Hacker News Reader

Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi)

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.

View on HN

A psychologist I know did their PhD in this area (also old and smart), and he called this kind of thinking "Neural Chauvanism" -> if her explanation actually requires the chemical and neural components.

PDF warning: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1985-cuda.pdf

It's a good point as i'm sure what she was saying is she belives consciousness requires specific neural properties. I am aware of the the ideas around neural chauvanists, but that paper is now almost 40 years old. We know a lot more about the brain since it was written. The idea that the homunculi can perfectly replicate the relevant causal powers of neurons is... questionable at best. It would says distinctive biochemical properties of neurons enable consciousness, which homunculi would lack, and then homunculized, I also don't like the idea that we must attribute consciousness to the homunculized brain unless we accept an implausible cut-off point? Consciousness could be requiring a critical mass of neurons, which could be reached later without each replacement causing incremental fading. The implausibility of a single neuron replacement eliminating consciousness is not a good reason to consider it conscious. imo It's probably still more likley that experiences like an LSD trip require specifically neural underpinnings.

That seems more like a good natured refusal to engage with the question seriously.

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 whose experience with ketamine therapy profoundly changed my life, I think she was making a slightly different, sly point.

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.

Well, this guy is highly proficient at administering an artificial lysergic acid to LLMs: https://x.com/repligate/status/1792010019744960577

Deep Dream is wild: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DaVnriHhPc

And a few drinks too many: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/13vv941/tempera...

Raising the temperature is probably a close analog to psychedelics.

I've read once they determined the mechanism by which a.o lsd 'works', is by lowering/disabling a lot of the filtering between neurons. This leads us to recognise all kinds of patterns that are not really there. Visual hallucinations being the obvious form of this, but I suppose the same applies to other things like our personalities and self; that's neither here nor there anyway.

Now I'm not 100% sure how temperature is implemented, but from what i recollect, might be a reasonable analogue indeed!

That's not really correct. default mode network activity is somewhat disrupted, but LSD works primarily by interaction with the 5-HT2A receptor subtype, this is multiple neurotransmitter systems, including serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate, and in many examples it's via excitement not inhibition/lowering/disabling. Excitatory neurotransmission in glutamate is looking like the the most important of the work in the 5-HT2A area.

Does excitatory/inhibitory map cleanly on to the higher level abstractions? I'm no neuroscientist, so maybe it does, but that seems like a bad assumption to me because in digital logic "active when low" is extremely common. A spurious-suppression system that caused inhibition when low would be perfectly reasonable and compatible with the observation that excitation caused an increase in spurious behavior.

They don't really map well. The brain obviously operates on more continuous principles rather than binary states. The relationship between excitation/inhibition and emergent effects may be more direct and graded in biological neural networks vs to the "active when low". Buuuutt stiilll, 5-HT2A receptor and its downstream effects on glutamate transmission play a central role in mediating the subjective effects of psychedelics. Very very many studies have consistently linked 5-HT2A activation to the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional characteristic of the psychedelic state. Disruption of the default mode network and other changes are somewhat important maybe, the 5-HT2A receptor appears to be the focus of action for producing these effects. The point being, neurochemical interactions at the molecular level are the most important aspects of the LSD interaction, so.., now sure how that works in the context of synthetic AI, I don't know much about ML/NN.

I still don't see the reason why glutamate or 5-HT2A receptor excitation (in the chemical sense) couldn't be involved with inhibition reduction (in the psychological sense).

That's begging the question of whether inorganic matter can be conscious. If you boil it down, she's just said if it's inorganic, it's not conscious.

It's funny, I've studied a lot of psychedelics (probably because it was an area of research for both my parents), and salvia divinorum is a really really stand out plant in it's trips, it seems to be a very "technically philosophical" plant. Trip reports always go into weird things like "I became a book on a shelf for 4,000 years, and now I know inanimate objects are conscious", there is also the area of panpsychism and animism.

That stuff is all a little too mind bending for me, but pretty fun thinking for a Sunday morning. :)

well, i tried salvia and I tried shrooms. I don’t see how it’s more philosophical just because it’s a dissociative. at best, it’s more of an ego death than, say, shrooms, if during the trip you become an object. It’s still a unique plant for sure because of it’s dissociative effects. To thread lightly. AFAIK natives in mexico say that smoking it is very bad. and that u’re supposed to chew fresh leaves. maybe chewing fresh leaves doesn’t even cause the same dissociative effects which are unpleasant.

You can give it a virtual device as the real time camera input to show it things that aren't there. That's not organic acid, but the target isn't organic consciousness.

One uncanny thing is that people have such a diverse tolerance for "fake", across a spectrum from absolute acceptance to complete rejection.

Or for things like hallucinatory perceptions of reality.

> 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.

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”.

Can't you train a model on LSD experiences, and use that as a prompt?

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...

You can give LLMs DRuGS though!

https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS

Funny story, but at the same time, got seems fine about hallucinating by itself. At least a little.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com