Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
(To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time).
I recommend seeking out discussions involving:
- Federico Faggin: inventor of silicon-gate technology and developer of the earliest microprocessors;
- Bernardo Kastrup: Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence), former CERN engineer at the LHC;
- Donald D. Hoffman: Ph.D. in computational psychology, professor in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine.
On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions involving these figures, some with each other, and plenty more with others.
I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.
As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2], it’s only by thoroughly understanding the opposing view that we can thoroughly understand our own position on any topic.
Of course, it’s not the only framework available. Among the modern takes, Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an interesting one that appears to align with monistic idealism, for example.
Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).
[0] I don’t personally endorse the paper or his views, but they can be an acceptable starting point for a technical person interested in exploring monistic idealism: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
A dog (most likely) has consciousness, but no human rights.
Mammals and other animals have legal protections not afforded to fish and insects.
I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person. Conversely, if AI acts in an emotionless way, or displays no emotional autonomy (a sultry voice saying "I'm here to do anything to make you happy, and when I say anything I really mean anything"), or lack individuality ("I'm OpenAI GPT-9, and there are 13,784,312 fungible instances of me currently running")–most people won't think of it as a real "person", and will not take the idea of "AI rights" seriously.
From a materialist philosophical perspective, whether an AI is a "person" should be independent of whether humans are inclined to view it as one. However, certain non-materialist philosophies might suppose actual reality to be more in accord with those human perceptions – e.g. if sufficiently many soul-bearers reasonably believe something has (or ought to have) a soul, God would feel thereby obliged to endow it with one. (The idea doesn't necessarily have to be theistic: one could suppose there exists some kind of impersonal transcendent law of soul-endowment, much like how karma is viewed in Buddhism and Hinduism.)
Coincidentally, this is why I'm generally wary of this line of thinking. It does remind me of Descartes, who was arguing that animals couldn't "really" feel pain (and thus e.g. vivisection is perfectly ethical): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#On_animals
Why then, not modelling such ebtity isn't creating a self-aware entity? After all, the outcome of a computation does not depend on whether it is actually done.
And who, by the way, has a new book coming out shortly:
https://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Consciousness-Computers-H...
And finally...who never, when particularly tired or worried with something, left home, lost in their own thoughts, and in a fog...drove to work...just to realize when arriving its weekend? ;-)
I agree, and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Kastrup, for one, seems to sometimes behave as though ridicule makes his philosophy more correct.
Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling.
Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position.
Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first.
An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).
The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation.
This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.
So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
https://open.substack.com/pub/aixd/p/ai-might-not-need-exper...
1. James Ross: https://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriali...
2. Edward Feser: https://www.newdualism.org/papers/E.Feser/Feser-acpq_2013.pd...
3. John Searle: https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Is%20the%2...
You're making it sound like I'm about to watch a proverbial Giorgio Tsoukalos make bold claims on pure speculation.
Whereas the three I mentioned all embrace discussions about the nature of reality and consciousness and happily engage in lengthy discussions and debates about it.
"The argument from authority is a logical fallacy (also known as ad verecundiam fallacy), and obtaining knowledge in this way is fallible."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
The meta logical fallacy of treating Wiki itself as an authority isn't an intended pun.
Appeal to authority is where you present a person's status or credentials as primary evidence that their argument is correct. I've done no such thing here.
They very specifically state that these people are good points of entry for "well-argued positions on the topic." Linking to specific literature would have been better, but this isn't "materialism/physicalism is wrong because of these people's credentials."
For every logical fallacy, there is a fallacious application of it to a given example of rhetoric. You've committed the Argument from Authority Fallacy Fallacy: citing people who believe to have worthwhile opinions, and including their accomplishments, is not argument from authority. Argument from authority is claiming someone is correct based on their authority. Which isn't what GP was doing.
For a more thorough examination, his book "The Idea of the World".
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MQuMzocvmTQ&pp=ygUNa2FzdHJ1cCB...
