4 ms·

The author's talk at the Royal Institute is here https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817 https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817 Overall, I'd say we are no closer to u

The author's talk at the Royal Institute is here https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817 https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817 Overall, I'd say we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were 30 years ago. As a science, we are still poking at the brain to gather data and proposing hand-wavy models of low level behavior. As philosophy, we still don't agree on what the phenomenon we need to study is. My gut feeling is that consciousness/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain (a very high-dimensional non-linear system not amenable to reductionism) and that the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand.

echelon 8y ago
> the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand Why? We already have models of the brain and cognition, and they're improving over time. Just because we can't gain a sufficient understanding within a time scale suitable for you doesn't allow you to call it "too complex for our brains". We'd have a much better understanding if we conducted live vivisection of prisoners, but we're not cruel. We have to glean what we can from shadows of knowledge. One day maybe our children will see the shape of reality. Even the things we think we understand now will be greatly expounded upon.
- c1sc0 8y ago
  Live vivisection of prisoners has been done in the past & we can safely assume it will be done again in the future. There are whole uncomfortable corners of medicine built up on data gathered by cruel means. A prime example is what we know about hypothermia.
Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
To be fair, the simplest model of a complete modern automobile is already too complex for a human to understand. (Except for the 10 geniuses perhaps.) Not a model of just the engine, or just the chemistry processes in the exhaust system, or just the electrical wiring, or how the painting jobs work - but the whole model of every subsystem existent in this car. Notably, this does not stop us from making new cars. There would need to be some substantial basis for a claim that a human brain will not soon be a similar deal: no one will undertand the whole system completely, but we will have experts on different areas and aspects of consciousness which will be more than enough for progress and specifically, strong AI.
- Engineering-MD 8y ago
  I would suggest that the difference is modularity. Designed devices often are made modular to aid understanding and ease modification/repair. The opposite is true with evolved systems. The brain is ultimately produced and controlled by genetics, which allows genes to overlap, and have multiple functions. This makes understanding it difficult. Furthermore, the highly interconnected nature of the brain will make this even less modular. While I think we will gain further understanding of some sub systems such as the cerebellum or visual cortex, I think the unmodular nature will limit this to imperfect models.
  - Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
    One of the most profound understandings I had about nature and humans - is that it is also modular! Surely, it is likely evolved and not directly designed, but if you look at it more closely - it is modular in almost every important area! Organisms oragnize into distinct non-mixable speices/genotypes, we have organs in our body that have specific functions, we have sub-organs, we have specialized distinct types of cells, distinct sub-cellular structures inside the cell, distinct proteins with different functionalities (with some groupings of course), even higher level functionality is modular, like for example sleeping: all processes that need to be done offline are refactored away into a "sleep" phase which is enforced in many ways, even though this enforcement turned out to have so many parts and being so complicated that newborns need to learn to to start sleeping. The sleep itself it split into distinct phases, different processes happening in the them; humans auto-organize their societies into specific roles, etc. And, my personal favorite - the bulk of the information about a human is in a genome: a specified code utilizing 3-letter, 4-character words and sentences to describe almost everything needed to make a human. How did it evolve into a "code", a language??? Modern designed x86 architecture is more complex and has more ugly legacy crap than the evolved genetic code which has the perfect number of letters, perfect control structures, perfect number of aminoacids that is enough to build everything! (Ok, yes I know it is not "perfect" but it is very very sophisticated and, apparently, well-thought-through.) So I think this modularity, which exists both in evolved and designed systems tells about the nature of the universe, and/or