector across all possibilities, collapsing the wave functions along time. Other commenters in the thread have done a better job articulating that aspect than me, however!