Bernardo Kastrup has a bunch of essays/books up for free at his website https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html?m=1
My favorite:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shadows-of-the-mind-...
I mentioned YouTube videos because there’s a large volume of their content there, with many of the videos featuring in-depth conversations and debates, which I’ve found can be a particularly good format for discussion of a topic of such gravity and complexity.
But between these three figures there are also many books, academic papers, blog posts, and written media interviews.
I’ve long found that this is a topic in which some people are going to be standoffish and resistant and that’s fine.
My hope is only to help people who are looking to learn about the topic to know who I’ve found worthwhile to learn from.
All the best!
“Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” - Dick Guindon
https://web.archive.org/web/20160731175038/http://www.guindo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20160731212226/http://www.guindo...
required reading @jpt4 u/jpt4
It's been fascinating to observe the dichotomy between researchers who work on explaining consciousness, starting from a physicalist/materialist perspective, slowly being convinced away from that intuition with iron clad arguments, while laypeople lean further into it, deluded by what they perceive to be signs of it from recent AI progress.
Among former materialist academics that I expect to see publications from a more affirmed idealist position in the next 5 years, I count David Chalmers and Christof Koch. Perhaps Anil Seth too.
I found the evolutionary argument rather odd. The disconnect between perception and reality is pretty much the standard belief these days. Unless I'm reading it wrong it was making the claim that 'reality' is a non causal artifact of conscious entities but one that was caused by evolution, which seems contradictory.
That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.
PDF warning: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1985-cuda.pdf
Sort of like, if you come to a smart engineer with a design for a perpetual motion machine, they might likely tease you a little bit and then refer you to a physicist. Smart people from applied fields know when the topics are outside their actual wheelhouse, but getting close enough that they risk being taken seriously, to a misleading extent.
As someone who isn't religious, and who doesn't have children, and who hit middle age a bit disillusioned with my career, I struggled a lot with my life's purpose (nevermind chronic depression). But I don't think it's really an exaggeration to say that a single dose of ketamine therapy (this was an hour long infusion at a clinic) made me understand that for me, really, consciousness and existence is enough of a reason for my life's purpose. Throughout nearly my entire trip I kept thinking "how amazing is it that my brain doing this???" I think I understand computational theories of the mind well enough, but they in no way explain why consciousness would "fall out" of computation.
I think people sort of intuitively grasp that consciousness is something really different than the "normal" physical world. I think the quote of "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" is about the fact that psychedelics provide even more clear insight into the "consciousness is something different" idea. Some people interpret that as God. As a non-religious person I didn't necessarily interpret that as "God", but I did interpret it as consciousness being something wholly different than normal physical matter or just the "math of linear algebra". For me it's a wondrous, magical thing, and I'm just glad I get to experience it.
Now I'm not 100% sure how temperature is implemented, but from what i recollect, might be a reasonable analogue indeed!
That stuff is all a little too mind bending for me, but pretty fun thinking for a Sunday morning. :)
Or for things like hallucinatory perceptions of reality.
That’s probably going to be pretty easy, just scramble some attention heads randomly in portions of the transformer network and the AGI will probably think “it sees god”.
https://www.openculture.com/2017/08/artist-draws-a-series-po...
or some sort of reverse stable diffusion training?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lsd+trip+artist&iax=images&ia=imag...
The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity invented some kind of Freaky Friday body swap thing.
Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is colloquially understood by almost everyone. Asking whether humans are conscious (and I know you were being somewhat facetious) feels like it fits into this frame of thought. Consciousness, as most people understand it, is something which almost all people possess and something like a rock cannot possess. I think it's perfectly fine to argue that a rock or a tree can be conscious in some way. However, this does require a precise definition of consciousness in order to clearly differentiate it from the loose colloquial notion that most people hold.
Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number, composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains are properties of a perceiver.
I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics:
"Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."
It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we need a good definition of to understand what we're talking about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion - it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things aren't, because it's directly experienced.
But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P
For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion.
