5 ms·

> “Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produce

by dkarl 5y ago

> “Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” This statement surprised me. If evolution could have created zombies, and equally possibly could have not created zombies, then consciousness would be a weird and unexplained chance occurrence. Despite having evolution to explain how we came to exist as complex information-processing organism, we would need an additional and entirely different explanation for why we happen to be conscious. We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Which feels no less strange and magical, even if it is simpler, and took me straight to panpsychism, and the question of whether the machines we create might be conscious, and whether we are creating them to have pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences. Equally, since we can see how machines are made of smaller machines and so on, we can wonder if parts of us have consciousness and whether it is the same consciousness as our own, or if a group of people has a consciousness that experiences our world in some way but is unable to make its presence known because it exists at a level unconnected from the consciousnesses that direct human speech and action. Or maybe it has an illusion of agency just like we do.

bryan0 5y ago
> We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Agreed. I never understood the zombie distinction. It seems ridiculous that some thinking machines are “zombies” and some are not.
- simonh 5y ago
  The question there is what exactly, and very specifically do you mean by 'thinking'. We perform very complex intellectual tasks completely subconsciously all the time, without any concious awareness that we're doing them. Driving a car, while listening to the radio for example. Playing football or any complex sport at the highest level is done very largely on autopilot. Grandmasters playing chess, or Go, don't consciously think through every possible permutation of move, yet they can out play extremely sophisticated algorithms. Huge swathes of the cognitive load on these very sophisticated tasks is subconscious, so clearly those tasks must in principle be doable by entities not capable of consciousness. We don't yet know where the boundaries are between tasks that do and don't involve consciousness, if there are any.
  - bryan0 5y ago
    > We perform very complex intellectual tasks completely subconsciously all the time, without any conscious awareness that we're doing them I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it implies consciousness is binary. There are various levels of awareness and experience.
    - simonh 5y ago
      I think that's fair, it's a very complex phenomenon.
gpderetta 5y ago
> We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us That's the thesis in Blindsight (well, more 'interesting evolutionary incident' than 'necessary') . There might be other intelligent creatures that are unlike us and that are not conscious.
simonh 5y ago
>We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. We are concious, so creatures like us must be concious, otherwise they're not 'like' us. This is a conceptual pit trap. I'm sorry but I don't see this as at all elegant, it's the usual hierarchical inversion error somewhat disguised. A is a kind of B, therefore B is a kind of A. Phrased like that it's obviously false, but we see people doing this all the time. In this case the most common manifestation is conscious systems are complex systems (A is a kind of B where A=conciousness, B=complex), therefore complex systems are conscious (B is a kind of A). Therefore panpsychism. I suppose the argument is that consciousness might be a generalised attribute of complexity, or slightly more plausibly of information processing systems, but I see no evidence for this, and frankly no reason to believe it might be true. I am very wary of these kinds of hierarchical inversion though, they must be approached an examined extremely carefully because it's a very seductive intellectual failure mode.

by dkarl 5y ago

bryan0 5y ago

> We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Agreed. I never understood the zombie distinction. It seems ridiculous that some thinking machines are “zombies” and some are not.

simonh 5y ago
The question there is what exactly, and very specifically do you mean by 'thinking'. We perform very complex intellectual tasks completely subconsciously all the time, without any concious awareness that we're doing them. Driving a car, while listening to the radio for example. Playing football or any complex sport at the highest level is done very largely on autopilot. Grandmasters playing chess, or Go, don't consciously think through every possible permutation of move, yet they can out play extremely sophisticated algorithms. Huge swathes of the cognitive load on these very sophisticated tasks is subconscious, so clearly those tasks must in principle be doable by entities not capable of consciousness. We don't yet know where the boundaries are between tasks that do and don't involve consciousness, if there are any.
- bryan0 5y ago
  > We perform very complex intellectual tasks completely subconsciously all the time, without any conscious awareness that we're doing them I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it implies consciousness is binary. There are various levels of awareness and experience.
  - simonh 5y ago
    I think that's fair, it's a very complex phenomenon.

gpderetta 5y ago

> We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us That's the thesis in Blindsight (well, more 'interesting evolutionary incident' than 'necessary') . There might be other intelligent creatures that are unlike us and that are not conscious.

simonh 5y ago

>We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. We are concious, so creatures like us must be concious, otherwise they're not 'like' us. This is a conceptual pit trap. I'm sorry but I don't see this as at all elegant, it's the usual hierarchical inversion error somewhat disguised. A is a kind of B, therefore B is a kind of A. Phrased like that it's obviously false, but we see people doing this all the time. In this case the most common manifestation is conscious systems are complex systems (A is a kind of B where A=conciousness, B=complex), therefore complex systems are conscious (B is a kind of A). Therefore panpsychism. I suppose the argument is that consciousness might be a generalised attribute of complexity, or slightly more plausibly of information processing systems, but I see no evidence for this, and frankly no reason to believe it might be true. I am very wary of these kinds of hierarchical inversion though, they must be approached an examined extremely carefully because it's a very seductive intellectual failure mode.