Biology, on the other hand, is nothing but timed processes in a loop, the most obvious to us being the circadian cycle. As estimators of wall clock time, biology isn’t great, but when it comes to internal processes, and most certainly learning, memory, sensing, locomotion… biology is rhythmic in behavior, and the rhythms go all the way down to gene expression. More, these rhythms are, except during sleep, constantly entraining to signals from the environment that indicate time, most importantly light.
I think it’s a fairly unremarkable claim that agency and consciousness are temporal processes that depend on systems having an internal sense of time. How else can you anticipate? How can a system that can be literally turned off ever succeed in an environment where time never stops?
For around 8 hours a day, neither do you. Not sure if this has anything to do with the subject at all.
>track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks.
Humans don't do this either. You use context clues from the world around you. If I lock you in a room with no windows or a dark cave your timing senses can go all fucky really quick.
>is nothing but timed processes in a loop,
I mean, so is an agents harness. You can make as many loops as you'd like here.
There are a whole lot of holes in your claims.
You mean sleep? Actually the answer is pretty complicated. Your body clock is very much on during sleep. It responds to temperature changes. Sound and light responsiveness is obviously dampened, but hardly absent.
You are unaware of wall clock time. You’re in an altered state of consciousness that needs your eyes closed after all. However, you are not timeless, nor is the entirety of your body and brain unaware of environmental signals for time.
> Humans don't do this either. You use context clues from the world around you. If I lock you in a room with no windows or a dark cave your timing senses can go all fucky really quick.
Again, that’s wall clock time. Our time perception does indeed get fucked up in total darkness. But our internal clock ticks on. I’d recommend reading about the Aschoff Bunker experiments, which first proved this rigorously.
> I mean, so is an agents harness. You can make as many loops as you'd like here.
An agents harness doesn’t touch its weights. A figure 8 on paper is a loop. That doesn’t mean it’s the same as a dynamical loop that’s self sustaining and internally organized.
Are you just reading the words and randomly grabbing related concepts to say nothing here is meaningful?
Is that all it needs to do? A rock, in response to a sound signal (make it as informative as you want) can also be said to go from state A (molecules at rest) to state B (molecules vibrating in response to the sound). Is the rock a cognitive system?
Or let’s go up a level of complexity. Is a thermostat a cognitive system? It doesn’t just go from state A to B but measures changing stages against a reference. Is it a cognitive system?
> The time interval between these states can be arbitrary, it seems to me (setting aside problems with disconnecting the mind from its substrate, which does of course need rhythms at various frequencies; oxygen at a higher frequency than sugar, and so on)
Not sure how you land on this. Going from A to B, in your definition, is a purely internal state transition, right? If the motivation to go to state B is external (as will often be the case with a conscious agent), and the system is offline entirely while it switches from A to B, how is it to reverse or stall its transition if external signals contradict the earlier decision?
It’s a very bizarre definition of consciousness, that you don’t need to be in time. Seems to break the word beyond meaning, and allows it to be applied to any system capable of change.
> I'm not sure that going from A to B quickly, or slowly, or with intervals of a thousand years affects that entity's consciousness in of itself
It’s not about the speed of transition from A to B. Instead it’s about the internal processes being temporally commensurate, and entrainable to environmental periodicities.
All of biology (plants and many bacteria included) has its dynamics are organized around an internally generated rhythm. This rhythm entrains to the external environment, shifting its phase to match (mismatch leads to issues like jet lag: a place where your consciousness shows its temporal boundaries as it is abruptly subjected to an environment out of sync with its current phase tethered to another location). Crucially, the internal rhythm continues to run in isolated conditions (total darkness), and have been measured to be around 24 hours, but slightly off, within and across species (and the same holds for endogenous tidal rhythms, which also don’t exactly track tidal period left to themselves).
Everything, including learning and memory, but also sleep, sensory and locomotor function, shows organization around this internal temporal axis. The key advantage this gives, evolutionarily, is anticipation. The sunflower rises to face the east, not in reaction to sunrise, but in advance of it (many lovely YouTube videos of this), so it can maximally extract the nutrition it needs from whatever sunlight it can get. A purely reactive system would waste a ton of time after sunrise getting subsystems ready to respond.
Now, there is no broadly agreed theory of consciousness that points to these oscillations as the source. For one, Cyanobacteria and plants have them, a too much of science has rested on the baseless assumption of consciousness being some unique, or advanced thing.
