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Your definition of consciousness drags in a lot that is not required. You are conflating it with intelligence too much. Consciousness is what it feels like to

Your definition of consciousness drags in a lot that is not required. You are conflating it with intelligence too much. Consciousness is what it feels like to have a thought, an emotion, an idea, in that exact moment while you are feeling it. It can happen in a brain at a moment, during a single second of time, and doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with learning, reacting to environments, or any of that other stuff the normally goes along with life. Consciousness itself is the actual experience itself. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is why we think anything with a brain has some kind of consciousness. If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have.

nickelpro 6y ago
Your royal "we" is casting a pretty wide net here, Chalmer's openness to animal consciousness is by no means a universal opinion.
Stupulous 6y ago
It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
- amarte 6y ago
  I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    This is a question I've considered for a long while. As programmers we can easily see that no set of behaviours require consciousness. I touched on this in my previous comment, it is my belief that consciousness is not the only way that intelligence can be made, but that it is somehow efficient for the purposes of evolution. Using consciousness may consume the least energy (the brain uses a lot of energy), take the least genetic material to describe, have the safest learning curve (so that children are more intelligent and more likely to survive), or any combination of these and other features. I think of experience as a sophisticated mathematical object with useful functionality. We have a disconnect with physical reality, and a strong connection with informational reality. I can assert that I exist, and the abstract model of my phone I keep in my head exists, but I can't assert that the phone exists and in reality its existence is very different from how I perceive it. It certainly seems like I am an information construct that was formed within a physical reality. Beyond that I'm mostly in the dark though. You can see that consciousness is involved in learning and adapting- you are highly conscious of new skills and change, but old skills sink into the subconscious and you gradually ignore repeated stimulus. You can see that consciousness integrates much of our intelligent functionality (perception, memory, executive function) and you can feel that your role is to run things. How is experience related to all of this? I do not know.
skissane 6y ago
Is some degree of intelligence necessary for consciousness? We don't know. Some philosophers (of a pan-psychic bent) would say that consciousness doesn't require any intelligence, so even something completely unintelligent (like a pebble, or an individual proton) could be conscious. Others think that consciousness requires some minimal degree of intelligence, a standard which (non-human) animals may or may not meet, but a pebble certainly can't. We don't know who is right here. We don't have any agreed upon objective standards to determine what is conscious and what is not. But, if it were true that some minimal degree of intelligence is required for consciousness, then it may well be that primitive animals have that degree of intelligence yet GPT-3 lacks it. While GPT-3 can perform at seemingly human level on some tasks, there are other tasks on which even quite primitive animal intelligences vastly outperform it. Maybe, if intelligence is necessary for consciousness, the kind of intelligence underlying the later tasks may be more essential to consciousness than the kind underlying the former. > If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have. The idea that consciousness is some kind of special quantum phenomena is highly speculative. Sure, some philosophers and physicists think it may be true, but others think the whole idea is baloney. When you say "likely", that's just your own opinion of what is more likely, there is no hard evidence to support that probability judgement.
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  I agree with everything you just said. What I mean about quantum mechanics comes from the fact that neuroscience has never been able to locate "where" in the brain any memory is stored. I think consciousness and memory are interdependent, and that consciousness is essentially memory. You can invent new thoughts and ideas, but they are always built from existing ones, as their building blocks. I think the answer to the question 'where/how' is memory 'stored' in the brain is: "It's not". I believe the brain is quantum mechanically connected to all prior states of itself (like all matter is), and so what we call 'memory' is actually a 'direct connection' thru spacetime to the actual event. Needless to say it would take a book to describe this theory in detail, so maybe I'll write up all my thoughts at some point, but it explains lots of mysteries of intelligences once you accept this interconnection model. Everything from savantism, to instinct behaviors, to fungal intelligences falls into place. Once you accept that all complex patterns in nature that 'evolve' are always still 'connected directly to' all prior copies of themselves, and able to exchange wave potentials, it makes many things that used to seem 'paranormal' or 'magical' suddenly have a more scientific explanation.

nickelpro 6y ago

Your royal "we" is casting a pretty wide net here, Chalmer's openness to animal consciousness is by no means a universal opinion.

Stupulous 6y ago

It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.

WClayFerguson 6y ago
I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
amarte 6y ago
I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
- Stupulous 6y ago
  This is a question I've considered for a long while. As programmers we can easily see that no set of behaviours require consciousness. I touched on this in my previous comment, it is my belief that consciousness is not the only way that intelligence can be made, but that it is somehow efficient for the purposes of evolution. Using consciousness may consume the least energy (the brain uses a lot of energy), take the least genetic material to describe, have the safest learning curve (so that children are more intelligent and more likely to survive), or any combination of these and other features. I think of experience as a sophisticated mathematical object with useful functionality. We have a disconnect with physical reality, and a strong connection with informational reality. I can assert that I exist, and the abstract model of my phone I keep in my head exists, but I can't assert that the phone exists and in reality its existence is very different from how I perceive it. It certainly seems like I am an information construct that was formed within a physical reality. Beyond that I'm mostly in the dark though. You can see that consciousness is involved in learning and adapting- you are highly conscious of new skills and change, but old skills sink into the subconscious and you gradually ignore repeated stimulus. You can see that consciousness integrates much of our intelligent functionality (perception, memory, executive function) and you can feel that your role is to run things. How is experience related to all of this? I do not know.

skissane 6y ago

Is some degree of intelligence necessary for consciousness? We don't know. Some philosophers (of a pan-psychic bent) would say that consciousness doesn't require any intelligence, so even something completely unintelligent (like a pebble, or an individual proton) could be conscious. Others think that consciousness requires some minimal degree of intelligence, a standard which (non-human) animals may or may not meet, but a pebble certainly can't. We don't know who is right here. We don't have any agreed upon objective standards to determine what is conscious and what is not. But, if it were true that some minimal degree of intelligence is required for consciousness, then it may well be that primitive animals have that degree of intelligence yet GPT-3 lacks it. While GPT-3 can perform at seemingly human level on some tasks, there are other tasks on which even quite primitive animal intelligences vastly outperform it. Maybe, if intelligence is necessary for consciousness, the kind of intelligence underlying the later tasks may be more essential to consciousness than the kind underlying the former. > If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have. The idea that consciousness is some kind of special quantum phenomena is highly speculative. Sure, some philosophers and physicists think it may be true, but others think the whole idea is baloney. When you say "likely", that's just your own opinion of what is more likely, there is no hard evidence to support that probability judgement.

WClayFerguson 6y ago
I agree with everything you just said. What I mean about quantum mechanics comes from the fact that neuroscience has never been able to locate "where" in the brain any memory is stored. I think consciousness and memory are interdependent, and that consciousness is essentially memory. You can invent new thoughts and ideas, but they are always built from existing ones, as their building blocks. I think the answer to the question 'where/how' is memory 'stored' in the brain is: "It's not". I believe the brain is quantum mechanically connected to all prior states of itself (like all matter is), and so what we call 'memory' is actually a 'direct connection' thru spacetime to the actual event. Needless to say it would take a book to describe this theory in detail, so maybe I'll write up all my thoughts at some point, but it explains lots of mysteries of intelligences once you accept this interconnection model. Everything from savantism, to instinct behaviors, to fungal intelligences falls into place. Once you accept that all complex patterns in nature that 'evolve' are always still 'connected directly to' all prior copies of themselves, and able to exchange wave potentials, it makes many things that used to seem 'paranormal' or 'magical' suddenly have a more scientific explanation.