Comment by temporarely | Hacker News Reader

Comment by temporarely | Hacker News Reader

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As I said, the matter of consciousness is a shared experience. By denying its concrete reality due to difficulty of communicating this experience you open the door to nonsense such as LLMs being "conscious" because then people like you line up to claim "define consciousness".

> If the definition of consciousness is simply ...

No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience. Then the question is posed to you: please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.

This is sufficient to dethrone any purely structural notions. Which is huge, actually. And informative.

Insisting on "what is the definition" allow for various nonsense, hand waving, and large claims regarding the nature of some mechanism.

> Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.

QED. That's because you insist on missing the point. Naturally it makes for boring discussion. Choose to not engage in such discussions if not contributing anything beyond the red herring of lack of definition for consciousness.

> No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience.

Our shared experience is a real thing, yes. But it’s worthless to ask whether something that’s not a human has our shared experience, because we’ve excluded it by definition. If you asked “does ChatGPT experience the world identically to the way we do?”, the answer is trivially “no”, since we’re human and it’s an LLM. But if you change the question to “is ChatGPT conscious?”, suddenly this is supposed to be a less trivial question? No, you said yourself, nobody’s even willing to define consciousness, and when prodded, we default to “that thing we have”, and how exactly is that supposed to illuminate anyone towards a meaningful answer to the question.

Of course ChatGPT is not a human, duh. If you aren’t willing to state your terms, and “consciousness” isn’t willing to be defined an inch past our noses, then it ceases to be a useful to discussion to ask whether anything is conscious.

> please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.

The structure and what I experience are the same thing. My brain/senses/body apparatus is a thing that by its very construction includes the ability to ponder and reason about stuff, and experience the world. It is this way because it is this way. There is no “me” separate from the structure, so there is no ability to ask “how do I experience the world given only this structure?”

I am the structure, the structure is me.

"Consciousness" seems to be some sort of a reserved word somehow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_word

"Flagged" article, wow that's unexpected.

I believe this is where our cognitive abilities essentially run up against the incompleteness theorem. Everything we can possibly conceive of is happening inside consciousness. There’s no way for us to define the system from inside the system.

Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course there’s nothing outside the universe and there’s presumably stuff outside of consciousness, just we never experience it directly)

> I believe this is where our cognitive abilities essentially run up against the incompleteness theorem.

I believe what it's running up against is culture.

https://hbr.org/2018/03/what-breaking-the-4-minute-mile-taug...

We are conditioned to be dumb. To be clear, I'm not saying it's necessarily intentional (though I am very suspicious), but it isn't physics or (only) Mother Nature that's caused the problem, it is our own actions, or lack thereof. People cannot think about consciousness skilfully for the same reason most people can't think about physics skilfully: it requires particular education. And it isn't just consciousness that requires special education, have you seen the train wreck that politics/geopolitics and economics are? Heck, we can't even reproduce any more in a lot of Western countries.

> There’s no way for us to define the system from inside the system.

How could one know such a thing? Plus, Humans "define" things all the time, there is no requirement for any the stories we tell each other to be correct. People (and the smarter the better) seem to downright revel in it.

> Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course...

Yes, of course.

See how easy it is!

> just we never experience it directly

How could you possibly know the entirety of all human experiences? Let me guess: a story? Perhaps one based on critical thinking and science, that makes complete sense (so it must be true, as per critical thinking)?

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