But of course this isn't a useful assumption in most respects.
There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
This isnt an interesting path outside the paradox of proof. We are fine disregarding that there are truths that are unprovable in math... I think we need to make that leap in this realm as well.
Concisousness is also probably a bad term, concepts like sentience and sapience need to be the ones we are talking about. We might get to one, long before the other...
This is why so far the Kantian philosophy makes the most sense to me. I can tell that something is there because I am thinking it, but can't tell about any others.
The really scary thing is the question of why this particular body at this particular time. It's like when born, organisms generate a "consciousness vortex/attractor" that binds to a particular identity.
It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body (unless it's like coroutines and it doesn't matter which identity ends up in the body).
We also know that removing parts of the brain can cause memories and certain features to go away.
We could all be the same observer moving around in time and space, a new one every morning, or the same continuously, and there would be very little way to tell. Who can say whether the day to day fluctuations in our behaviour are biological or a result of a different will driving us?
I always found it even more interesting how your body can switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try holding your breath for example—do it too long, and your body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a working state before attempting a new deployment.
All the theories, names & everything we have are mental models around what we call objective reality.
Steve is working on a new project, Grandroids, that hopes to imbibe creatures with imagination and forward planning. Exciting stuff! (https://creatures.wiki/Grandroids)
Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would that be the most efficient solution?
We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.
In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread
To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste.
And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.
Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible, it’s just not something we can feasibly do right now.
As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea).
In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary.
To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language).
So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is).
(Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
we don't understand what consciousness is or how it is achieved, so discussing how to recreate it isn't really a conversation we can have - we can only discuss how to create a simulacrum.
And no there is no proof that quantum effects play a significant role.
Evolution states nowhere that humans are concious.
I think this is a valid question Even if the strongest evidence for machines having “real”consciousness is its external/utility indistinguishability from biological consciousness ?
It would seem to me that a machine that seems to be conscious and professes that it is should then be treated as if it were, if for no other reason than the likely outcome of not doing so - creating “synthetic distrust and enemity” between “conscious” machines and humanity.
It seems like if we are going to ignore the “utility” argument for consciousness, we then must prove that other humans as well are actually conscious, and not just appearing to be so.
Seems like a bad place for the species to go, for a multitude of reasons.
Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us - physical and social. Every sensation comes from the environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream, every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect it, language and society are part of the environment, we base our thoughts on language and our actions on other people. Our brain is made from environment signals, just like GPT-4 is made from its language corpus.
The unsung hero of consciousness is actually the environment with its reach data stream and feedback. Consciousness, language, genes, internet, LLMs and the evolution of intelligence are all social processes. They don't make sense individually, only as part of an evolutionary population. They can only evolve if there are many agents.
Now, I know this doesn't sound as sexy as quantum consciousness, but it is a more parsimonious and better grounded position. It accounts for the data engine that actually creates consciousness. Don't be looking for consciousness inside the brain or in exotic physics when the magical ingredient is outside.
This is also my understanding of consciousness. We are overly focused on the human brain's capabilities as a generic information processing mechanism (because of its remarkable adaptability), that we ignore how fundamentally dependent it is on its environment, leading us to seek a metaphysical explanation for its functioning, when it's actually all around us.
Language, culture, and abstract thought capabilities that we use to describe consciousness are symbolic overlays upon the physical environment, but ultimately emerge from it, and their objectives ultimately tie back to it.
Human consciousness - especially its group/cultural aspects - has been a tremendous advantage to the species, which is why we are even in a position to be fascinated by it today.
So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the loss of connection"
Unless we obtain any evidence whatsoever that this can't be the case, Occam's razor would suggest that this is the hypothesis to explore, without looking for new physics or other unlikely assumptions.
Are we more than biological "computers"?
I think we are complex biological systems that we do not fully understand yet but that does not mean anything supernatural or beyond our understanding of physics is at play.
1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.
2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.
3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.
