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All this is underpinned by your definition of conscious. I recall seeing Koch in debate with a philosopher (it was long ago I can't recall but one of the big o

All this is underpinned by your definition of conscious. I recall seeing Koch in debate with a philosopher (it was long ago I can't recall but one of the big ones: maybe Searle or Dennet) and they were talking past each other. For Koch, at least in this debate, consciousness was something akin to attention. For the philosopher, it was something else entirely (if I remembered, I might be able to guess who it was). Consciousness could mean: making a decision as opposed to having it pre-ordained, or the experience of your senses, or "feelings" or knowing you are a self, or who knows what else. It isn't just a computer science issue, it is a philosophical and linguistic one too: just what do you mean by the word.

colinmhayes 6y ago
All decisions are pre-ordained, that doesn't mean we don't have consciousness.
- voxl 6y ago
  You can say that as matter of factly as you want but that doesn't change the long philosophical debates around determinism, liberalism (not the political kind), and free will.
  - economicslol 6y ago
    You might be misunderstanding that debate then because what's usually termed Libertarian Free Will which is the type that most people think they subjectively experience, that is the ability to choose from different paths at any given moment, almost certainly does not exist in humans and most philosophers agree on that at least.
    - mewpmewp2 6y ago
      To me it seems like true free will or what people think they have is logically impossible to exist.
      - goldenkey 6y ago
        Yeah, you get something which feels like free will which is physical universality along with quantum randomness (which can be deterministic RNG.) Physical universality just means that the body appears to have a symmetry with regard to its operation over space and that it also appears to be self-contained (noise resistant computation.) The randomness along with the noise resistance collude to create the appearance of self-contained agency. Of course eastern doctrine and even western physics knows there are no separate entities. Especially when the QM dicerolls are considered..you at their mercy for your supposed choices. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1896 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1896
      - mannykannot 6y ago
        Logically impossible is a strong claim - do you have a proof? I suspect it might be an incoherent concept, but that is a much weaker position.
msla 6y ago
> For the philosopher, it was something else entirely (if I remembered, I might be able to guess who it was). "Qualia" perhaps, which is a sleight-of-hand which amounts to shoving the complexity around on the plate: Consciousness depends on qualia. What's qualia? Exactly. I think consciousness is a continuum, and humans slide up and down that continuum all the time, from deep sleep to nearly-autonomic behaviors like doing purely rote tasks to, at the other end, being very aware of everything because you just heard a rattlesnake rattle and need to know where it is right now. Is AI conscious? I think it fits somewhere at the lower end of the spectrum. Is a flatworm conscious?
- goatlover 6y ago
  Qualia means the experience of a particular sensation, like colors, sounds, pains. It's not a sleight-of-hand. We do have those experiences. The difficulty is that they are subjective.
  - msla 6y ago
    My problem is that qualia leads into the idea of philosophical zombies, or people who act like they're alive and think they're alive but don't have qualia. The trick is to either prove they don't exist, or prove you're not one of them, while also not granting qualia to, I don't know, flatworms or search engines. Which is the same thing as proving things about consciousness.
    - stan_rogers 6y ago
      The P-zombie thing is a nonsense, since it posits an unconscious entity that acts and reacts exactly as a conscious entity would - which would include answering any questions you asked about their experience in exactly the same way. That means that their "synthetic" qualia are indistinguishable from "real" qualia, the insistence of philosophers with preferences notwithstanding. It's just good old Cartesian duality with a new wig.
      - knodi123 6y ago
mannykannot 6y ago
Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi debated IIT five years ago. Personally, I think Aaronson had by far the stronger argument, and my much less analytical response to IIT is that it broadens the definition of consciousness to the point of being uninteresting and unhelpful. From the article (Christof Koch's words): "The theory fundamentally says that any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious. What do I mean by causal power? The firing of neurons in the brain that causes other neurons to fire a bit later is one example, but you can also think of a network of transistors on a computer chip: its momentary state is influenced by its immediate past state and it will, in turn, influence its future state." In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I very much doubt that any amount of study of simple systems that fit this definition will tell us anything useful about the sort of consciousness that is displayed by, for example, humans. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823
- barbecue_sauce 6y ago
  Doesn't this apply to anything with a control loop?
- colordrops 6y ago
  > In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I don't think this is as overly broad or bad of a definition as you presume. I recall sitting at a laundromat one day, in a somewhat sleepy state daydreaming, with the rhythm of the washing machine in front of me playing through my mind. My subconscious told me that the machine was conscious. I dug deeper into that intuition, and realized I was seeing a bit of the inner workings of the mind of the engineer that designed the algorithm. Not a perfect example, as I didn't know if the alg was closed-loop, but in any case, it made me realize that our minds are just large bodies of these algorithms working together. We have some additional oracles, random data generators, and probabilistic mechanisms thrown in as tools, but consciousness really is mechanistic and pluralistic. To recreate it requires not only the qualitative aspects of a being that can think, but also sufficient (read: vast) quantity of systems to get to a useful general purpose thinking machine. There is no "soul" or special sauce or singular definition of consciousness. It's an illusion.
pvarangot 6y ago
For philosophers that adhere to modern or post-modern schools of thought consciousness is usually related to being self-aware enough to set up a framework to reason about things like "what is consciousness" or ask oneself or ourselves if we have a higher purpose besides keeping our bodies alive. The attention framework allows some quick thought tricks like equating your AIs behavior to non-human animal behavior and then you can use frameworks from ecology or biology to reason about it. Other frameworks allow for more sophisticated experiments like setting up AIs to interact against each-other and see if they come up with systems or concepts similar to sociology or economy or at least reason that they decided that those were not useful. the attention framework needs to be stretched a bit to be able to justify this experiments.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
I took Searle's philosophy of society and philosophy of mind courses in undergrad. A lot of Searle's theory of consciousness is tied to biology. A lot of his theories were based on causal notions (thinking I need to move my arm, makes my arm move for example).