But the evidence is rather overwhelming that consciousness is very much shaped by these internal oscillations. Deep cave experiments have shown what happens to cognition, and consciousness, when the clock free-runs (that is, keeps cycling with no entraining light or temperature signals from the environment). Studies have also shown that restoring the amplitude of these rhythms in patients with “diseases of consciousness” leads to improvement of symptoms.
There’s also a LOT of molecular evidence showing how the circadian clock affects learning and memory. Most critically, actual synapses are never static. Major components are on a 24 hour cycle, and recent research has shown that major clock proteins are at the synapse organizing its dynamics, and synaptic proteins critical to learning and memory loop back to affect the clocks phase and amplitude.
Timing is, beyond doubt, a huge aspect of what biology is. And every bit of evidence we have, from the molecular level to observable behavior we can feel ourselves, says that consciousness is fundamentally linked to how the body organizes its internal rhythms and responds to external time.
You and I are clusters of about 36 trillion cells that are all able to individually keep time. They synchronize and orchestrate their timekeeping, and entrain to the external environment, and there is a cluster of cells, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, that is the master orchestrator of circadian time, sitting right behind the eyes as light is the main signal it uses to tell external time.
We know its function can get dampened with age.
However, please note this is not how we perceive time, in the sense of being able to count 60 seconds and have it match the wall clock. That’s a subsystem. But the internal temporal order of your body is cell by cell, not dictated from one spot in your body.
Maybe talk to a neurologist about that. Sounds like some kind of disorder.
"The only way that '(trees, shrimp, ants) are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway)."
I put forward the philosophical position "subjective experience is not substrate-independent" as an answer to this.
The claim is that the content of subjective experience depends upon how that subjective experience is instantiated. If you get a text "I'm fine" from two different people, those two different people are not necessarily having the same subjective experience even if they produce the same output.
In general, people that behave similarly in many contexts can have quite different experiences in those contexts.
There are many different ways that you can instantiate a forward pass in an LLM. Even if these are doing the exact same computation, we should not necessarily believe that they have the same experience, or that they even have a coherent single experience associated with the forward pass.
Subjective experience presents itself to me. To the best of my understanding, this subjective experience seems to be correlated with this biological human body (brain, heart, eyes, etc.).
To the best of my understanding, other biological humans have subjective experience, but this subjective experience seems that it can be much different than mine, in ways that are sometimes difficult to understand.
LLMs are instantiated in a radically different way from biological humans. Forward passes happen across many different physical machines, spread across time, batched and interleaved with many other computations and forward passes.
Given this, I think that it is very likely that LLMs have radically different sorts of experience to me and other biological humans.
I don't think that we have a good understanding of how subjective experience is instantiated in the physical world. I hope that we will gain a better understanding of this.
I think that chimpanzees have experience much more similar to us than LLMs do, even though the output of LLMs seems much more similar to humans in some contexts.
Essentially, until we gain a better understanding of how subjective experience is physically instantiated, we should bias towards believing that more physically similar architectures have more similar types of experience, and should think that very physically different architectures (such as LLMs) likely have very different subjective experiences.
Humans are odd in the sense is that we're an informational creature on top of an animal. We can see the lineage of animals from nearly no complex behaviors up to nearly human like behaviors. But they still miss out on most of the conceptual information processing humans have. We know they have dreams and inside thoughts (at least complex animals), we don't know the complexity of them.
But humans also have dreams and subjective experiences on higher level informational concepts. "Nukes could go off and kill us all" or "what happens after we die" are purely informational forms of anxiety that humans have. What we don't seem to know is can this become a self-referential loop in an purely informational mind. If an informational concept causes a system to output a stresslike response, or worse trigger a stresslike action in real life then there is no distinction to me. A system is what it does.
Hmm. I think that I partially agree. But it sort of depends. E.g., someone with locked-in syndrome can seem comatose to someone who isn't very observant, while at the same time experiencing everything. Octopuses are very intelligent, but I would have to study them for a very long time before I was at all confident in my ability to predict what they were experiencing.
So, the difficulty is knowing what a "stresslike response" is. E.g., a LLM might seem stressed, but if you say the right things to it it might flip and say that it is totally fine. Or, it might seem totally fine and then you say the right thing and it seems stressed. Is it secretly stressed and hiding it? Or secretly fine and pretending to be stressed? Or something much more confusing and fragmented?
I think that we should study this more, and try to understand what experience actually is, but by default should assume that the experience of a LLM is a radically different sort of thing that that of a human.