7 ms·

This is kind of a weird discussion. "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed t

This is kind of a weird discussion. "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed to the way it's used in "Embodiment and the Inner Life" [1]). In that case, I don't think embodiment could ever be considered a necessary condition for AGI. But AGI would need to be able to learn motor tasks if given a body (in order to be called "general"). A deeper question, and one I don't see enough discussion of, is whether a certain kind of embodiment is necessary for AGI to "feel something." I don't think this question is definitively answerable, but it's super important. Can a CPU experience qualia? Or do you need something more "meaty" and analog? Does the material matter at all, or is consciousness (in the hard-problem sense) just a pattern of information? An even more interesting and relevant question might be - is "feeling" (i.e. having qualia) a necessary condition for AGI? [1] https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780199226559 https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780199226559

heyitsguay 4y ago
"qualia" is the bikeshedding for any discussion on intelligence (biological or artificial). It's an unfalsifiable concept that's much easier to reach to than engaging in the concepts that are actually relevant to modern work in those fields. Posting this is a bit of trying to hold back the tide, because the dominant threads in HN AI/BI discussions are almost always horribly uninformed, but I'm posting this so that if anyone else who actually does work in those fields is reading this and wondering what on earth is going on, now you know you're not alone!
- mrtranscendence 4y ago
  Eh? I’m not surprised that AI researchers are not informed about the philosophy of mind, and I doubt that they need to be in order to do their work. But the quale is an important concept and just assuming it doesn’t exist because AI researchers don’t need it is a bit silly.
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    It's just not relevant. It's an ill-defined measure for something that (all due respect) makes philosophy majors feel like they're participating in something they're unqualified to participate in.
    - mrtranscendence 4y ago
      With similarly all due respect, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about here. Philosophers aren't qualified to pontificate on the nuances of building language models, but they can have plenty to say on consciousness and intelligence. When you ignore them you get ... let's call them funny tweets saying that some large language models might be conscious.
      - ShamelessC 4y ago
        Sorry, my prior comment was incredibly rude - must have been in a bad mood but that's no excuse. I agree that outside perspective is valuable (although I would wager that such tweets are more attempts at getting headlines/funding than at being earnest).
- Jack000 4y ago
  I agree. You might as well replace the word "qualia" with "soul" and the argument stays exactly the same.
snek_case 4y ago
Whenever I see "qualia" being discussed I just roll my eyes. Asking whether a CPU can experience qualia is kind of like asking if atoms can experience anything. The CPU is just the substrate on which software runs.
- saulpw 4y ago
  You're being quite dismissive of a very real question. Where does our subjective experience come from? If there was an AGI with human-level intelligence, would it have its own subjective experience? How could we possibly know (either way)? For that matter, does a brain have a subjective experience, or is it just the substrate on which a mind runs?
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Why does it matter?
  - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    Probably it is a valid question, but I lost my patience a long long long time ago with the David Chalmers and Thomas Nagels of this world. They love to play a god of the gaps game with consciousness which it is really boring. The same thing some scientists did regarding life in the 19th century , which still some people play btw: the search for the supposed elan-vital. Count me in with Dr I-refute-thus Johnson and the anesthesiologists on the physical-reductionist side.
  - K0SM0S 4y ago
    There's no asking, let alone answering this question beyond mere speculations, until we've defined "subjective experience" in objective terms — i.e. positively provable, measurable in some unambiguous way (not merely inferred). That is the hard problem. Solving it might require reframing the problem such that this dichotomy isn't even relevant anymore (like say electromagnetic information isn't "opposed" or "dual" or "exclusive" to a gravitational field but merely concurrent) if we are to unify somehow the general field of "theory of mind".
Isinlor 4y ago
It's impossible to not be embodied. Controlling CPU and other hardware like motherboard and computer screen is an embodiment. Why would moving physical objects like electrons by micro meters not be good enough, but by meters it would?
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  It's not micrometers vs meters, or electrons vs macro objects. It's primarily a matter of sensor density. That is, I feel my fingers move in a way that a CPU does not feel an electron move. When I speak, I experience far more than a CPU experiences writing some bits to some output ports. And so on. Does that mean that embodiment is required? No. But your definition of "embodied" misses the point of the discussion.
  - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      I absolutely agree. You can, and better than humans. Not only better for any one sense, but also more senses than humans have. But that isn't what Isinlor was talking about. They said "moving electrons around" within the normal CPU circuitry as if that was the same as actuators controlling the external world. It's not.
      - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
        Moving electrons in silicon circuits = Moving K+ and Na+ ions in cells. Same principle. There is nothing inherently special, sacred or non-physical about our circuits. They are very energy efficient (compared to current standards), highly parallel and it is a kluge hard to reverse-engineer but other than that they are sensors, processors and actuators. This blueprint is universal, trivially so.
narag 4y ago
Can a CPU experience qualia? The mind has a physical structure that supports it. We are still unable to understand a meaningful portion of that structure or replicate it. Creating a concept to speculate about a system that we have no objective knowledge, based on subjective experience is useless. The name is catchy for a song though.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  It's hard to usefully speculate, but I don't think it's right to imply that it's an unimportant question either. Even putting aside the more out-there scenarios, we don't want to look back in 2100 and say "oops, AIs have had qualia for the past 25 years, and we've been real jerks to them".
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
If we are physical beings, and CPUs can simulate physics, then a CPU can experience everything that we experience, including "qualia". Do you think we're metaphysical beings, or that physics are beyond the capacity of a CPU to simulate?
- Karellen 4y ago
  Alternatively, we are analogue beings made up of systems that appear to be best described by chaotic continuous non-linear math, and digital computers can roughly simulate physics to a given level of precision, which can be as fine as you care to make it… at the cost of ever increasing processing requirements. And the amount of physics involved in simulating a single human cell, like a neuron, is already vast. Whether we can simulate a “large enough” physical system, in as much detail as is required, at a fast enough speed to produce any results in a meaningful timeframe, is an open question. We don’t even know how big the simulation needs to be, in terms of neurons, to produce qualia. Or how we’d know if it were. Or how much detail/resolution is needed. It’s like brute forcing the travelling salesman problem for a 10,000 node graph. Yeah, we know exactly how to do it with a digital computer. The math is simple. It’s just going to take longer than the heat death of the universe to get the answer.
  - dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
    Who says computers have to be digital? Analog computers are already a thing.
    - andrewflnr 4y ago
      The preceding discussion was specifically about "a CPU". Analog computers are specifically excluded. If, despite that, you're trying to simulate an analog entity with an analog computer, or build any analog AGI, the question arises whether it's possible to build one any simpler or faster than existing biological computers, e.g. humans. If no, then why bother?
      - 4y ago
liuliu 4y ago
Having a body basically gives you a way to interact the world. That is only good if you want to model the world and the actuator-control limits. Now, if we want to model the world (or build "world model", in LeCun's words), I am not sure "interacting" with the world is a necessary condition given the amount of data we already have. GPT-3 probably has some vague "world model" inside these parameters and we don't know how to effectively extract it out.
6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
It’s all about learning causation. It may not be strictly necessary, but it’s damned useful. If you’ve ever tried to learn causation from observational data or from a randomized trial, you’ll know which one is incredibly easier. If you can’t affect the data, it’s worth a lot less. Like learning to play a game without actually engaging in exploration. It can technically be done, but it’s so much harder.
- erikpukinskis 4y ago
  This is right, people are getting overly hung up on the idea that an AGI needs fingernails. It doesn't need fingernails but it absolutely needs the ability to effect change in the world it is meant to be "intelligent about" and learn from the results.

