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You're asking for a refutation, and ordinarily that's a good thing to aim for, but in this case was the original claim clear enough to be refuted? I think we do

by abeppu 5y ago

You're asking for a refutation, and ordinarily that's a good thing to aim for, but in this case was the original claim clear enough to be refuted? I think we don't even have a good definition for consciousness and we certainly don't have agreement over what would constitute evidence for it from the view of an outside observer, and the original claim doesn't attempt to provide any evidence, and so doesn't even imply an epistemic position. How can one refute something which is so vague?

Veedrac 5y ago
If one considers oneself entirely unsure about what properties consciousness has, maybe one shouldn't be trying to refute twitter posts that hypothesis certain things might be conscious. Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. If the article stuck to “we don't have any good reasons to believe that neural nets are conscious,” I wouldn't have had this objection. Either you get to say you know some properties about consciousness that allow you to coherently argue that some things are or are not, or you don't claim that and then you don't get to make that argument. The article wants to have its cake and eat it too, making a strong stance about what their model says while also claiming to neither have nor hope to have a model. I do actually think there are useful things you can say about what is and isn't conscious, but my comments here aren't really about that, they are about this annoying argument style where you attack things from whether they conform to social norms, rather than the merits of the position.
- Retric 5y ago
  It’s up to the person proposing a new term like “slightly conscious” to define what that means. Without that I can say no neural nets aren’t blubbery muffins and it’s just as valid as any other argument. Quite simply I don’t agree or disagree because the guy failed to clearly communicate.
  - hitekker 5y ago
    Agreed. The backlash to the OP's article reeks of religion. A few AI zealots pushing the burden of proof upon their naysayers under the pretense of science. Meanwhile, actual science is far closer to basic concepts like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    This is nonsense. The statement isn't meaningless. It's a tweet, not a formal conjecture. Sure, no one knows what exactly consciousness is... or what slightly conscious is. The idea of protoconsiousness isn't that much of a stretch. If a biologist had suggested some plants have protoconsiousness, no one would have whined. So what if someone working on NLP has an opinion about consciousness. Why is their opinion less valid than someone else's. It's not less informed.
    - Retric 5y ago
      I didn’t say meaningless, I said he didn’t communicate clearly. He can always add more tweets on the subject to remove ambiguity. Suppose you walked past a billboard that just said “Jump.” That’s grammatically correct and would be meaningful with context, but sitting alone you simply have no idea what idea was supposed to be communicated. Perhaps you missed a different sign, perhaps it’s art or an in joke, but sitting alone it’s simply ambiguous.
- abeppu 5y ago
  > Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. I think this still fails in the sense that the distribution representing one's beliefs is only defined with respect to a set of hypotheses. By invoking Bayes, presumably you acknowledge that different parties will come to the conversation with different priors. But critically, one can only update one's beliefs given both evidence and a likelihood function related that evidence back to hypotheses in the domain of one's beliefs. The "our take" summary near the end of the article explicitly says that they would regard the claim as reasonable given the right explicitly definition of consciousness. > The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Our take is that the claim could also be reasonable, but only if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well.
bluedays 5y ago
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Here's an opinion that virtually nobody holds. You want me to adopt that opinion? You'd better have some reason for me to do so - some evidence. Here's an opinion that 99% of people hold (or 99% of those within a field - same effect). You want to persuade someone to not hold it? Better have evidence. It's not exactly that the burden is on the one making the claim, or on the one denying the claim. The burden is on the one who is trying to change minds from their existing beliefs. That one needs something convincing - principles, reason, or evidence, with evidence being the best.
malloryerik 5y ago
"A sense of awareness." Does that work as a definition of consciousness? Also "sensible inwardly," and where we might get into trouble: "knowing." Do you think AI has a sense of awareness? I can't see one reason to ascribe a sense of awareness to any current form of AI, as world-changing and amazing as it is already. Even the I in AI tugs at me because I feel it might be a metaphor taken literally. As in, McDonalds is a hamburger empire but surely not a real empire. AI "knows" something in a way similar to how the dictionary "knows" the definition of a word. Beware of taking metaphors literally; there be dragons (but not real dragons)! AI has advanced beyond symbolic processing, it processes information in fantastic new ways, but it strictly speaking understands nothing. We take the processed information and we understand it (or don't). But maybe there's a case to be made that I'm being unfair, and it's actually justifiable to say that AI "thinks" without being conscious, aware, or sentient. On panpsychists, if their heady intuition is somehow not deluded and a form of awareness or consciousness is a fundamental quality of matter or in some other way ubiquitous, maybe like "The Force" in Star Wars, that's clearly not the way that people would mean conscious here. An appropriate way to discuss AI in that context would be, "AI is slightly conscious just like everything else." And if consciousness were somehow a quality of all matter it still wouldn't mean that, say, a chair is conscious as a chair or a tokamak as a tokamak, or even a carrot as a carrot, but rather that the matter that makes up those things and everything else has some kind of awareness.
lobocinza 5y ago
In other words, the original author was not even wrong.