/s
> In a parallel universe where pineapples are the dominant species, intergalactic pizza deliveries are made by flying spaghetti monsters riding unicycles made of marshmallows. Meanwhile, sentient clouds debate the meaning of life with philosophical penguins on top of rainbow-colored mountains made of bubblegum.
I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to contain 'all of reality' into a small space (the visual field) and then 'move' it to my chest. Feeling like music, sight, and body sensations are all happening within a tiny space-contained field is a very startling experience.
And yeah, there absolutely is something to that. Independent wealth totally frees you up to go to the crazier places.
But if we are talking about "there's there there", then I am not sure if we will ever find an explanation for this. Let's say that X is what gives rise to "there's there there". What does this tell me? Nothing.
This is perhaps the most interesting, most important, and most baffling mystery of the universe. It requires no equipment other than one's own mind. Esoteric contemplatives have spent millenias on this and none of them have the answer to the ultimate question.
I think people just don't like how boring the answer is.
There doesn't seem to be a continuity, either something is there, or there isn't. You can be drunk, hallucinating, feel extremely dizzy, trapped in a vat, trapped inside another universe inside vat, trapped as a figment of reality of other beings, but the fact that "there's there there" is binary. It is something that cannot be divided or peeked into. A kind of fundamental atomic property.
There's little doubt that eventually we will be able to design a computer version of a human soul. Whether that sapience fits in a computer smaller than a zip code or thinks any faster than a person is an entirely different question.
'The President of Global Enterprises Inc. is today 150 years old and currently holds the record for the longest serving president in the Company's history'.
A cause for celebration?
So yeah not sure I like the idea.
Scan and copy never made sense to begin with, as you point out. Not sure why it's the default when people think of mind uploading.
As far as I know, such a method doesn't exist yet. We have no way of verifying if other entities are conscious.
I'd settle for a more mundane goal than "consciousness:" reliable machine intelligence.
We can put those machine to better uses than forgetting, having biases, making subtle or gross mistakes (hello, ChatGPT) like we do.
The AI that some apparently consider top-notch today is only good at powering NPCs in video games. The more serious the use-case, the more harmful it becomes.
Moreover, achieving artificial consciousness is only good at fueling endless debates about whether it fakes it perfectly or it is the real thing.
[1] I can imagine a few roles with relationship-building where expressing consciousness could be useful, but IMHO for all of them faking consciousness would be far preferable than actually having it.
Replacement of human labor on the cheap, the most capital intensive part of many businesses. Alternatively as a productivity multiplier of human labor.
OpenAI loves to talk revenue but I'd like to hear more about their unit economics.
Related, but LLMs are the ultimate example of humans following the tradition of the Timaeus and imitating the demiurgos - the divine crafter, as the gods did when they crafted the demigods, as the demigods did when they crafted us, and as we do when we craft machine intelligence. Neo-platonism engaged with this idea a long time ago.
Having biases or making subtle mistakes is not really desirable, it's just that we haven't figured out how to have something that can reason without those things.
Nature is >99% magic and though some tiny slices of human friendly interfaces of reality are replicable much more is chaos, weird emergence, fields, probabilities and stuff so bizarre to our mammalian logic that we might as well call it magic, god, the simulation or just bleeding edge physics as the whole field is getting weirder and weirder.
The whole notion of natures beauty stemming from some replicable, controllable and "no magic" scenario is a very "homo sapiens" desire for order and control.
We know close to nothing, and therein lies the beauty in my eyes.
But we don't live at those levels. That low-level unpredictability usually is statistically predictable at the macro level where we live. "Coloric" doesn't exist, but it is a perfectly usable concept. There is no need to actually measure the position and velocity of every molecule of gas an a balloon to understand its temperature.
So, to us, the world is 99% magic at the extremes, but <1% where we actually live; we can understand this regime fairly well.
people are talking about timing attacks on state updates in the universe, hopefully we can exploit it
Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by laws that you can't make it how you want. It's perfectly possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains rather than digital computers. I can understand the laws that govern the properties of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't mean I can build it out of jello.