complexity, information and knowledge: the information and its physical representation conspires to become modular and produce more complex designs and entities that way, through abstraction, through logical levels and modular architecture. Not only through sheer number of interconnections (surely, there is enough of that too, but is it really that much different to a number of transistors in a recent x86 chip?), but through modularity. It is easy to miss this because nature is arguably "less" modular than a man-made car. But when looking at some design choices under the hood or talking to mechanics, or looking at leaked software code for big projects - there is just enough spaghetti code there to prove that such designed entities have a lot of ugly poorly understood interconnectivity that is just made to "work good enough". I guess it is when this horizontal complexity becomes unsustainable - the designer, be it a human or a natural process of evolution - has to come up a new abstraction level, an organ, a genetic language - to allow for further progress.
c1sc0 8y ago
I would say it’s not just limited to the physical brain but the whole physical body. Increasing complexity even more.
bloak 8y ago
Sometimes I feel that consciousness is a bogus concept and will be abandoned: there will never be any major progress in "understanding" it, though future philosophers will probably discuss what 21st-century philosophers meant by "consciousness" in a similar way to how today's philosophers discuss what Hegel meant by "Aufhebung". I'd be very happy to listen to arguments against that pessimistic viewpoint because then the hundreds of hours I've spent reading and thinking about the topic won't have been wasted. The last book I read on the subject was Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I found myself agreeing with almost everything he wrote, so the book wasn't very exciting for me, though I should look up some of the bits of music he mentioned.
- naasking 8y ago
  This has always been Dennett's position, that "consciousness" will be decomposed into to a set of adaptive behavioural "tricks" we evolved over time. It's probably correct.
fossuser 8y ago
People made similar arguments about everything we didn’t understand until we understood it. The poorly defined word of consciousness may mean we’re asking the wrong question, but I find it pretty unlikely it’s too complex to understand. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futili...
wildermuthn 8y ago
Take a look at the Attention Schema Theory (AST) of consciousness by Michael Graziano. It is a mechanistic account of consciousness that avoids the rabbit holes of ‘hard problems’ and qualia. The fundamental insight it makes is that there is a distinction between attention and awareness: that attention corresponds to neural firing patterns, and that awareness is a schema (model) of that attention. Awareness then feeds back into attention — moving it or sharpening it. Think of it as a high-level programming SDK for the brain. AST also helps explain why awareness evolved: it is a prediction engine for brains, both our own and others. And once competition began, an arms race of prediction begins that ultimately ends with a non-determinative ‘free-will’ that defies prediction. If AST is correct, then consciousness is a simulation. It also means we have a roadmap to machine consciousness. Graziano has written articles that ask for engineers to try this model, but from what I can tell, no one has really tried (by intention). However, model-based reinforcement learning is pretty close. Especially the ones that are beginning to use action-prediction. It won’t be long before we have paranoid androids.
- curo 8y ago
  I don't think it's difficult at all to come up with a mechanistic/reductionist model for attention (or any related functioning: FEF, saccades, salience, etc). But pure awareness is entirely different. You can't get around qualia. Because in essence, qualia is pointing to the idea that "you are." You have an experience of being. Saying here is an explanation of how the simulation arises just pushes the question back. Now I'm wondering, "to whom is the simulation presented?" You can say, "to no one—it's all a trick." But who is being tricked. Ultimately I am. The idea that my perceptions arise mechanistically presents no problem to me. The idea that the original background intelligence itself is a simulation seems obviously false. So obvious it precedes a logical argument because it is the intelligence from which logics derive their authority. Crudely speaking, it makes 1+1=2 true. I think a lot of really smart people look right past the most basic reality that they must exist prior to their perceptions for perceptions, logic, or a simulation to exist at all. If you can say that awareness is secondary and arises from these mechanistic explanations, who is left to evaluate the validity of this proposition? It's way simpler than we're all making it. People just have to sit alone with the knowledge that they are.