colinmhayes 6y ago

All decisions are pre-ordained, that doesn't mean we don't have consciousness.

voxl 6y ago
You can say that as matter of factly as you want but that doesn't change the long philosophical debates around determinism, liberalism (not the political kind), and free will.
- economicslol 6y ago
  You might be misunderstanding that debate then because what's usually termed Libertarian Free Will which is the type that most people think they subjectively experience, that is the ability to choose from different paths at any given moment, almost certainly does not exist in humans and most philosophers agree on that at least.
  - mewpmewp2 6y ago
    To me it seems like true free will or what people think they have is logically impossible to exist.
    - goldenkey 6y ago
      Yeah, you get something which feels like free will which is physical universality along with quantum randomness (which can be deterministic RNG.) Physical universality just means that the body appears to have a symmetry with regard to its operation over space and that it also appears to be self-contained (noise resistant computation.) The randomness along with the noise resistance collude to create the appearance of self-contained agency. Of course eastern doctrine and even western physics knows there are no separate entities. Especially when the QM dicerolls are considered..you at their mercy for your supposed choices. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1896 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1896
    - mannykannot 6y ago
      Logically impossible is a strong claim - do you have a proof? I suspect it might be an incoherent concept, but that is a much weaker position.

msla 6y ago

> For the philosopher, it was something else entirely (if I remembered, I might be able to guess who it was). "Qualia" perhaps, which is a sleight-of-hand which amounts to shoving the complexity around on the plate: Consciousness depends on qualia. What's qualia? Exactly. I think consciousness is a continuum, and humans slide up and down that continuum all the time, from deep sleep to nearly-autonomic behaviors like doing purely rote tasks to, at the other end, being very aware of everything because you just heard a rattlesnake rattle and need to know where it is right now. Is AI conscious? I think it fits somewhere at the lower end of the spectrum. Is a flatworm conscious?

goatlover 6y ago
Qualia means the experience of a particular sensation, like colors, sounds, pains. It's not a sleight-of-hand. We do have those experiences. The difficulty is that they are subjective.
- msla 6y ago
  My problem is that qualia leads into the idea of philosophical zombies, or people who act like they're alive and think they're alive but don't have qualia. The trick is to either prove they don't exist, or prove you're not one of them, while also not granting qualia to, I don't know, flatworms or search engines. Which is the same thing as proving things about consciousness.
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    The P-zombie thing is a nonsense, since it posits an unconscious entity that acts and reacts exactly as a conscious entity would - which would include answering any questions you asked about their experience in exactly the same way. That means that their "synthetic" qualia are indistinguishable from "real" qualia, the insistence of philosophers with preferences notwithstanding. It's just good old Cartesian duality with a new wig.
    - knodi123 6y ago

mannykannot 6y ago

Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi debated IIT five years ago. Personally, I think Aaronson had by far the stronger argument, and my much less analytical response to IIT is that it broadens the definition of consciousness to the point of being uninteresting and unhelpful. From the article (Christof Koch's words): "The theory fundamentally says that any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious. What do I mean by causal power? The firing of neurons in the brain that causes other neurons to fire a bit later is one example, but you can also think of a network of transistors on a computer chip: its momentary state is influenced by its immediate past state and it will, in turn, influence its future state." In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I very much doubt that any amount of study of simple systems that fit this definition will tell us anything useful about the sort of consciousness that is displayed by, for example, humans. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823

barbecue_sauce 6y ago
Doesn't this apply to anything with a control loop?
colordrops 6y ago
> In this view, a building with a thermostat would seem to be conscious to some degree. I don't think this is as overly broad or bad of a definition as you presume. I recall sitting at a laundromat one day, in a somewhat sleepy state daydreaming, with the rhythm of the washing machine in front of me playing through my mind. My subconscious told me that the machine was conscious. I dug deeper into that intuition, and realized I was seeing a bit of the inner workings of the mind of the engineer that designed the algorithm. Not a perfect example, as I didn't know if the alg was closed-loop, but in any case, it made me realize that our minds are just large bodies of these algorithms working together. We have some additional oracles, random data generators, and probabilistic mechanisms thrown in as tools, but consciousness really is mechanistic and pluralistic. To recreate it requires not only the qualitative aspects of a being that can think, but also sufficient (read: vast) quantity of systems to get to a useful general purpose thinking machine. There is no "soul" or special sauce or singular definition of consciousness. It's an illusion.

pvarangot 6y ago

For philosophers that adhere to modern or post-modern schools of thought consciousness is usually related to being self-aware enough to set up a framework to reason about things like "what is consciousness" or ask oneself or ourselves if we have a higher purpose besides keeping our bodies alive. The attention framework allows some quick thought tricks like equating your AIs behavior to non-human animal behavior and then you can use frameworks from ecology or biology to reason about it. Other frameworks allow for more sophisticated experiments like setting up AIs to interact against each-other and see if they come up with systems or concepts similar to sociology or economy or at least reason that they decided that those were not useful. the attention framework needs to be stretched a bit to be able to justify this experiments.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

I took Searle's philosophy of society and philosophy of mind courses in undergrad. A lot of Searle's theory of consciousness is tied to biology. A lot of his theories were based on causal notions (thinking I need to move my arm, makes my arm move for example).