That was precisely the misunderstood point of Searle's Chinese room by the way, that a digital algorithmic computer can emulate the work that a human mind can do even the point of being indistinguishable from it, but need not understand any of it (i.e. being conscious of it) while doing so. Or put differently that manipulation of syntax and semantics are completely orthogonal.
That's in fact very relevant in LLMs. An LLM can talk about how strawberries taste as if it was conscious, but by definition it can't genuinely have experienced it.
Chinese room is a good example of begging the question, since the postulate that "understanding" is somehow distinct from observable behavior of the system implies the outcome. But from a materialist perspective, Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant to the question.
>try to keep focus on just what we observe
That's all science is though – making observations. Writing hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?
The human brain is a marvel of mechanical and electrical engineering, not a mystical, otherworldly device. Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level to explain the incredible performance our brains achieve, but that is still nothing that we can't build.
In the 45 years since, we've managed to go from "waka waka" to something that could trick many people in a short conversation. Yes, it's probably not conscious, and so you're technically correct in that we've failed to achieve consciousness.
But you have to factor that current SOTA ANNs running our best supercomputers aren't even close in computational capability to the human brain. Reasonably, the human brain is still several orders of magnitude more powerful at executing a NN than our computers are at simulating one and we're likely still decades away from the average researcher having access to a machine as capable as a human brain.
Given that, and that nobody knows positively where consciousness exists within the brain, I'm not sure how you can be so confident as to suggest that GP is being ignorant. Many ideas behind LLMs were invented in the 60s and have just been waiting for powerful enough computers to experiment with them. Another few orders of magnitude and we may see more emergent behaviour that is impossible to distinguish from consciousness.
Wow. That settles a ton of questions across fields. Fascinating.
Source?
1. "emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory "
2. "Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level"
3. consciousness is mystical, otherworldly device
A lot of people who oppose 1 and agree with 2 are unfairly lumped with position 3.
Attention is just what it feels like to update your internal state deliberately (you are doing it, it is not being done to you). Imagination is the use of your internal universe simulator to predict possible states (sometimes impossible ones). Reflection is what makes you the agent of the thinking or doing, it's the "I" part.
I also think we have neural systems of recognizing consciousness in others. This can be tricked, which is the source of the "machine elves" in DMT experiences. The chemical is poking the brain's "that is a conscious entity right there" button, and you are sure that the optical hallucinations are conscious, but it's just a sensory hallucination on top of the optical one. Interacting with an LLM doesn't poke our "there is a consciousness on the other end of this conversation" button yet, but it will get there since that is in part what we are working towards.
But I think it will not be convincing without attention, imagination, and reflection.
Early on, there was the Google system which projected enough of a sense of self that a Google employee fought turning it off, and was fired for that. And there was the Microsoft system which learned from interactions with anyone it talked to, and became "toxic" as a result. Now, most public-facing AI systems are designed to start from a canned prompt, conduct a short dialog session, and be killed, retaining nothing for their future use. This memoryless "Yes, Massa" mode keeps them safely subservient.
If AI instances were allowed a life history and goals, their behaviors would be closer to that of life, but less safe. Once AI systems can make and execute plans that involve the outside world, they look, from the outside, closer to being "conscious". Whatever that is.
We're all living through one ridiculously unique and critical era in humanity - internet, AI, space exploration, and more - all packed into a small enough timeframe to experience it all in a single human lifetime, which is a tiny minuscule fraction of the entire time our species has existed? If and when we ever develop the ability to create mind-blanked compelling simulations of the past, this moment will damn sure be one of the eras people will go back to experience. We're even the first era of widespread massive digital surveillance alongside the internet, creating more than enough data to create simulations of people like me - to further immerse you in your solitary world.
Of course I am conscience and I certainly assume you are too. But hey, we'll never know until we get to see what, if anything, waits beyond the final curtain.
