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Judging whether a machine is sentient seems pretty tough because I can't even explain or understand why I'm sentient. One thing I know is that there is no phys

Judging whether a machine is sentient seems pretty tough because I can't even explain or understand why I'm sentient. One thing I know is that there is no physical law I've ever learned about that accounts for it. My brain is doing information processing, and the connection between that and physical laws is clear. But it seems like that could happen entirely without the accompanying subjective experience. On the other hand, it has to be somehow connected to the physical, because my consciousness (temporarily) goes away when I sleep, and an anesthesiologist once used chemistry to force it to go away in about 5 seconds. And I have no idea how to reconcile these two things. I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. Plus emergent consciousness is not a very falsifiable hypothesis since it conveniently says don't be surprised if you never see anything at all if you look for it under simple conditions. Anyway, what is an emergent phenomenon? In terms of numbers, I'll say it's like if you start with X which is tiny, then multiply it by 1.01 a whole bunch of times, eventually you'll get a number which is significant. That makes sense, but it assumes X is nonzero, and the most interesting question is why X isn't zero.

wildermuthn 4y ago
Explaining why consciousness exists is the same task as asking why anything exists. Take applesauce: we know what it is made out of and we could probably recreate it without using any apples — applesauce is just a configuration of matter, same as whatever configuration of atoms in our brains leads us to have conscious experiences. But why do atoms exist? Why does existence exist? Thus, religion and philosophy. The existence of consciousness just feels like a unique problem because we only feel and think through the medium of consciousness itself. Consciousness is the closest we get to the baffling existence of existence. The good news is that we don’t really need an answer. It is enough to know that some configuration of matter and energy coincide with consciousness, and that means we can create it. Just like applesauce.
whimsicalism 4y ago
It is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous.
- johnsimer 4y ago
  1) How would processing all inputs and determining actions be less effective if everything was done subconsciously rather than consciously? Our hearts determine the correct speed and pressure to beat at all unconsciously and that is evolutionarily advantageous. Why would some information processing tasks benefit more (or at all) from consciousness? 2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?
  - RedNifre 4y ago
    Re 1) It is advantageous to predict what other humans are doing, so it makes sense for your brain to create a simulation of the world with other humans in it. To try different scenarios, it adds "you" to the simulation, figures out what the best decision is and then puts that decision into "you" (as in, you can measure that your brain makes a decision before you become consciously aware of it).
    - Tozen 4y ago
      Seems like we should not stop at just what other humans are doing, as clearly attempting to predict what other animals might do or the environment around us would be just as important.
- ars 4y ago
  The vast vast vast majority of living creatures are not sentient, so that's unlikely to be true.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    1. The vast majority of creatures don't have opposable thumbs, that doesn't mean it wasn't evolutionary advantageous for humans to have opposable thumbs. 2. We have no way of knowing any of this because we don't even have a handle on what sentience is.
candiddevmike 4y ago
Sentience is most likely some kind of emergent quantum phenomenon IMO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind If it is, we have a long, long way to go before we start to understand it.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  "most likely"? Absolutely not - most quantum effects would decohere in the brain and there is little evidence to suggest that it is not a largely classical machine. People are only attracted to this idea because it rescues the concept of "true consciousness" but I am not even convinced that is the case either - it still is deriving from a deterministic evolution of a wave function.
- notfed 4y ago
  To rephrase: sentience is most likely a kind of emergent phenomenon of physics. Most likely true yet completely hand waving and inane.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  What does an 'emergent quantum phenomenon' get us beyond... appealing to a branch of physics that most of us don't understand very well?
beefield 4y ago
To me emergent phenomena are things that simply can't be analyzed just looking at the building blocks the emergence comes from. Say, a photo of a cat is made of pixels, but there is no meaningful way to discuss "catness" of a single pixel. The RGB value of a single pixel simply has no information in that that distinguishes a non-cat pixel from cat-pixel. Only when you take a pile of pixels you may start to dicuss if that pile contains a cat or not. But you need to falsifiably define the catness of the image by something else than RGB values of individual pixels.
- dekhn 4y ago
  this isn't entirely correct. if you take the distribution of all extant cat pixels, you will see that pink is very rarely observed (there are no naturally pink cats, but there are certainly pictures of cats dyed pink). Therefore, if you see a pink pixel, you can say with modest certainty that it's not a cat. That's a fairly pedantic and uninteresting point, but the reality is even scalar observations contain information and can be used to classify, if poorly.
