So... where exactly do the neurons come from? Are these donated neurons or grown in a lab from samples?
This seems... questionable at best. Not really comfortable with the idea of this...
This seems... questionable at best. Not really comfortable with the idea of this...
So, to me, it seems like until that threshold is very clearly established, any work with 'organoids' is hazardous at best, but more than likely just wildly inappropriate.
Am I being a luddite?
Nobody reading this comment knows if there's a human by the keyboard.
Heck, if you go for A J Ayer and "there is a thought now", then even I don't really know if I'm the real me, or if I'm instead just a vision-and-text model seeing the image of the phone and a finger swiping over the keyboard, to be switched off when the "real me" is satisfied the output proves some point.
You may argue that I can perceive myself and therefore know that I exist (I certainly took that approach at school contrasting the previous Ayer quote with "cogito ergo sum"), but even that doesn't tell me that what I experience as consciousness is what you experience as consciousness.
Indeed, things in the same category as aphantasia, sleep deprivation, and excessive caffeine consumption, all suggest to me that we all have very different experiences of being conscious at the best of times and even without such thought experiments.
I have always been so puzzled by the line of thinking you present here. It is clear that everyone else responds to pain in much the same way, everyone else responds to lack of food, water, social interaction, love, etc In much the same way, etc. The differences are at the fringes and your examples of sleep deprivation and caffeine consumption only serve to reinforce that : doesn't matter how much coffee I drink or how little sleep I have, its going to hurt if my bones are broken just like it would for you.
I think this line of thinking is a cute little thought experiment but it really falls apart quickly - if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently. And largely, we don't. So even you if intellectually will posit that you are the only truly conscious person, or that maybe even you are not conscious, you do not actually behave this way in practice. Obviously
Consciousness emerges and is maintained in the context of other people - and not just individuals but communities whose language, techniques of adaptive living (i.e.: traditions), and storytelling about the word, are carried intra-individually within clan and affiliate groups. In the postmodern era those communities can be parasocial or virtual to an extent, fictive or reenacted, but they're not optional for the continued coherence of self.
There is no 'I' except in relation to the other, moreover the self doesn't become fully individuated without being witnessed and held by the other - caregivers in early childhood, friends in adolescence, social roles in adulthood.
All of this would be impossible if our phenomenology wasn't broadly similar. All societies have identified social roles for those few whose inner world isn't commensurate with the collective - in modernity we call them schizophrenics.
I think that's a false dichotomy; third option is that everyone is different.
Also notice I suggested that I might be "only" a model that doesn't even realise it's a model. I sure know I can make models pretend to be specific people, so it's not unreasonable for me to wonder if I can make a model trained on my own public data, at which point it becomes reasonable to wonder (if you assume for the sake of argument that the model is indeed conscious, who knows, roll with it) if that model might post something under the experiential delusion that it's A Real Boy.
Would my digital twin know it wasn't the original? What question could it ask itself that upon introspection would reveal the truth?
> It is clear that everyone else responds to pain in much the same way, everyone else responds to lack of food, water, social interaction, love, etc In much the same way, etc.
Pain, no. I can switch mild pain off at will. I know people into BDSM, who confuse me massively by enjoying it. I know someone who appears to lack the qualia (not the nerve response, just the qualia) of direct pain. The are also people I see in the news occasionally with literally no pain nerves, and they regularly injure themselves as a direct consequence of this, so no, broken bones isn't as good an example as you think it is.
(Edit: and another example in the opposite direction, I've also met someone disabled by pain that has no apparent cause).
Food and water, well, my mother had Alzheimer's and what killed her in the end was forgetting how thirst worked. When my dad got bowel cancer and his lower intestines removed, he almost destroyed his kidneys because his thirst reflex didn't come close to the impact of the now-missing moisture absorption. But it doesn't even require end-of-life illnesses to encounter such issues: a decade ago in a different country, I used to know someone who regularly didn't drink enough fluids because they didn't feel thirst, and got kidney stones as a result.
