Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property.

I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own.

Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above

View on HN

I think consciousness is going to turn out to be very challenging to define rigorously enough that we can test for its presence or absence. Emergent or not, the question is how do you determine when it has emerged? Is it a quantity or an attribute? Discrete or continuous? Does it have a finite or infinite range?

We can all agree on what color something is, but we can’t describe the color a priori, only by example. I think consciousness may be a similar phenomenon and the only test is by shared experience. If so then we are in deep trouble because we will not be able to anticipate when a system becomes conscious.

I like the color example, but colors can be reproduced at will by trial and error and by observing the results (and collectively compare them to our shared experience).

Why cannot this be applied to consciousness as well? I mean, it's surely much more difficult to do compared to colors but... impossible?

You and previous comment seem to agree that trial and error/shared experience can determine if consciousness has emerged. And this might/will be challenging.

Previous comment used the word "anticipate" and I think they mean that we won't know in advance before we run the trial and error process.

When they say "deep trouble" I assume they mean because creating a non-friendly conscious AI might pose an existential risk for humanity.

However there is also the ethical issue of creating a consciousness and then destroying/murdering it.

Basically all of that, yes.

I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.

Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.

Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here.

Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.

I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho

If something happens "on the map" doesn't that imply the map to exist and be some sort of metaphysical thing? As opposed to a purely theoretical construction.

I think you can be a monist and still have a map. To me it's similar in the sense of "all models are wrong, some are useful." A mathematical model (a map) doesn't require a metaphysical foundation to exist. Right?

I agree that a monist can have a map. But you said "consciousness exists on the map" which (AFAICT) would imply the map to be "real" else how would something happen on it as opposed to being an emergent property of the contents of the territory?

For example temperature is an emergent property of matter, it does not happen on the map, do you agree? Assuming you do, what would it mean for temperature to happen "on the map"? (Obviously that's nonsensical so for a second here just don't think about what temperature actually is.) Would such a state of affairs not imply dualism?

Temperature is a model. It exists on the map.

Temperature is a classic example of an emergent phenomenon. It can be physically measured using (for example) a mercury thermometer which is an exceedingly simple construction. It is a real thing. You can touch a hot or cold surface and feel it for yourself, no map required.

Anyway even if you don't like the example I chose can you see the point I was trying to make? What would it mean for a quantifiable phenomenon to happen on the map as opposed to happening in the territory? How would it interact with the world (ie the territory)? Would it not necessarily imply dualism?

A variable within a model can be measured. We use physics to describe the universe, but we shouldn't confuse it with the universe.

I agree, but what does that have to do with what I just asked? What would it mean for a quantifiable phenomenon to happen on the map as opposed to happening in the territory?

You can measure a derived value that appears on your map, but you do so by observing concrete things from within the territory. So in that case the quantifiable things happen entirely within the territory and (as you say) it is important not to confuse the map with that.

So when you earlier suggested that "Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map" I'm asking what would that entail? How could consciousness exist on the map as opposed to within the territory? If it did, would that not imply dualism - that the map were in fact real?

"an", not "the" alternative.

Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.

The counter to that is that altering the brain directly alters the consciousness. I can take LSD and I literally change. I can have parts of my brain removed and parts of my self disappear. It's not like cutting off a leg, where I lose capabilities but am still the same me.

The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me.

> The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me

The logical conclusion under the popular axiomatic framework of materialism, for sure.

But there are other possible logical conclusions depending on your philosophical foundations, e.g. the brain could be a receiver for consciousness which is translated into our worldly experience from somewhere else.

I don't know if most people would dismiss the sentence "all matter has a sort of proto-subjectivity very different from ours but which gives rise to ours". And it solves some problems (introducing others).

Panpsychism is certainly an interesting idea but I wouldn't consider it a popularly held view.

That's because Panpsychism is silly.

I don't think it's any more silly than the alternatives.

You don't think it's sillier than "rocks don't have consciousness"?

Potential for consciousness. To have a working mind you need to have a way to gather, process and store information. In case of rocks it would be very empty, static, timeless experience.

If I believe that machines or neural networks can develop consciousness, then I also believe in some kind of substrate independence which presupposes some kind of panpyschism imho because as you say things would have a potential for consciousness, some more and some less.

I'd expand a little bit to say inevitably emergent property. That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. With regards to current AI, we're a fair way away from building something with enough connections, but we'll get there.

One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of information processing, may matter: there might be something about neurons that isn't (currently) reproducible in silicon. I don't know, and there's not (yet) any evidence for or against, but it at least seems like plausible speculation. We just don't know enough about any of this right now.

> That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result.

Why is that?

Aye, that's the question, and we don't know: everything in this sub-thread my comment kicked off is speculation. The thing is that several large groups of (or at least led by) fundamentally reckless people are racing to build machines that will test these hypotheses, with little regard for the consequences. The rest of us are scrabbling around in their wake wondering what's going to happen next.

Well, I think the "brain as an antenna" theory is also plausible given your preconditions.

But I think my issue with the emergence theory is that it seems to imply to me that consciousness is non-physical and non-local. So what entity is actually experiencing the consciousness? It's not that I believe consciousness is physical and local, but people who make the emergence argument seem to believe it is and I can't figure out how that is supposed to work.

Why would emergence imply anything about non-physicality and non-locality? Temperature is a another common example of an emergent phenomena. An individual atom doesn't really have a temperature, only a large group of them do. But you wouldn't say temperature is non-physical and non-local, would you?

I am not sure, but I think you might misunderstand what emergent means. Take chaotic systems, in the math sense. Chaos is a well defined property of, say, iterated dynamic systems.

A linear dynamic, say x_n+1=lambda x_n, or x_n+1=(1-x_n), is never chaotic. But if you multiply them, x_n+1=lambda x_n (1-x_n), it depends on lambda if the system is chaotic.

None of the components are chaotic. But for specific combinations, chaos emerges as an property.

In physics, the mass of mesons and the nucleon is emergent. It's completely different from the constituents' mass. Different from an atom, where its mass is very close to the mass of its nucleus and its electrons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com