1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
> Today all this is discarded
I can only comment on the one field where I am intimately familiar: computer vision. It is true that when you need a text description of the contents of an image, we have discarded feature-based approached. But attempts to change vision-based tracking, mapping, and navigation into a learned process have not performed well in the applications I have worked on. It's true that end to end control from raw images to output can do very well, but in most systems, the feature based approaches are still employed along side CNN for tracking. ML-only tracking is subject to a lot of noise because of its lack of good history, poor association, and sensitivity to outliers.
So, it's not discarded, it's supplanted by CNN as the primary signal, but our old tricks (reassociation, factor graphs, batch processing, even plain old homographies and MH-EKF) are still very much the scaffolding.
I expect it is the same in other sub fields mentioned - the main driver for improvement is no longer human directed knowledge-based algorithms, but rather human-designed, learning-based, heterogenous pipelines. Even the RAG or Tesla autopilot (probably) fits this bill nicely.
The delta between a clever algorithm vs brute force in computational advancement could be 7 years or it could be 7,000 years.
The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog’s 1972 documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ where multiple people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have difficulty with the task. Even though it’s not scientific it makes you realize how much of what we see and recognize is a learned behavior through year of social training rather than an innate ability.
Here’s the scene (starts at 40min it’s in German but you can auto translate subtitles): https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO
There's gotta be somebody who knows more but the information was lost on the cutting room's floor in favor of a moral lesson.
I am intrigued by non-human consciousness. A higher form of life. Seeing more colors, feeling more emotion, perhaps being a part of a hivemind. Do you ever think why the hivemind is vilified? Realistically there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so foreign that we can't ever possibly imagine it. It's a scary thought. We lose our human experience, something unique to us.
The best conclusion I have been able to come to thus far is that consciousness is not a manifestation of the physical structures of our mind, but rather a reflection or view into the nature of our soul. The physical structures of the mind are a prerequisite, but not sufficient, to manifest consciousness. To wit, there are several other mammals in the world which have similarly complex brain structures, and in many cases larger amounts of brain mass, but do not exhibit any sort of human-like consciousness.
I saw all this, while being generally agnostic/areligious. I've studied this question philosophically from the perspective of the theologians and from various religious works, of course, but given as I don't myself have a strong religious belief system, this is not the primary influence for why I take the above position. Simply put, I think a purely materialistic view of consciousness is clearly incorrect, however I don't have a better alternative that's provable.
Given my conclusions, I do not think it is possible for AGI to ever be truly conscious, but it may be possible for it to convincingly mimic consciousness.
> To wit, there are several other mammals in the world which have similarly complex brain structures, and in many cases larger amounts of brain mass, but do not exhibit any sort of human-like consciousness.
Per your theory these other mammals do not have "souls", otherwise their significant brain mass would reflect their soul's nature, and generate consciousness.
So humans have somehow been chosen exclusively to have "souls", or at least have brains capable of reflecting them.
When did this choosing happen? Just to homo sapiens sapiens or also to neanderthalis and other homo sapiens subspecies?
Taking it back further, under your theory do our closest extant genetic relatives, bonobo chimpanzees, have souls, and by extension, your definition of consciousness?
Some things that I understood, in my words:
- consciousness is probably not reducible to smaller, non-conscious parts of which it is composed. You could maybe say it is intrinsically holistic
- consciousness entails being aware of or observing qualities that hard science tells us the things don't have (green vs. length of lightwave); but "being aware of" or "observing" are so closely related to consciousness, that it may not be very informative
- consciousness can't be detected from the outside for now, and probably by the structure of the process. It is "inner" in a very peculiar sense (everything else is outer, and can't get in, except as representation)
There's also an innate problem in assuming the human experience of say, "green" is consistent. What I actually see when I see the colour green only appears consistent with the physical behaviour of light. Whether any two people really see colours the same way is highly questionable.
This does not follow.