Food is also a common oddity. I'm currently dieting, my hunger is more of a suggestion; yet the need to lose weight comes from the fact that I've previously been ravenous.
Social interactions: I'm an introvert with a handful of connections, and ex of mine connects to so many people so easily that during the pandemic, her online birthday video call had about 90 minutes of her welcoming new people and telling everyone in one sentence how they were connected. I think she invited more people to that than I can actually name from my life.
> if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently
We do behave abhorrently.
You mention animals in the opening paragraph: if animals are as conscious as humans, then meat has the moral standing of industrialised murderous cannibalism, and even dairy has the moral standing of industrialised nonconsensual impregnation.
Fear of this possibility is why I am vegetarian, and why I repeatedly attempt veganism.
We're also pretty bad with out-group humans, though to a much lesser degree. It's why we're willing to go to war, and why most of us demonstrably don't care all that much about civilians dying so long as they aren't of our own nationality — How many genocides happened since 2000? I think most of us don't know the names of the groups, let alone the individuals.
> or that maybe even you are not conscious, you do not actually behave this way in practice
LLMs do not necessarily behave, though they may be so trained, as if they think they are not conscious.
Likewise a VHS tape of Brent Spiner in the 80s and 90s wearing white face paint: the actor is (of course I assume that), but the VHS itself isn't despite displaying the real human actor demonstrating these behaviours.
It tells me nothing about the underlying nature either way.
Ah, I see.
My perspective is that this comes up so often, in so many people, that it reveals an underlying truth: there's no such thing as "normal", not even in humans.
As you say, we agree that it's a spectrum :)
> "I can only be sure that I am real, everyone else is a construct of my mind"
No solipsism here: even though is unclear to me how to determine the boundaries, I still have a probability distribution that's got most of its mass somewhere between "most humans are conscious" and "most big mammals are conscious" — the fact I can't prove either panpsychists or A J Ayer wrong doesn't mean I have to take either seriously.
Now, that said, "most" humans. There's people who act like they're not really there. Is that behaviour indicative of an inner absence? IDK.
Even in the most extreme human case, that of anencephaly (*do not* google that unless you have an iron stomach), I'd rather not let them be treated poorly, for the same reasons I will never consume insect-based food: just because they fall outside the region where I put most of my probability of finding consciousness, doesn't mean I'm actually confident that it's absent.
(This also applies to AI, but as they share zero evolutionary history I have zero reason to expect an AI which does have subjective experience mapping "what they do" and "how do they feel about it" in anything like the way we do; could be all laughs and smiles on the outside while hating every second, just as Stephen Fry describes some of his depressive episodes, except even then this is over-anthropomorphising and even an AI modelled on a human brain scan may be much more different from this example than any two humans are different from each other).
I’d separate “experiencing” from how it works here. It doesn’t have to be more lucid, all these people similar to you may not experience it and may only “work” properly, while you both work and experience. In this, you also may lose it anytime and the body you have wouldn’t even notice.
As of how unique you are, well, you may have it and they may not. You can’t tell due to “wouldn’t notice” part. You (both body and it) can only insanely loop back, converge on it for a while right now, until routine gets you again. Imagine a book about a guy who reads that same book. That’s the theme here. The author decides to never go back to this fourth-wall break and that’s it. Or he just stops writing in the middle of a sentence. Or something else. Whatever he does, the guy in the book has zero choice, despite realizing all of it clearly.
it really falls apart quickly - if we operated like we didn't know if other people were conscious to the same degree we were, then we would behave abhorrently
Only if the “work” part tends to this and loops back enough. Which is unusual for humans. People barely ask themselves questions about consciousness, and many actively(!) avoid the talks. You may think that free bodyless geneless part of “you” is something that makes decisions, but does it?
