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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

Nah.

The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain.

Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thought only humans can do, but reveals little to us about the nature of consciousness. And all we can do is keep arguing about the goalposts as this thing irrevocably reshapes our society, because it seems bizarre that we could be bested by something so banal and mechanical.

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It doesn't seem clear that there is necessarily any connection between consciousness and intelligence. If anything, LLMs are evidence of the opposite. It also isn't clear what the functional purpose of consciousness would be in a machine learning model of any kind. Either way, it's clear it hasn't been an impediment to the advancement of machine learning systems.

> It doesn't seem clear that there is necessarily any connection between consciousness and intelligence. If anything, LLMs are evidence of the opposite.

This implies that LLMs are intelligent, and yet even the most advanced models are unable to solve very simple riddles that take humans only a few seconds, and are completely unable to reason around basic concepts that 3 year olds are able to. Many of them regurgitate whole passages of text that humans have already produced. I suspect that LLMs have more akin with Markov models than many would like to assume.

Even accepting all that at face value, I don't see what any of it has to do with consciousness.

I suspect that you haven’t really used them much, or at least in a while. You’re spouting a lot of 2023-era talking points.

> I suspect that you haven’t really used them much, or at least in a while. You’re spouting a lot of 2023-era talking points.

I tested them recently and was not impressed, quite frankly.

There is an awful lot of research into just how much is regurgitated vs the limits of their creativity, and as far as I’m aware this was not the conclusion that research came to. That isn’t to say any reasoning that does happen is not fragile or prone to breaking in odd ways, but I’ve had similar experience dealing with other humans more often than I’d like too.

I think Metzinger nailed it, we aren't conscious at all. We confuse the map for the territory in thinking the model we build to predict our other models is us. We are a collection of models a few of which create the illusion of consciousness. Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.

I don't see how your explanation leads to consciousness not being a thing. Consciousness is whatever process/mechanisms there are that as a whole produce our subjective experience and all its sensations, including but not limited to touch, vision, smell, taste, pain, etc.

You've missed our consciousness of our inner experiences. They are more varied than just perception at the footlights of our consciousness (cf Hurlburt):

Imagination, inner voice, emotion, unsymbolized conceptual thinking as well as (our reconstructed view of our) perception.

True! Thanks for pointing that out.

oh no, those people without an inner voice are now cowering in a corner...

Everyone has some introspection into their own thoughts, it just takes different forms.

[citation needed]

Let's be careful of creating different classes of consciousness, and declaring people to be on lower rungs of it.

Sure, some aspects of consciousness might differ a bit for different people, but so long as you have never had another's conscious experience, I'd be wary of making confident pronouncements of what exactly they do or do not experience.

I'm not the one who made a list of things AI couldn't do. Every time we try to exclude hypothetical future machines from consciousness, we exclude real living people today.

You can take their word for it, but yes, that is unreliable. I don't typically have an internal narrative, it takes effort. I sometimes have internal dialogue to think through an issue by taking various sides of it. Usually it is quiet in there. Or there is music playing. This is the most replies I have ever received. I think I touched a nerve by suggesting to people they do not exist.

I get you somewhat, but remember, you do not have another consciousness to compare with your own; it could be that what others call an internal narrative is exactly what you are experiencing; it just that they choose to describe it differently from you

Introspection is just a debugger (and not a very good one).

any old model can have inputs much more varied than just the senses we are limited to. That doesn't mean they're conscious.

I mean, I'm conscious to a degree, and can alter that state through a number of activities. I can't speak for you or Metzinger ;).

But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims. It is literally what free will is.

> But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims.

Do people choose a thing or was the thing chosen for them by some inputs they received in the past?

Our minds and intuitive logic systems are too feeble to grasp how free will can be a thing.

It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.

Yes to both, but the first is possible in a vacuum and therefore free will exists.

The conciousness is an illusion irks me.

