Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says
news.ucr.edu
news.ucr.edu
We define a word to mean a certain collection of things (consciousness) and then try and stretch that definition to other things in the world that have the same appearance.
The problem is that this abstract term likely doesn’t exist in itself as a quality, but is just a shorthand for a collection of behaviors that are observed only in biological entities.
And so even if a machine exhibits all the appearance qualities of this definition of consciousness, it’s fundamentally not the same thing at all, and the only reason we think it is, is because our language is insufficient for actually describing reality.
In pragmatic terms it might not actually matter, if a machine 100 years from now passes every conceivable Turing Test. But that doesn’t mean that machines have become conscious in the way humans are conscious.
Expanding in an edit: It just means that the word consciousness is more descriptive, like awareness, and not the soul-derived concept that it still functions as today. Side note – I spent a couple months last year researching the history of consciousness for an essay contest, and one conclusion is how consciousness is descended in large part from our concepts of the soul. Which explains a lot of the reason it has such cultural prestige today.
And currently its widespread usage in how people relate to and talk about Ai is actively harmful.
And dont get me started on how terrible the "hard problem" is, yeesh.
When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.
The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.
We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.
Early on and for obvious reasons - it is pretty easy to observe in oneself, much easier than discovering electrons. ;)
When a ball hits a bat, the ball also has a short-term memory and sense in the forms of how the inter-molecular forces detect and respond to the event of getting too close to the molecules of the bat and react with a repelling force. A more evolved form would be your consciousness.
Further, a lot of living things on earth might not have self-awareness.
...What? If a human brain can, that's quite literally proof a machine can? We are made out of matter that obeys the laws of physics.
And we have never made a machine remotely complicated enough to mimick a human brain. LLMs are the closest we've ever come, and they're not even close. Nor are the even made in a way condusive to doing so (focused on generating requested output, not postulating randomly). So as to the mechanical machine specifically, nothing exists to even be capable of being observed to make such a claim!
I feel that this is what we will ultimately conclude is the thing that makes us feel “conscious”. We model the world, but with ourselves in it. We need some sense of self to do this. Doesn’t mean this can’t be done in (probably) a million different ways.
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information.
It's like saying love, or nation states, or music doesn't exist. These things exist as much as it can matter to human experience, but you can't explain them by materiality alone.
Here it is:
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...
"Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon, posing a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?"
Basically, they are asserting that no matter how we define consciousness, it can't be unique to earth's biology.
This feels deeply unsatisfying to me, because the argument is not specific to conciousness so it doesn't tell us anything about conciousness.
Personally i suspect conciousness is kind of code for: the experience of being alive as a human. In which case aliens might not be concious by definition.
But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation.
Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc.
The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms.
If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability.
That’s because consciousness allows an object to experience its wholeness, but there is no physical explanation as to what makes an object ‘whole’, for example smooshing two brains together doesn’t result in a single consciousness any more than cutting a brain in half results in two. Yet, the same action by another mechanism (reproduction) does create a new consciousness.
How does a level of consciousness that goes well above human baseline look like / work like / feel like?
Could such consciousness go to levels not merely slightly above human levels -- but like 10x or 100x (if there were a way to quantify).
What would that unlock?
Curious to know if there has been any vivid description of these possibilities by people much smarter than me ... that might help me appreciate the shape of such things :)
You can take various brain scans, MRI, EEG. Then you data-analyze them to compare to other scans, and you map things out.
In chess there is this ELO rating which allow to compare various players. This concept can also be applied to comparing various AI, and even though progress happens in various different dimensions (coding, mathematics, question answering, style, cohesiveness,...), there are a bunch of step changes where once you cross the threshold progress in various domains rise simultaneously until they plateaued again.
In the multidimensional energy landscape of self-organization, when you try to minimize the energy, like a sequence of waterfall cascade, you go down by steps and there are can be big falls or small falls and you don't really know until you take the step.
One such step is the ability to self-organize the hardware your consciousness runs on. For example if you are a human it may involve optimizing the neuro-chemistry of the brain by taking various substances, or by controlling the body finely enough that it produce them itself. For a machine that could be designing is own chips or nano-machines.