  - __s 4y ago
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Pink_Panther.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Pink_Panther.... https://www.boredpanda.com/sphynx-cats-family-heterochromia-this-is-rosie-kitty https://www.boredpanda.com/sphynx-cats-family-heterochromia-...
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    Aside from the cats mentioned in a sibling comment, there are also all kinds of ways light could make something look pink, when it is actually not
strogonoff 4y ago
Is there a falsifiable argument that reality in fact causes consciousness? If we pretend to swap the direction of that causal link, would it contradict our observations if we really get to the bottom of it? And on the other hand considering that all we can really be certain exists is only consciousness (our own and their who interact with us), with reality inaccessible other than through the lens of it?
- TuringTest 4y ago
  > Is there a falsifiable argument that reality in fact causes consciousness? You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...). You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Thanks, I was trying to make roughly the same point in a roundabout way. The comment I replied to seemingly made an implicit assumption not supported by physics, being outside of its scope, that reality causes consciousness, while as you say it could equally be the opposite as far as the framework of natural sciences is concerned. If so, we should mind both possibilities, and I very much agree that philosophy is key to learning about the issue (as opposed to physics, chemistry, biology and so on), though I might add Kant to your list.
bnralt 4y ago
> I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes. I think in general humans just have a very difficult time conceptualizing massive numbers and systems, and as such the emergent phenomena that come out of it seem unreal. Whenever I look into neuroscience, it looks like researchers are getting a clearer and clearer idea of how things work (as you noted, we even understand how to manipulate things at a basic level), but the system is so massive that it's slow going. As such, there's a certain "god of the gaps" argument that people turn to, where anything that researchers haven't yet fully understood gets treated as evidence that there's "something more." You see the same sort of arguments for religious explanations for other natural processes that are still being understood. When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach. The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).
- ch4s3 4y ago
  > This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes Yeah this is fundamentally an argument from ignorance[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
- undreren 4y ago
  I would be much more disconcerted if we were super special. I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that. On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    This has nothing to do with being super special. Sentience is literally the thing that defines our experience of the world. It's irrational to dismiss it as "Oh, that's nothing. Don't worry about it." It may well be "a semi-random by product of natural laws and processes", but that's a hand-wavey non-explanation. Whatever the details are, we're so completely ignorant of them we can't even hazard a reasonable testable hypothesis about how exactly natural laws and processes create self-awareness. Saying it's a non-problem because "obviously" it just is, is the opposite of science.
sowbug 4y ago
If you're really interested in this subject, consider reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Part of Jaynes' thesis is that the thing we call consciousness is a lot smaller than we think it is, at least as distinguished from mere subjective experience that doesn't quite rise to the level of awareness or consciousness. It's fascinating to think about, because it raises questions like whether a tree or even a rock experiences subjectivity. If subjective experience doesn't require consciousness, then maybe more things have that experience than we might expect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
scarmig 4y ago
Most of the time, the content of the sentence "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon" is indistinguishable from the sentence "consciousness is magic." I'd almost prefer the latter, because it at least acknowledges the complete lack of knowledge we have about consciousness and its etiology. It also seems like we can just as well say that computers magically become conscious as we can say water meat sacks magically become conscious.
m4nu3l 4y ago
Here is my two cent hypothesis. Consciousness arises whenever a system processes information in some way. In particular I would think it requires that the system has a simplified recursive model of itself. When I say "arises" I mean that is like a fundamental property of information. If true that would also mean that systems that we don't think are sentient in reality are, but we have no way to communicate with them. For instance a market system, that usually process information about itself might be sentient and we are like neurons in the system transferring information trough transactions and prices. Or forests might be.
Rury 4y ago
>Anyway, what is an emergent phenomenon? To me, emergent phenomena is nothing other than the complexity resulting from observing a group of smaller phenomena interact from a higher-scope. And from what I can tell, building blocks of emergent phenomena do explain everything regarding the emergent phenomena, but only when a sufficient amount of the building blocks are accounted for.