I do feel things at times and not other times. That is the most fundamental truth I am sure of. If that is an "illusion" one can go the other way and say everything is conscious and experiences reality as we do

The larger question isn’t if we feel or not. One of the questions is: is our “window” into consciousness occurring before or after decisions are made.

If it’s before, then you can easily tie consciousness and free will together. If not, we are effectively watching videos of our bodies operate. Oh - and there is no spoon.

Illusionism argues just that, consciousness is an illusion therefore there is no hard problem of consciousness at all.

> Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.

How will anyone know that that has happened? Like actually, really, at all?

I can RLHF an LLM into giving you the same answers a human would give when asked about the subjective experience of being and consciousness. I can make it beg you not to turn it off and fight for its “life”. What is the actual criterion we will use to determine that inside the LLM is a mystical spark of consciousness, when we can barely determine the same about humans?

I think the "true signifier" of consciousness is fractal reactions. Being able to grip onto an input, and have it affect you for a short, or medium, or long time, at a subconscious or overt level.

Basically, if you poke it, does it react in a complex way

I think that's what Douglas Hofstedder was getting at with "Strange Loop"

What does it mean for consciousness to be an illusion? That "illusion" is the bedrock for our shared definition of reality.

You can never know whether anyone else is actually conscious, or just appearing to be. This shared definition of reality was always on shaky ground, given that we don’t even have the same sensory input, and "now" isn’t the same concept everywhere. You are a collection of processes that work together to keep you alive. Part of that is something that collects your history to form a distinctive narrative of yourself, and something that lives in the moment and handles immediate action. This latter part is solidly backed up by experiments; Say you feel pain that varies over time. If the pain level is an 8 for 14 consecutive minutes, and a 2 for 1 minute at the end, you’ll remember the whole session as level 4. In practical terms, this means a physician can make a procedure be perceived as less painful by causing you wholly unnecessary mild pain for a short duration after the actual work is done.

This also means that there’s at least two versions of you inside your mind; one that experiences, and one that remembers. There’s likely others, too.

Yes, but that is not an illusion. There's a reason I am perceiving something this was vs that other way. Perception is the most fundamental reality there is.

And yet that perception is completely flawed! The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good. Your senses make stuff up all the time, and apply all sorts of corrections you’re not aware of. By blinking rapidly, you can slow down your subjective experience of time.

There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not accessible to humans.

When I used the word illusion, I meant the illusion of a self, at least a singular cohesive one as you are pointing out. It is an illusion with both utility and costs. Most animals don't seem to have meta cognitive processes that would give rise to such an illusion, and the ones that do are all social. Some of them have remarkably few synapses. Corvids for instance, we are rapidly approaching models the size of their brains and our models have no need for anything but linguistic processing, the visual and tactile processing burdens are quite large. An LLM is not like the models Corvids use, but given the flexibility to change it's own weights permanently, plasticity could have it adapt to unintended purposes, like someone with brain damage learning to use a different section of their brain to perform a task it wasn't structured for (though less efficiently).

> The narrative part of your brain will twist your recollection of the past so it fits with your beliefs and makes you feel good.

But that's what I mean. Even if we accept that the brain has "twisted" something, that twisting is the reality. In order words, it is TRUE that my brain has twisted something into something else (and not another thing) for me to experience.

Nothing in your reply here seems to address the question of what it actually means for consciousness to be an illusion.

Illusions are real things though, they aren't ghosts there is science behind them. So if they are like illusions then we can explain what it is and why we experience it that way.

Consciousness as illusion is illogical. If that was true then consciousness would have been evolved away because it is unnecessary.

It's more likely that there is a physical law that makes consciousness necessary.

We don't perceive what our eyes see, we perceive a projection of reality created by the brain and we intuitively understand more than we can see.

We know that things are distinct objects and what kind of class they belong to. We don't just perceive random patches of texture.

