Hacker News Reader

Comment by hparadiz | Hacker News Reader

"Consciousness" is tick based and it does not require a massive human brain. Even the smallest of animals react in real time to stimulus. There's a filter that lowers the amount of tokens the next tick has to process. That's why you can watch a video and two different people will notice entirely different things about it. Forgetting is our brains culling what they process. Being awake eventually degrades that process. You can see this in every study on tokenized llms showing a decrease in accuracy as the context fills up. So too does your brain. That is why we sleep.

Short answer yes. We can build a brain.

As for quantum effects. It's just the machine. Not the mind itself. It's sort of like asking how a CPU works and then expecting that to inform your science on cognition.

View on HN

> "Consciousness" is tick based and it does not require a massive human brain. Even the smallest of animals react in real time to stimulus.

Reacting to stimulus is a behavioral response. Consciousness is subjective experience. We know humans have subjective experiences (and suspect many other animals do), but not every stimulus reaction is conscious, and consciousness is not limited to perception (feelings, empathy, dreams, imagination, visualization, earworms, inner dialog, memories).

You're confusing multiple concepts.

The tick is at the top of an async jobs queue. The jobs provide the tick with constant updates. And this is not in real time. If you are injured say a sudden injury. You won't even notice until 2-3 ticks after.

Behavior is an emergent property of this. Not it's base.

Behavior isn't consciousness. Also, brains aren't digital computers or LLMs. They're part of a living organism.

You're arguing web servers are conscious.

Consciousness is a misnomer here.

What I'm actually talking about is decision making. This applies to higher and lower life forms. Even a bacteria will decide things from moment to moment. Well okay how does this happen? Well something in the background must provide new data to the "tick". Ticks don't rebuild on each turn. They get re-used. But that re-use is updated from sensory inputs, memory, and then is filtered to limit how many tokens each congitive tick is forced to process. Anyway consciousness is an emergent property of this system. We're just state machines ultimately.

Personally, I get a lot more milage out of "human brains are 100-1000 trillion parameter odes" than a discrete temporal model. There's probably some isomorphism but I find ODEs to be a much more natural model with less impedance to real world biological systems.

It's probably both.

But that's not what other people mean when they say consciousness

> We know humans have subjective experiences

No, we don't. The humans claim that they do, but they may as well be philosophical zombies who claim to have such experiences without actually experiencing them (just as animals don't actually experience pain even if they behave as if they do).

You think animals don't experience pain?

Well, they certainly have behavioral response. But do they experience it? Descartes believed they didn't, most people today believe they do, but don't believe that web servers or LLMs are conscious; who knows what people a century in the future will believe?

Experiance is subjective even among the same species. For example you and I have access to a billion times more information and easily have 100 times the education. Yet when discussing cognition I find what Descartes thought about cognition is an appeal to tradition; not an argument. Whereas you apparently do not. I find this particularly odd. Especially since there is a mountain of evidence proving he was wrong. So why would you even bring it up? Just to be contrarian?

> what Descartes thought about cognition is an appeal to tradition; not an argument.

The modern debate about whether LLMs are conscious are not has lots of people whose position is "no, they're not" but with arguments not that much better than Descartes (and also coming from the position of tradition). That's why I bring him up.

> Especially since there is a mountain of evidence proving he was wrong.

Only if you accept a particular way to interpret it. After all, I can show you an experimental proof that apparently the rays of cold (in addition to the rays of heat) exist; but that experiment can easily be re-explained in terms of infrared radiation only.

A question out of honest curiosity: Would you say that it is unknown whether any humans have subjective experiences, or just any humans outside yourself? I've seen the former view being expressed previously and can't wrap my mind around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com