by abeppu 5y ago

Veedrac 5y ago

If one considers oneself entirely unsure about what properties consciousness has, maybe one shouldn't be trying to refute twitter posts that hypothesis certain things might be conscious. Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. If the article stuck to “we don't have any good reasons to believe that neural nets are conscious,” I wouldn't have had this objection. Either you get to say you know some properties about consciousness that allow you to coherently argue that some things are or are not, or you don't claim that and then you don't get to make that argument. The article wants to have its cake and eat it too, making a strong stance about what their model says while also claiming to neither have nor hope to have a model. I do actually think there are useful things you can say about what is and isn't conscious, but my comments here aren't really about that, they are about this annoying argument style where you attack things from whether they conform to social norms, rather than the merits of the position.

Retric 5y ago
It’s up to the person proposing a new term like “slightly conscious” to define what that means. Without that I can say no neural nets aren’t blubbery muffins and it’s just as valid as any other argument. Quite simply I don’t agree or disagree because the guy failed to clearly communicate.
- hitekker 5y ago
  Agreed. The backlash to the OP's article reeks of religion. A few AI zealots pushing the burden of proof upon their naysayers under the pretense of science. Meanwhile, actual science is far closer to basic concepts like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
- dalbasal 5y ago
  This is nonsense. The statement isn't meaningless. It's a tweet, not a formal conjecture. Sure, no one knows what exactly consciousness is... or what slightly conscious is. The idea of protoconsiousness isn't that much of a stretch. If a biologist had suggested some plants have protoconsiousness, no one would have whined. So what if someone working on NLP has an opinion about consciousness. Why is their opinion less valid than someone else's. It's not less informed.
  - Retric 5y ago
    I didn’t say meaningless, I said he didn’t communicate clearly. He can always add more tweets on the subject to remove ambiguity. Suppose you walked past a billboard that just said “Jump.” That’s grammatically correct and would be meaningful with context, but sitting alone you simply have no idea what idea was supposed to be communicated. Perhaps you missed a different sign, perhaps it’s art or an in joke, but sitting alone it’s simply ambiguous.
abeppu 5y ago
> Maybe one should do the more principled Bayesian thing and just allow oneself to be uncertain proportional to the amount you don't know. I think this still fails in the sense that the distribution representing one's beliefs is only defined with respect to a set of hypotheses. By invoking Bayes, presumably you acknowledge that different parties will come to the conversation with different priors. But critically, one can only update one's beliefs given both evidence and a likelihood function related that evidence back to hypotheses in the domain of one's beliefs. The "our take" summary near the end of the article explicitly says that they would regard the claim as reasonable given the right explicitly definition of consciousness. > The reality is that we don’t have a widely accepted definition, let alone understanding, of consciousness. Claiming that we have already replicated such a nebulous concept with computers seems improbable at best. Our take is that the claim could also be reasonable, but only if a particular definition of consciousness was specified as well.

bluedays 5y ago

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Here's an opinion that virtually nobody holds. You want me to adopt that opinion? You'd better have some reason for me to do so - some evidence. Here's an opinion that 99% of people hold (or 99% of those within a field - same effect). You want to persuade someone to not hold it? Better have evidence. It's not exactly that the burden is on the one making the claim, or on the one denying the claim. The burden is on the one who is trying to change minds from their existing beliefs. That one needs something convincing - principles, reason, or evidence, with evidence being the best.

malloryerik 5y ago

"A sense of awareness." Does that work as a definition of consciousness? Also "sensible inwardly," and where we might get into trouble: "knowing." Do you think AI has a sense of awareness? I can't see one reason to ascribe a sense of awareness to any current form of AI, as world-changing and amazing as it is already. Even the I in AI tugs at me because I feel it might be a metaphor taken literally. As in, McDonalds is a hamburger empire but surely not a real empire. AI "knows" something in a way similar to how the dictionary "knows" the definition of a word. Beware of taking metaphors literally; there be dragons (but not real dragons)! AI has advanced beyond symbolic processing, it processes information in fantastic new ways, but it strictly speaking understands nothing. We take the processed information and we understand it (or don't). But maybe there's a case to be made that I'm being unfair, and it's actually justifiable to say that AI "thinks" without being conscious, aware, or sentient. On panpsychists, if their heady intuition is somehow not deluded and a form of awareness or consciousness is a fundamental quality of matter or in some other way ubiquitous, maybe like "The Force" in Star Wars, that's clearly not the way that people would mean conscious here. An appropriate way to discuss AI in that context would be, "AI is slightly conscious just like everything else." And if consciousness were somehow a quality of all matter it still wouldn't mean that, say, a chair is conscious as a chair or a tokamak as a tokamak, or even a carrot as a carrot, but rather that the matter that makes up those things and everything else has some kind of awareness.

lobocinza 5y ago

In other words, the original author was not even wrong.