The Origin of Consciousness (2008)
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.
To your point:
> Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.
SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...
Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.
And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.
It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction).
"We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.
It shows there was an influx of linguistic influence from a migrating group. There were many waves of such things. Genetically Europeans are continuous with populations with the pre-PIE influx too.
Language did change fast before PIE, in all likelihood. But it didn't have to be "progress", it could have been regular churn just as it's been since then. PIE wasn't more primitive in grammatical capabilities than modern languages.
And PIE wasn't a just one language or one tiny tribe necessarily. But had many variants and dialects and relatives and other languages living near it from which it borrowed. There is no indication that anything out of the ordinary was going on at that time. It was regular language stuff as it's been before and after.
And it matters that we can't go further back because it's not unlikely that there could be other relationships, like PIE being connected to Proto-Uralic potentially, but we can't really substantiate this at such distance in time. But it's not implausible by itself. Just can't show it at this temporal distance and this rate of natural churn.
If they were 8 and now 7, but still called "8 sisters", I'd be more impressed.
But it is hard for us to imagine times before us, it is true.
Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.
I did search but only found examples of recurrent in a sentence.
We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.
“The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0]
0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel
Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.
Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.
I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.
Would your definition be that of your experience?
Would that definition encompass all of humanity, past and present?
Would that definition contain all sapient life? Sentient too?
Would that definition allow for less complex forms of life?
Reading the comments on this post, I am inclined to agree with the words of his biographer “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.”
If you do get a chance to actually read the book (as you ought to), it covers all the issues and complexities you may have. It is limited only by the information of the era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k
I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!
Nope. You don’t exist for that time. Anesthesiologist counts down 10, 9, 8, 7, and then I was teleported to the recovery bed.
I consider it incredibly weird and very unlike sleep. Consciousness is off, instantly, then back.
But hey, I don't have cancer anymore. So if I had to endure four hours of agony that I don't remember, I'll take it.
But I also have a doctor friend who tells me how removing my appendix actually worked: I go under. Then they take out the appendix. Then they wake me so that I can, with help, move from the operating table to the wheeled bed. This part is not a part of my memory, but people can talk to me and I can get down from the table and onto the bed (again, with help).
So I'd say there's some middle ground here.
I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.
Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.
Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.
Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.
Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.
I’m open to correction but my understanding is everyone dreams when they have REM sleep and everyone has some REM sleep every night unless there are rare medical conditions which would be unhealthy if there is a long period of no REM sleep.
People who believe they never dream (including myself before I learned this) simply don’t remember it. If you were woken artificially during REM you might remember fragments.
Perhaps memory and consciousness are closely related or even the same process, as there is no way to tell them apart from the inside.
Anyway yes, as I understand it this should be the last time you _remember_ having dreamt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep says we hit REM multiple times per night normally.
... Also this Wikipedia says we have non-REM dreams. This whole article is interesting, thank you for indirectly prompting me to read up a bit :)
When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.
Quite where that line exists then is very fuzzy because while for example I feel conscious while I'm typing this, it's also clearly possible I could but then have no memory of it.
Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.
How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?
And by "we", you mean "you".
If I read an article about the nature of "consciousness", I assume it means "as opposed to being a rock or a twig".
N=2; two definitions.
Sounds like attention rather than consciousness. You lose your attention.
Rather, how much of it is just language.
We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.
I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.
It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM).
We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.”
But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience.
I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation.
I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.
> If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer.
If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on.
There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality.
If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space.
So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing.
2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.
I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain. Exactly what the neurons do to cause this is unknown, but we do have some leads like general anesthesia or split brain experiments.
If you remove your brain cells one at a time, or even half a brain in some surgeries, you would also not die, but this is not sufficient to say that the part removed isn't a part of what constitutes your consciousness. In fact the definition of "you" is probably changing from moment to moment as brain cells die, regen, or reorganize, ship of Theseus style. One possible explanation is that information processing is distributed all over your neurons, and certain patterns or sequences of information gives rise to consciousness. And neurons are mostly concentrated in the brain, that's why it's responsible for most of your consciousness and it's no big deal when a small part dies/disconnects because enough of the processing is still happening.
What does "feeling" mean in the thinking/feeling distinction you made? It seems to me that it means whether information is being received from the rest of the world, such as via eyes over the optic nerve. If we give images/video/audio to an LLM, that would meet the same criteria besides the fact that the sensing mechanism is not biological.
You claim that "thinking", as in, processing information in a certain way, is an unconscious phenomena because LLMs can do that too. This requires the assumption that LLMs are not conscious, even though this axiom is the very thing we're trying to question by considering that information processing could be precisely what gives rise to consciousness.