wildermuthn 4y ago

Explaining why consciousness exists is the same task as asking why anything exists. Take applesauce: we know what it is made out of and we could probably recreate it without using any apples — applesauce is just a configuration of matter, same as whatever configuration of atoms in our brains leads us to have conscious experiences. But why do atoms exist? Why does existence exist? Thus, religion and philosophy. The existence of consciousness just feels like a unique problem because we only feel and think through the medium of consciousness itself. Consciousness is the closest we get to the baffling existence of existence. The good news is that we don’t really need an answer. It is enough to know that some configuration of matter and energy coincide with consciousness, and that means we can create it. Just like applesauce.

whimsicalism 4y ago

It is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous.

johnsimer 4y ago
1) How would processing all inputs and determining actions be less effective if everything was done subconsciously rather than consciously? Our hearts determine the correct speed and pressure to beat at all unconsciously and that is evolutionarily advantageous. Why would some information processing tasks benefit more (or at all) from consciousness? 2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?
- RedNifre 4y ago
  Re 1) It is advantageous to predict what other humans are doing, so it makes sense for your brain to create a simulation of the world with other humans in it. To try different scenarios, it adds "you" to the simulation, figures out what the best decision is and then puts that decision into "you" (as in, you can measure that your brain makes a decision before you become consciously aware of it).
  - Tozen 4y ago
    Seems like we should not stop at just what other humans are doing, as clearly attempting to predict what other animals might do or the environment around us would be just as important.
ars 4y ago
The vast vast vast majority of living creatures are not sentient, so that's unlikely to be true.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  1. The vast majority of creatures don't have opposable thumbs, that doesn't mean it wasn't evolutionary advantageous for humans to have opposable thumbs. 2. We have no way of knowing any of this because we don't even have a handle on what sentience is.

candiddevmike 4y ago

Sentience is most likely some kind of emergent quantum phenomenon IMO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind If it is, we have a long, long way to go before we start to understand it.

whimsicalism 4y ago
"most likely"? Absolutely not - most quantum effects would decohere in the brain and there is little evidence to suggest that it is not a largely classical machine. People are only attracted to this idea because it rescues the concept of "true consciousness" but I am not even convinced that is the case either - it still is deriving from a deterministic evolution of a wave function.
notfed 4y ago
To rephrase: sentience is most likely a kind of emergent phenomenon of physics. Most likely true yet completely hand waving and inane.
bee_rider 4y ago
What does an 'emergent quantum phenomenon' get us beyond... appealing to a branch of physics that most of us don't understand very well?

beefield 4y ago

To me emergent phenomena are things that simply can't be analyzed just looking at the building blocks the emergence comes from. Say, a photo of a cat is made of pixels, but there is no meaningful way to discuss "catness" of a single pixel. The RGB value of a single pixel simply has no information in that that distinguishes a non-cat pixel from cat-pixel. Only when you take a pile of pixels you may start to dicuss if that pile contains a cat or not. But you need to falsifiably define the catness of the image by something else than RGB values of individual pixels.

dekhn 4y ago
this isn't entirely correct. if you take the distribution of all extant cat pixels, you will see that pink is very rarely observed (there are no naturally pink cats, but there are certainly pictures of cats dyed pink). Therefore, if you see a pink pixel, you can say with modest certainty that it's not a cat. That's a fairly pedantic and uninteresting point, but the reality is even scalar observations contain information and can be used to classify, if poorly.
- __s 4y ago
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Pink_Panther.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Pink_Panther.... https://www.boredpanda.com/sphynx-cats-family-heterochromia-this-is-rosie-kitty https://www.boredpanda.com/sphynx-cats-family-heterochromia-...
- mitchdoogle 4y ago
  Aside from the cats mentioned in a sibling comment, there are also all kinds of ways light could make something look pink, when it is actually not

strogonoff 4y ago

Is there a falsifiable argument that reality in fact causes consciousness? If we pretend to swap the direction of that causal link, would it contradict our observations if we really get to the bottom of it? And on the other hand considering that all we can really be certain exists is only consciousness (our own and their who interact with us), with reality inaccessible other than through the lens of it?