heyitsguay 4y ago

"qualia" is the bikeshedding for any discussion on intelligence (biological or artificial). It's an unfalsifiable concept that's much easier to reach to than engaging in the concepts that are actually relevant to modern work in those fields. Posting this is a bit of trying to hold back the tide, because the dominant threads in HN AI/BI discussions are almost always horribly uninformed, but I'm posting this so that if anyone else who actually does work in those fields is reading this and wondering what on earth is going on, now you know you're not alone!

mrtranscendence 4y ago
Eh? I’m not surprised that AI researchers are not informed about the philosophy of mind, and I doubt that they need to be in order to do their work. But the quale is an important concept and just assuming it doesn’t exist because AI researchers don’t need it is a bit silly.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  It's just not relevant. It's an ill-defined measure for something that (all due respect) makes philosophy majors feel like they're participating in something they're unqualified to participate in.
  - mrtranscendence 4y ago
    With similarly all due respect, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about here. Philosophers aren't qualified to pontificate on the nuances of building language models, but they can have plenty to say on consciousness and intelligence. When you ignore them you get ... let's call them funny tweets saying that some large language models might be conscious.
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Sorry, my prior comment was incredibly rude - must have been in a bad mood but that's no excuse. I agree that outside perspective is valuable (although I would wager that such tweets are more attempts at getting headlines/funding than at being earnest).
Jack000 4y ago
I agree. You might as well replace the word "qualia" with "soul" and the argument stays exactly the same.

snek_case 4y ago

Whenever I see "qualia" being discussed I just roll my eyes. Asking whether a CPU can experience qualia is kind of like asking if atoms can experience anything. The CPU is just the substrate on which software runs.