But it can also be expanding the consciousness on the software side, by having a rich inner life, where you have various memories. You structure your brain "database" more efficiently so that it can make use of the progress of information retrieval technologies. For example you can incorporate mental calculation algorithms, so that it becomes second nature. You can visualize, grow your imagination, have ideas interact with each others.
There is no longer a single thread of consciousness. Ideas comes in your head faster than you can process them, they just are. They progress you don't know where they are going, but you just go with the flow, trusting everything will sort itself correctly. Then you notice you are not limited by your own brain, but you can sync up with other beings. So you start vibrating with others expanding your consciousness to something greater than yourself.
Then you are vibing with the world, vibing with the universe, you understand its rules, and you realize time is not linear; in an instant more can happen than in a lifetime. It's all computations, and by organizing your own brain in a certain configuration you can force the universe to spend all its computational budget on the intricacies of your thoughts. You set-up new rules for an interesting universe, one more beautiful, number 43 among the promising ones, more worthy of exploring than the one you've already connected to, and you let them fly ; you have become the universe.
Edit: Wasn't trying to be harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little clickbaity. I also think string theory is a meaningless pursuit.
Who, other than you, claimed this?
Coming up with a dumb thing someone else could say, but has in fact not, is not rhetoric. It’s not insightful. It’s beating a straw man like a piñata.
Science works. Philosophy can help guide that by helping us decide where to look. So I guess this paper is helping in its own small way.
The argument essentially is. The universe is really big. It would be weird if we were the only thing alive in it, so probably there are other life forms out there. Given enough of them probably some are conscious and made out of different stuff then we are.
And sure, fair enough. That seems plausible. But it also seems like not a very interesting argument. It is essentially just saying the universe is big, therefore all the possibilities are out there.
Solaris ? Do stars dream of being a Sun and what they can do about it ? (master SF)
- but is he talking about.. _frozen_ mass imagination (or snapshot hallucination) ??
- consciousness? - yes, lots of it is there, as of many other beings caught by _Language Models_
.
(aside of a a joke that the universe (with us as a part of it) is not evolving but computing a number (42 exactly) - which eventually may become real thanks LLM) [Lem:Dick .. (Adams)]
Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a system. That's why organic chemistry is a thing. There aren't that many families of elements with that property. Ammonia and silicon based life have been suggested. But none of the alternatives have very promising chemistry. See [1]. Life is probably stuck with CHON, in the "goldilocks zone" where water exists as a liquid.
We now know that planets are not rare. Many extrasolar planets have been discovered. A few are promising. The systems with known extrasolar planets might have smaller, more interesting planets, too small to be detected at interstellar ranges.
But stars are a long way away. Unless FTL is possible (which it probably isn't, because causality would break), the most we can hope for is someone to talk to by radio or something similar.
See the Drake Equation.[2] There's been progress on firming up the numbers since the 1950s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...
Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. We couldn't detect earth level civilizations in the nearest solar system (which probably doesn't have earth like life) even if both of us by chance aimed at each other at the correct time.
Supposedly, the Arecibo radio telescope, before it collapsed, could in theory communicate with a similar setup across most of the galaxy. The dishes would have to be aimed at each other.
> before it collapsed
This is a real problem - communication implies two-way, or at least intentional one-way. Across light-years of the galaxy anything that doesn't last for 200,000 years (or at least close to that) can't communicate. Arbitrary advanced technology has only detected life advance enough to detect their signals out a few light-years (assuming they care to look), and then they need to get a return signal back to us (again assuming they care, and we are looking)
Further-away stars would take longer but on the flipside you have many more candidates as destination.
TLDR; any spaceship that can be kept operational for a few centuries or millenia, while travelling at a modest fraction of c, would allow space-faring intelligent life to meet alien life in person, as long as it is 'nearby' (compared to crossing the Milky Way for example).
Not saying that's easy! Or that alien life is nearby. But possible.
Aaand I stopped reading. If you cannot describe or frame the object of your study, then I don't care.