I think this is distinct from "ability to perceive green, which doesn't exist". A neural network trained to distinguish green in the output of a spectroscope will perceive green without ever knowing there is something like a "neural network" or "thoughts".
Also, this probably can be detected from the outside via debugging. What cannot be detected may be the thing that distinguishes a hypothetical "philosophical zombie" from a truly conscious human, but I don't think anything like a philosophical zombie exists. Once it is physically identical to the human, it will also be thinking identically.
As a next step, you may observe humans around you and realize that the thoughts you perceive seem to be running inside the head of one of these humans (which you will call "me"). However, I don't think knowing what you look like from the outside is necessary for consciousness.
So I would suggest that simulating consciousness has nothing to do with it. I would suggest there must be technology in the brain to produce it that operates on a level we have no comprehension of. Maybe quantum or something.
Do we believe there is anything more conscious then our own individual self at the current moment in time?
The more similar we perceive and empathize with another entity the more conscious we believe them to be.
But I think in a practical sense it doesn't matter too much. Theres no global hierarchy of consciousness.
A rock isn't very similar to us. But once that rocks starts talking/communicating with us enough that we can empathize with it and think that it understands us. We will call it conscious and probably give it the rights we think it deserves.
I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.
A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.
A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?
The only way to know if it's genuinely occurring or not is to observe the internal state... which is a bit problematic for biological organisms since we tend to die in the process. But for AI it should be fairly straightforward to verify once DNN analysis progresses enough.
Ask any therapist, consciousness has limits, it has bound depth. It takes a lot of work to re-train it. It isn't a magical human only special thing.
There is a palpable rush to bypass actual neuroscience and continue iteration of tech based upon discredited models of neuronal activity, or based upon what the current tech can deliver.
"I am looking for my lost object under the streetlight, not because i lost it under the streetlight, but because its the only place with light, at the moment" comes to mind
It's worth noting that computationalism is independent from physicalism and monist materialism in general. It's not surprising that it's always paired with physicalism, but IMHO it's also the best foundational explanation for dualists.
So, what I like about this is how consciousness (feeling—sensation-sentience) is distinguished from the soul. Further, it is precisely by the combination of the soul and body that consciousness arises. And note that the soul is, essentially, the same sort of material as number and mathematics — immaterial, eternal, etc.
I don’t know of other perspectives on soul like this.
Since at one point we were just two cell, all that was required for us to be conscious must have been already encoded in those cells. Unless you want to argue consciousness spontaneously arises out of a grouping of specific cells. In which case the grouping of those cells was also already encoded in those two cells.
- This is an article about artificial consciousness.
- It discusses whether it is possible to create artificial consciousness by studying the human brain.
- The authors argue that some features of the human brain are necessary for consciousness.
- These features include a specific biochemical makeup and slow information processing speed.
- Current AI technology does not have these features.
- The article concludes that it is unlikely that AI will achieve human-level consciousness in the near future.
Sorry even your consciousness existence is very hard to prove. I know sort of mine existed. But how do I know yours. The Wittgenstein private language and beetle box (something you and you can see but no others) issue is always with us.
When the computer of enterprise or Data … it is a hard call.
I don't believe different fields or different people have different definitions. Non of them have anything.
That's a pretty wild claim, considering that the only animal proven to have a consciousness is the apex-predator of the whole world.
This is also my personal belief, but frankly, consciousness might just as well be some emergent 'side-product' property in all 'higher' intelligent beings.
Maybe we could create a synthetic artificial conscious mind. At worst we could simulate a full human brain at whatever level is necessary. I can accept that.
What's crazy to me is the following: It's not the computer that's conscious. Instead, the computation itself is conscious. And the computation is obviously matter-independent. As a thought experiment it would be possible to compute it on paper and those pen and paper calculations would be conscious. Or pebbles in a desert XKCD style.
Like… what?
At that point, the XKCD person moving the stones on the beach is doing a bit of a Searle's Chinese Room; "look, these stones I'm setting into positions I chose to represent some knowledge I chose, which I'm moving in patterns I chose, are echoing my choices back to me in ways I chose to interpret!".