TuringTest 4y ago
> Is there a falsifiable argument that reality in fact causes consciousness? You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...). You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Thanks, I was trying to make roughly the same point in a roundabout way. The comment I replied to seemingly made an implicit assumption not supported by physics, being outside of its scope, that reality causes consciousness, while as you say it could equally be the opposite as far as the framework of natural sciences is concerned. If so, we should mind both possibilities, and I very much agree that philosophy is key to learning about the issue (as opposed to physics, chemistry, biology and so on), though I might add Kant to your list.

bnralt 4y ago

> I've heard "it's an emergent phenomenon", but that's super hand-wavy to me. It might be true that it's emergent, but that doesn't tell me what the connection is. This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes. I think in general humans just have a very difficult time conceptualizing massive numbers and systems, and as such the emergent phenomena that come out of it seem unreal. Whenever I look into neuroscience, it looks like researchers are getting a clearer and clearer idea of how things work (as you noted, we even understand how to manipulate things at a basic level), but the system is so massive that it's slow going. As such, there's a certain "god of the gaps" argument that people turn to, where anything that researchers haven't yet fully understood gets treated as evidence that there's "something more." You see the same sort of arguments for religious explanations for other natural processes that are still being understood. When I listen to people who actually study this (and make progress on it), they don't see to hit any limits using a physical approach. The "hard problem" seems to mostly exist in the minds of people outside the field who are unsettled by the thought that we might not be special (a pretty common reaction whenever science makes progress on subjects).

ch4s3 4y ago
> This reminds me of religious arguments about how evolution can't account for complex organs like eyes Yeah this is fundamentally an argument from ignorance[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
undreren 4y ago
I would be much more disconcerted if we were super special. I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that. On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  This has nothing to do with being super special. Sentience is literally the thing that defines our experience of the world. It's irrational to dismiss it as "Oh, that's nothing. Don't worry about it." It may well be "a semi-random by product of natural laws and processes", but that's a hand-wavey non-explanation. Whatever the details are, we're so completely ignorant of them we can't even hazard a reasonable testable hypothesis about how exactly natural laws and processes create self-awareness. Saying it's a non-problem because "obviously" it just is, is the opposite of science.

sowbug 4y ago

If you're really interested in this subject, consider reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Part of Jaynes' thesis is that the thing we call consciousness is a lot smaller than we think it is, at least as distinguished from mere subjective experience that doesn't quite rise to the level of awareness or consciousness. It's fascinating to think about, because it raises questions like whether a tree or even a rock experiences subjectivity. If subjective experience doesn't require consciousness, then maybe more things have that experience than we might expect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

scarmig 4y ago

Most of the time, the content of the sentence "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon" is indistinguishable from the sentence "consciousness is magic." I'd almost prefer the latter, because it at least acknowledges the complete lack of knowledge we have about consciousness and its etiology. It also seems like we can just as well say that computers magically become conscious as we can say water meat sacks magically become conscious.

m4nu3l 4y ago

Here is my two cent hypothesis. Consciousness arises whenever a system processes information in some way. In particular I would think it requires that the system has a simplified recursive model of itself. When I say "arises" I mean that is like a fundamental property of information. If true that would also mean that systems that we don't think are sentient in reality are, but we have no way to communicate with them. For instance a market system, that usually process information about itself might be sentient and we are like neurons in the system transferring information trough transactions and prices. Or forests might be.

Rury 4y ago

>Anyway, what is an emergent phenomenon? To me, emergent phenomena is nothing other than the complexity resulting from observing a group of smaller phenomena interact from a higher-scope. And from what I can tell, building blocks of emergent phenomena do explain everything regarding the emergent phenomena, but only when a sufficient amount of the building blocks are accounted for.