echelon 8y ago

> the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand Why? We already have models of the brain and cognition, and they're improving over time. Just because we can't gain a sufficient understanding within a time scale suitable for you doesn't allow you to call it "too complex for our brains". We'd have a much better understanding if we conducted live vivisection of prisoners, but we're not cruel. We have to glean what we can from shadows of knowledge. One day maybe our children will see the shape of reality. Even the things we think we understand now will be greatly expounded upon.

c1sc0 8y ago
Live vivisection of prisoners has been done in the past & we can safely assume it will be done again in the future. There are whole uncomfortable corners of medicine built up on data gathered by cruel means. A prime example is what we know about hypothermia.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago

To be fair, the simplest model of a complete modern automobile is already too complex for a human to understand. (Except for the 10 geniuses perhaps.) Not a model of just the engine, or just the chemistry processes in the exhaust system, or just the electrical wiring, or how the painting jobs work - but the whole model of every subsystem existent in this car. Notably, this does not stop us from making new cars. There would need to be some substantial basis for a claim that a human brain will not soon be a similar deal: no one will undertand the whole system completely, but we will have experts on different areas and aspects of consciousness which will be more than enough for progress and specifically, strong AI.

Engineering-MD 8y ago
I would suggest that the difference is modularity. Designed devices often are made modular to aid understanding and ease modification/repair. The opposite is true with evolved systems. The brain is ultimately produced and controlled by genetics, which allows genes to overlap, and have multiple functions. This makes understanding it difficult. Furthermore, the highly interconnected nature of the brain will make this even less modular. While I think we will gain further understanding of some sub systems such as the cerebellum or visual cortex, I think the unmodular nature will limit this to imperfect models.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  One of the most profound understandings I had about nature and humans - is that it is also modular! Surely, it is likely evolved and not directly designed, but if you look at it more closely - it is modular in almost every important area! Organisms oragnize into distinct non-mixable speices/genotypes, we have organs in our body that have specific functions, we have sub-organs, we have specialized distinct types of cells, distinct sub-cellular structures inside the cell, distinct proteins with different functionalities (with some groupings of course), even higher level functionality is modular, like for example sleeping: all processes that need to be done offline are refactored away into a "sleep" phase which is enforced in many ways, even though this enforcement turned out to have so many parts and being so complicated that newborns need to learn to to start sleeping. The sleep itself it split into distinct phases, different processes happening in the them; humans auto-organize their societies into specific roles, etc. And, my personal favorite - the bulk of the information about a human is in a genome: a specified code utilizing 3-letter, 4-character words and sentences to describe almost everything needed to make a human. How did it evolve into a "code", a language??? Modern designed x86 architecture is more complex and has more ugly legacy crap than the evolved genetic code which has the perfect number of letters, perfect control structures, perfect number of aminoacids that is enough to build everything! (Ok, yes I know it is not "perfect" but it is very very sophisticated and, apparently, well-thought-through.) So I think this modularity, which exists both in evolved and designed systems tells about the nature of the universe, and/or complexity, information and knowledge: the information and its physical representation conspires to become modular and produce more complex designs and entities that way, through abstraction, through logical levels and modular architecture. Not only through sheer number of interconnections (surely, there is enough of that too, but is it really that much different to a number of transistors in a recent x86 chip?), but through modularity. It is easy to miss this because nature is arguably "less" modular than a man-made car. But when looking at some design choices under the hood or talking to mechanics, or looking at leaked software code for big projects - there is just enough spaghetti code there to prove that such designed entities have a lot of ugly poorly understood interconnectivity that is just made to "work good enough". I guess it is when this horizontal complexity becomes unsustainable - the designer, be it a human or a natural process of evolution - has to come up a new abstraction level, an organ, a genetic language - to allow for further progress.

c1sc0 8y ago

I would say it’s not just limited to the physical brain but the whole physical body. Increasing complexity even more.

bloak 8y ago

Sometimes I feel that consciousness is a bogus concept and will be abandoned: there will never be any major progress in "understanding" it, though future philosophers will probably discuss what 21st-century philosophers meant by "consciousness" in a similar way to how today's philosophers discuss what Hegel meant by "Aufhebung". I'd be very happy to listen to arguments against that pessimistic viewpoint because then the hundreds of hours I've spent reading and thinking about the topic won't have been wasted. The last book I read on the subject was Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I found myself agreeing with almost everything he wrote, so the book wasn't very exciting for me, though I should look up some of the bits of music he mentioned.

naasking 8y ago
This has always been Dennett's position, that "consciousness" will be decomposed into to a set of adaptive behavioural "tricks" we evolved over time. It's probably correct.

fossuser 8y ago

People made similar arguments about everything we didn’t understand until we understood it. The poorly defined word of consciousness may mean we’re asking the wrong question, but I find it pretty unlikely it’s too complex to understand. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futility-of-emergence https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futili...

wildermuthn 8y ago

Take a look at the Attention Schema Theory (AST) of consciousness by Michael Graziano. It is a mechanistic account of consciousness that avoids the rabbit holes of ‘hard problems’ and qualia. The fundamental insight it makes is that there is a distinction between attention and awareness: that attention corresponds to neural firing patterns, and that awareness is a schema (model) of that attention. Awareness then feeds back into attention — moving it or sharpening it. Think of it as a high-level programming SDK for the brain. AST also helps explain why awareness evolved: it is a prediction engine for brains, both our own and others. And once competition began, an arms race of prediction begins that ultimately ends with a non-determinative ‘free-will’ that defies prediction. If AST is correct, then consciousness is a simulation. It also means we have a roadmap to machine consciousness. Graziano has written articles that ask for engineers to try this model, but from what I can tell, no one has really tried (by intention). However, model-based reinforcement learning is pretty close. Especially the ones that are beginning to use action-prediction. It won’t be long before we have paranoid androids.

curo 8y ago
I don't think it's difficult at all to come up with a mechanistic/reductionist model for attention (or any related functioning: FEF, saccades, salience, etc). But pure awareness is entirely different. You can't get around qualia. Because in essence, qualia is pointing to the idea that "you are." You have an experience of being. Saying here is an explanation of how the simulation arises just pushes the question back. Now I'm wondering, "to whom is the simulation presented?" You can say, "to no one—it's all a trick." But who is being tricked. Ultimately I am. The idea that my perceptions arise mechanistically presents no problem to me. The idea that the original background intelligence itself is a simulation seems obviously false. So obvious it precedes a logical argument because it is the intelligence from which logics derive their authority. Crudely speaking, it makes 1+1=2 true. I think a lot of really smart people look right past the most basic reality that they must exist prior to their perceptions for perceptions, logic, or a simulation to exist at all. If you can say that awareness is secondary and arises from these mechanistic explanations, who is left to evaluate the validity of this proposition? It's way simpler than we're all making it. People just have to sit alone with the knowledge that they are.