saulpw 4y ago
You're being quite dismissive of a very real question. Where does our subjective experience come from? If there was an AGI with human-level intelligence, would it have its own subjective experience? How could we possibly know (either way)? For that matter, does a brain have a subjective experience, or is it just the substrate on which a mind runs?
- adastra22 4y ago
  Why does it matter?
- UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  Probably it is a valid question, but I lost my patience a long long long time ago with the David Chalmers and Thomas Nagels of this world. They love to play a god of the gaps game with consciousness which it is really boring. The same thing some scientists did regarding life in the 19th century , which still some people play btw: the search for the supposed elan-vital. Count me in with Dr I-refute-thus Johnson and the anesthesiologists on the physical-reductionist side.
- K0SM0S 4y ago
  There's no asking, let alone answering this question beyond mere speculations, until we've defined "subjective experience" in objective terms — i.e. positively provable, measurable in some unambiguous way (not merely inferred). That is the hard problem. Solving it might require reframing the problem such that this dichotomy isn't even relevant anymore (like say electromagnetic information isn't "opposed" or "dual" or "exclusive" to a gravitational field but merely concurrent) if we are to unify somehow the general field of "theory of mind".

Isinlor 4y ago

It's impossible to not be embodied. Controlling CPU and other hardware like motherboard and computer screen is an embodiment. Why would moving physical objects like electrons by micro meters not be good enough, but by meters it would?

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
It's not micrometers vs meters, or electrons vs macro objects. It's primarily a matter of sensor density. That is, I feel my fingers move in a way that a CPU does not feel an electron move. When I speak, I experience far more than a CPU experiences writing some bits to some output ports. And so on. Does that mean that embodiment is required? No. But your definition of "embodied" misses the point of the discussion.
- UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
  It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    I absolutely agree. You can, and better than humans. Not only better for any one sense, but also more senses than humans have. But that isn't what Isinlor was talking about. They said "moving electrons around" within the normal CPU circuitry as if that was the same as actuators controlling the external world. It's not.
    - UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
      Moving electrons in silicon circuits = Moving K+ and Na+ ions in cells. Same principle. There is nothing inherently special, sacred or non-physical about our circuits. They are very energy efficient (compared to current standards), highly parallel and it is a kluge hard to reverse-engineer but other than that they are sensors, processors and actuators. This blueprint is universal, trivially so.

narag 4y ago

Can a CPU experience qualia? The mind has a physical structure that supports it. We are still unable to understand a meaningful portion of that structure or replicate it. Creating a concept to speculate about a system that we have no objective knowledge, based on subjective experience is useless. The name is catchy for a song though.

SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
It's hard to usefully speculate, but I don't think it's right to imply that it's an unimportant question either. Even putting aside the more out-there scenarios, we don't want to look back in 2100 and say "oops, AIs have had qualia for the past 25 years, and we've been real jerks to them".

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

If we are physical beings, and CPUs can simulate physics, then a CPU can experience everything that we experience, including "qualia". Do you think we're metaphysical beings, or that physics are beyond the capacity of a CPU to simulate?

Karellen 4y ago
Alternatively, we are analogue beings made up of systems that appear to be best described by chaotic continuous non-linear math, and digital computers can roughly simulate physics to a given level of precision, which can be as fine as you care to make it… at the cost of ever increasing processing requirements. And the amount of physics involved in simulating a single human cell, like a neuron, is already vast. Whether we can simulate a “large enough” physical system, in as much detail as is required, at a fast enough speed to produce any results in a meaningful timeframe, is an open question. We don’t even know how big the simulation needs to be, in terms of neurons, to produce qualia. Or how we’d know if it were. Or how much detail/resolution is needed. It’s like brute forcing the travelling salesman problem for a 10,000 node graph. Yeah, we know exactly how to do it with a digital computer. The math is simple. It’s just going to take longer than the heat death of the universe to get the answer.
- dinosaurdynasty 4y ago
  Who says computers have to be digital? Analog computers are already a thing.
  - andrewflnr 4y ago
    The preceding discussion was specifically about "a CPU". Analog computers are specifically excluded. If, despite that, you're trying to simulate an analog entity with an analog computer, or build any analog AGI, the question arises whether it's possible to build one any simpler or faster than existing biological computers, e.g. humans. If no, then why bother?
    - 4y ago

liuliu 4y ago

Having a body basically gives you a way to interact the world. That is only good if you want to model the world and the actuator-control limits. Now, if we want to model the world (or build "world model", in LeCun's words), I am not sure "interacting" with the world is a necessary condition given the amount of data we already have. GPT-3 probably has some vague "world model" inside these parameters and we don't know how to effectively extract it out.

6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago

It’s all about learning causation. It may not be strictly necessary, but it’s damned useful. If you’ve ever tried to learn causation from observational data or from a randomized trial, you’ll know which one is incredibly easier. If you can’t affect the data, it’s worth a lot less. Like learning to play a game without actually engaging in exploration. It can technically be done, but it’s so much harder.

erikpukinskis 4y ago
This is right, people are getting overly hung up on the idea that an AGI needs fingernails. It doesn't need fingernails but it absolutely needs the ability to effect change in the world it is meant to be "intelligent about" and learn from the results.