But that's somewhat begging a question of free will. Did I choose these words, because I literally chose them or is it simply a product of various physical processes within the entity that I'm 'attached' to and 'observing'? And if this latter possibility is the case, then the presence of "me", the consciousness, serves absolutely no purpose beyond being a 'passenger.' And an entity with or without such a thing would behave identically. This could, for instance, include compelling descriptions of consciousness.
This is one of the main issues I have with consciousness. If you write a computer program to give you the value of a variable, add a couple of numbers, or other fundamental process then you certainly don't believe some entity suddenly poofs into existence, imagines itself doing such an action(s) of its own will, and then poofing our of existence. Yet, if one is to believe consciousness is suddenly emergent then this must become true at some point or 2, 3, or 2^100 actions, which I find no less absurd.
It sounds like LSD trip because it’s about a topic that is naturally trippy.
By looping back I meant that in a passive passenger (experiencer, observer, you name it) & a physical body situation, the latter may coincidentally be driven into thinking about the former (as we were itt), but that doesn’t really mean the two are interacting. The passenger part doesn’t even have its own mind cause its only mind is in the body.
By “work” I mean the physical body. Esoterics aside, our bodies are physical objects which “just work”. They don’t need a metaphysical observer to do human things. Bodies without a “passenger” are usually called p-zombies in philosophy.
But surely it is both? It may be true that philosophy is the only line of inquiry that allows us to explore very far due to a lack of scientific progress, but but even a purely philosophical exploration has scientific implications, and even if we don’t have scientific answers in practice, that doesn’t means that there are no answers in principle.
But the unfalsifiability of consciousness only points to the hardness of the problem and the current limitations of science, not the importance of understanding consciousness and its implications.
Put another way, even if science can’t currently tell us anything solid about consciousness, the implications of what it can’t tell us are still highly relevant to the kinds of science we do, e.g. we still treat other humans as if they’re conscious and this forms the basis for most ethical decision making.
You’re also suggesting that because something cannot be perfectly formalized, there’s no value in exploring the problem given what we do know. This seems problematic.
Regarding ethics; the point is not that consciousness is somehow itself responsible for ethics. The point is that despite our incomplete understanding of consciousness, we use our first person lived experience as a basis for collectively formulating rules about how we interact with other humans. The fact that I can’t formally prove that anyone around me is conscious or what it even means to be conscious doesn’t mean I should feel free to treat those people as non-conscious objects.
> Trying to create any sort of formal ideas around something that cannot be measured, quantified, or evaluated in any way, shape, or fashion
The fact that I’m having this conversation with you is a rebuttal to this.
You’re correct that there is a particular kind of measurement that we cannot currently take, i.e. some kind of lower level diagnostic of consciousness itself, whatever it is.
But I disagree strongly that there’s nothing to measure or evaluate. Just one simple example, but why is it that we all seem to experience pain? And how is it that we agree pain exists? Why would most people understand a question like “how bad is the pain on a scale of 1-10?”
We have drugs to help mitigate pain, and we have stats about how efficacious some drugs are vs. others, when one drug is more appropriate for a given situation, etc.
How does any of this exist if we have no way, shape or fashion to measure conscious experience?
As for pain, you experience it because it's an evolutionary wiring in your brain to help you avoid harm. If you didn't recoil when putting your finger in fire, you'd risk severely damaging your finger. Pain saves you from yourself and is one of the most primitive stimuli we have. Even extremely simplistic multicellular creatures react to harmful stimuli or experience pain. Presumably you do not think they have a consciousness, but perhaps they do? The point of this is that there is no way to know anything. For all you know, it's even conceivable that a rock, or a star, or even a nucleus might have a consciousness. I strongly doubt all of these of course, but there is no way to conclusively say they do or they do not.
all of these use the same word, they each may or may not be the same thing.
That Nature article seems to discuss both approaches, using both induced pluripotent stem cells and embryonic stem cells — which of course are not donated by the human being which they once were part of.