Entertaining this possibility does not require the assumption that things exist without an observer. But it does require the idea that mutually observable patterns exist between oneself and other apparent observers in the same apparent universe, which is pretty close to what most people mean when they say "objective" in day-to-day conversation. This can be shown easily: you and I would not be able to communicate at all if there's no common understanding of language between us. That common understanding is the objective part, and it is as you say, not a 1:1 correspondence because your definition of "apple" is based on all of the apples you've seen while mine is based on all the apples I've seen, and we've not seen the same apples. But the correspondence must be close enough in order for communication to work. We need this idea of practical objectivity because it's required to talk about anything at all.
Now, onto the reason why you'd think anything else is conscious at all, besides yourself. Why do you think that I am conscious? If you ponder that question for a while, I think you would see why computer consciousness is not so easily dismissed. But I'm happy to discuss further if you think there's an answer that points to the contrary.
> I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.
Markov Theorem functions can predict a word. They have no knowledge, no creativity, and no more productivity than a hammer or magnifying glass. LLMs are in the "more like Markov Theorems" set of tools, and far more complex, but there is no proof of "knowledge" and no "creativity" (name an unprompted piece of work done by an LLM...).
However, I completely agree with your statement here:
> I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain.
You've correctly pointed out how Markov models and modern LLMs are similar in a way, and how modern LLMs don't have full agency. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that Markov models are very slightly conscious in some human-like way.
All information processing happens on matter-based substrates, brains and computers alike. I'll even provide a somewhat specific hypothesis: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for consciousness. I'm not aware of any existing evidence that would rule this out. And inquiry about consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations over time. It might even turn out that solving the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics.
The materialist stance is taken not because I believe in a strict metaphysical sense that something like solipsism/simulation theory is not true (def true: as real as one's own consciousness), but because even if those were true, the materialist stance and its accompanying theories of modern physics would have the same predictive power regarding what I will observe in the future (well, sort of, at least until I wake up from a simulation, or something like that). I could be a solo mind, but this mind is dreaming of a material world that works according to physical laws, so even if I am a solo mind, I am having the same experience as a brain that exists in true material reality, so it doesn't make much of a difference (except when evaluated for the purpose of philosophical rigor and honesty to oneself).
So "information processing is entirely physical" is strictly speaking an assumption, but it is a good assumption, despite it not having the same realness level as one's own consciousness.
And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.
You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
It might be right.
My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is.
Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts.
Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient.
I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
(1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes.
(2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes.
(3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module.
This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of).
That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness.
This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly.
So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness.
It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy.
But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it".
Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario.
Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions.
Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness.
One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest.
So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.
There won't be a simple answer, but if the model=actor due to survival pressures theory stands, it must be clearly testable.
I would go about answering that question as follows, identify the smartest creatures, whose cognition is most alien to ours, whose behavior suggests they have a strong real-time sense of self that extends into it immediate processing, regardless of immediate action, or immediate action dependent on immediate state that is not easily explained as normally detectable or processed lower order state.
Humans obviously.
Then the octopus, a true alien cognition. it has an extremely curious and creative mind, and can behave quite differently in even slightly different situations, as well as coherently is situations that ought to be well out of its niche in nature range.
Parrots are very distantly related. And are another example of very versatile social minds, who can pick up nuance, are lifelong learners.
The jumping spider had and extremely distant lineage, relative to people. But is a highly counterintuitively intelligent creature for its size. It is clear than when presented with a problem, it doesn't just search for a solution, but ruminates, and often finds non-monotonic, non-linear and very indirect means. And once it sets on a plan it carries it out adeptly. Even its smallest movement betray very nuanced understanding of physical dynamics. And it appears to be able to form "social" bonds with people it is familiar with. Those may be produced by simple strategies, or they may not.
Clearly rats are high intelligent. Closer to us, but no as close as many other intelligent mammals.
Whales come to mind. Although the logistic defy imagination.
What all these creatures also have, is a high ability to tackle novel problems individually. Sometimes also together.
Then a biologists approach might be creating various experiments, with and without brain scanning, to attempt to identify any externally or internally functional differences under conditions designed to require self-modelling and/or self-control at high level to occur.
That is just a thought on a start. And would only be a beginning.
The big questions, is a creatures ability to function, highly related to its ability to detect and therefore respond to its highest level states. And is that a very fast, essentially realtime, level of awareness and control, awareness and control, outside of a larger longer external loop.
Then can experiments be set up, that would create what might appear to be a cognitive threat to a creature? Does the creature treat managing internal states as important as managing external states? Is it able to do that at all? Does it go further and prioritize them/
[0]: https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/
If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)?
It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary).
This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue.
Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.
Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step.
It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences.
Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too.
It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.
Without loss of ability or function, I could still navigate the world, follow rules, maintain safety. The experience made me appreciate how vast and competent the non-verbal part of the mind is.
The verbal component is loud, takes up space, and generally acts as if it's the whole thing. It isn't. It's a symbolic veneer over something much more profound and mysterious than we generally have direct access to in our day to day lives.
There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".
Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.
Many only know that way of thinking, and can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to think, or be, without one.
Plus all the people somewhere between those two, whether or not they are themselves aware of it.
So all they need for the inner monologue is to move their lips.