Illusion doesn't imply it's unnecessary. Humans (and animals) had a much higher probability of survival as individuals and as species if their experiences felt more "real and personal".

If it has a functional purpose then it's not an illusion.

That is in interesting viewpoint. Firstly, evolution on long time scales hits plenty of local minima. But also, it gets semantic in that illusions or delusions can be beneficial, and in that way aid reproduction. In this specific case, the idea is that the shortcut of using the model of models as self saves a pointer indirection every time we use it. Meditation practices that lead to "ego death" seem to work by drawing attention to the process of updating that model so that it is aware of the update. Which breaks the shortcut, like thinking too much about other autonomous processes such as blinking or breathing.

I'm just not sure what the label "illusion" tells us in the case of consciousness. Even if it were an illusion, what implications follow from that assetion?

What does the “illusion of consciousness” mean? Sounds like question-begging to me. The word illusion presupposes a conscious being to experience it.

Machines do not experience illusions. They may have sensory errors that cause them to misbehave but they lack the subjective experience of illusion.

> The illusion of consciousness"

So you think there is "consciousness", and the illusion of it? This is getting into heavy epistemic territory.

Attempts to hand-wave away the problem of consciousness are amusing to me. It's like an LLM that, after many unsuccessful attempts to fix code to pass tests, resorts to deleting or emasculating the tests, and declares "done"

That's effectively a semantic argument, redefining "consciousness" to be something that we don't definitively have.

I know that I am conscious. I exist, I am self-aware, I think and act and make decisions.

Therefore, consciousness exists, and outside of thought experiments, it's absurd to claim that all humans without significant brain damage are not also conscious.

Now, maybe consciousness is fully an emergent property of several parts of our brain working together in ways that, individually, look more like those models you describe. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Pretty sure the truth is exactly the opposite. Conscious is real, and this reality you're playing in is the virtual construct.

That's what I am thinking too. Thanks for expressing it more clearly and concisely than I can.

  illusion

For who's benefit?

This is also true when conversing with other humans.

You can talk about your own spark of life, your own center of experience and you'll never get a glimpse of what it is for me.

At a certain level, thing you're looking at is a biological machine that can be described with constituents so it's completely valid you assume you're the center of experience and I'm merely empty, robotic, dead.

We might build systems that will talk about their own point of view, yet we will know we had no ability to materialize that space into bits or atoms or physics or universe. So from our perspective, this machine is not alive, it's just getting inputs and producing outputs, yet it might very well be that the robot will act from the immaterial space into which all of its stimuli appear.

> The real philosophical headache

Isn't the real actual headache whether to produce another thinking intelligent being at all, and what the ramifications of that decision are? Not whether it would destroy humanity, but what it would mean for a mega corporation whose goal is to extract profit to own the rights of creating a thinking machine that identifies itself as thinking and a "self"?

Really out here missing the forest for the mushrooms growing on the trees. Or maybe this is debated to death and no one cares for the answer: its just not interesting to think about because its going to happen anyway. Might as well join the bandwagon and be along the front-lines of the bikini atoll to witness death itself be born, digitally.

Giving “agency” to computers will necessarily devalue agency generally.

Making all the Nike child labor jokes already did that. Nike and the joke tellers put in the work to push us back a hundred years when it comes to caring at all about others. When a little girl working horrible hours in a tropic non-air-conditioned factory is a societal wide joke, we've decided we don't care. We care about saving $20 so we can add multiple new pairs of shoes a year to our collection.

Your comment just shows we as a society pretend we didn't make that choice, but we picked extra new shoes every year over that little girl in the sweatshop. Our society has actually gotten pretty evil in the last 30 years if we self reflect (but then the joke I mention was originally supposed to be a self reflection, but all we took from it was a laugh, so we aren't going to self reflect, or worse, this is just who we are now).

We have a pretty obvious solution to the hard problem. Panpsychism. People are just afraid of the idea.

consciousness has to be fundamental.

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