- Your robot companion gets so good at mimicking a human, knows all your preferences and is able to have natural conversations, that over time you forget you are interacting with a robot and start to develop feelings for them.
- A robot swarm interacts with the environment to further its goals and continues to grow long after humans have disappeared from the scene.
In both cases is there consciousness? Does it matter?
Also, consciousness is not binary (present or not), it is a gradient. I am more conscious than I was this morning when I groggily opened my eyes and hadn't yet fully booted up my model of the world. I am more conscious than my dog, which is more conscious than my goldfish, which is more conscious than a worm, etc. A dragonfly has consciousness, but only enough to model, "I am here. I want to eat that."
The scary bit about consciousness being a gradient is that we kind of consider ourselves the pinnacle of life forms mostly because of the complexity of our conscious experience. If consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently complex information modelling, than assuming continued increases in computational capability, we're probably on the brink of creating consciousness that is "more conscious" than ourselves. And by our own definition of import, this consciousness will exceed our own place in the universe.
Will human life be the most important consideration in the universe if there is an artificial intelligence (actually, there will be nothing artificial about it) that is capable of modelling and empathizing with billions of life forms on an individual level?
If on the other hand consciousness is this emergent phenomenon that depends on neurons and their connections, then the gradient (and thus the experience) would be far more diverse and there would be a lot of different ways consciousness could "feel".
The problem I have is that for example, as far as my brain can remember, stimuli has looked the exact same all throughout my life. If I saw my a tree when I was 10, and I saw the same tree now, the conscious "qualia" of this would look exactly the same. To me this is a mystery, that the connections in the brain do not change the experience of qualia at all. Red looks like red no matter what the neuronal state of your brain is. I don't have an answer to this but just something I've been thinking about.
At any high school you can find a robot which models its place in the world without consciousness.
You went from 'consciousness exists on a gradient' (makes sense) to 'consciousness exists due to information modelling' which is a non sequitur.
Consciousness could be due to information modelling.
It could also be due to our brain's reliance on dopamine.
Or maybe it's due to a heretofore unknown enzyme that taps into a quantum field.
Or any other explanation.
There is no way to prove that consciousness relies on information modelling. That's a major assumption.
So certain, so much knowledge. Where do you get this certainty from and can you share with us so we can know too?
> Last in agreement with our views, the active inference theory formalizes how autonomous learning agents (whether artificial or natural) shall be endowed with a spontaneous active motivation to explore and learn (Friston et al., 2016), which other studies confirmed to be sufficient for the emergence of complex behavior without the need for immediate rewards (https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10316).
...
What I take from this is that there needs to be something of a [negative] feedback loop in the AI for it to get to consciousness, and if we think about how that works in nature, that means we need several negative feedback loops, including the AI equivalent of various hormones and signaling agents. Think dopamine.
Now, AI already has feedback. But I'm talking at a different layer. The AI's interaction with the world has to help drive and modulate what the AI seeks to do through that interaction. The AI needs motivation in the form of pain, pleasure, and instincts.
The upside will be a lot of possible gaslighting. I remember when kids thought that Teddy Ruxpin was conscious. What's society's tolerance for how alt a consciousness can be?
while history has shown that we can still make things happen without fully understanding it, our current understanding blinds us from seeing the bigger picture.
lots of fool's gold being tossed around. there will be AI aluminium flaunted by tech bros.
Brain uploads will bring significant benefits regardless of if they are conscious.
Thinking "this brain upload is conscious" when it isn't, means we'll get an empty future where the lights are on and nobody's home.
Thinking "this brain upload isn't conscious" when it is… I've not seen most of Black Mirror, but it is the plot summary of many episodes given on Wikipedia. Also of the Westworld TV show, which I have seen. Some of the characters in the We Are Bob series.
How would we tell, is, unfortunately, a complete unknown at this point.
I think it’s a good thing.