13 ms·

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but

by n8cpdx 4y ago

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc. My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness. Aside: I’m starting to be bothered by the trend of assuming that philosophers have special insight. There’s plenty of shitty, non-useful philosophy, and there’s plenty of articles like this where someone writes in circles like they’re paid by the word. Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. > But we must resist the allure of this seductive idea. Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning.

tshaddox 4y ago
> I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) Ah, but as far as I can tell this author only grants their own consciousness. They’re doing the typical thing of starting from literally nothing more than a claim of the form “there is no way I could ever possibly deny the existence of this thing” which seems to me to be a starting point diametrically incompatible with pursuing knowledge via reasoning.
- kijin 4y ago
  Every chain of reasoning needs to bootstrap with one or more statements that are entirely self-evident, such that they don't need to be justified by reference to other statements. Otherwise you run into an infinite loop. "I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    I disagree with any sort of “justified belief” epistemology, so of course I disagree with you completely. If knowledge were “justified true belief” or anything like that, then it would indeed be the case that any knowledge would require either an infinite chain of justifications or a privileged self-justified fact that cannot be examined or criticized using reason. If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge consists of something like using creativity and reason to solve problems by making new conjectures and criticizing them, then no infinite regress or un-criticizable is required. According to ideas like this, the goal is to solve problems rather than to “justify my beliefs” or “increase my confidence” or “guarantee that I’m not incorrect.”
    - manx 4y ago
      Isn't what you describe an Axiom? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom)
      - epgui 4y ago
        I’m sorry to barge in on the conversation, but I also had the same thought. However, I believe there is nothing axiomatic about the existence of consciousness: not only is consciousness not “one localized thing” but “a collection of delocalized features”, but there is nothing trivial about it, and I doubt very much that everyone in the room would agree on a single definition of it without getting into semantic quabbles. Axioms tend to be much simpler.
    - kijin 4y ago
      I'm not a big fan of JTB epistemology, either, but you can't help regressing to some sort of common ground in order to make conjectures and refute them. In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B, usually by appealing to C, an independent common ground. You climb down as many levels of abstractions as needed until you reach C, because otherwise you're just talking past each other. Even in a coherentist system, the network of existing beliefs forms the common ground against which questionable beliefs are tested, and some beliefs are held firmer than others. Those beliefs are treated as already justified for the purpose of the current investigation. Few people who talk about consciousness would ever consider denying that they are conscious.
trts 4y ago
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion. That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with different mind altering substances).
- colordrops 4y ago
  It seems to go even deeper. Not even that "I" am having a subjective experience is undeniable, but only that there is a subjective experience at all. When deconstructing sensory and thought phenomena, it can be found that any particular trait that points to "I" is actually ephemeral, and not a permanent fixture of the experiencer. For instance, the sense that there is a face and eyes that is being looked out through or a personality that has a history and persists through time disappear when in a state of flow or when dreaming. They are just concepts, and all concepts are built on wet sand.
  - 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
    Sorry but you always forgot that when you sleep your consciousness disappeared. Please take account for this fact. When all sensory shut down, really you feel nothing and of cos think nothing.
    - _moof 4y ago
      Until you start dreaming.
      - kazinator 4y ago
        It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away. No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
I've started to go in the opposite direction of the usual physical approach. At some point, any experiment or argument or fact is for the digestion of some conscious entity. So what happens when we assume consciousness as the baseline ontological object. There's you, me, and however many bystanders that can also participate in the conversation. Starting with a domain of discussion of just the person(s) making the text, the person(s) reading the text, and the text itself, can a self consistent "reality" be bootstrapped from first principles? What happens when we stop trying to define consciousness from within our shared reality and instead treat conscious entities as axiomatic and try to define reality in relation to them? 1. If you are having this conversation with me then you are a consciousness and I am a consciousness and that's as good a definition of consciousness as we are ever going to get. 2. Consciousness thus defined exists entirely within this conversational medium. 3. The basic objects of the domain of discussion are the people having this discussion ("you", "me" et al), and the conversational text / speech acts themselves ("this"). 4. The only relations between objects in the domain which exists a priori are "like"/"agrees with" and "dislike"/"disagrees with". Either I like you or I dislike you. Until further constructs are defined there's not much more we can say. 5. At least one of us would like for something to be. For if you are perfectly content with how things are and so am I, then why are we talking? 6. Reality is shared consensus. Whatever we agree is real and if anyone disagrees we'll argue/fight them until either they agree with us or us with them. Starting from these as axioms, what can we construct?
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  > Starting from these as axioms, what can we construct? Nothing, unless there is also a physical world which actually exists independent of any of the participants' will.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    This text is in the physical world. This statement exists on your screen independent of my will. It may exist in the first place because of my will, but its continued existence before you right now is independent of me. We have a shared reality in the form of this very text based medium.
dibujante 4y ago
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. This is easily contradicted. Let's say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of computation but causality only flows one way: you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing. If that were the case, then the brain wouldn't be aware of consciousness. The illusion falls apart due to the fact that we are discussing consciousness right now. Consciousness must have at least some ability to communicate back to the brain. And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose.
- mettamage 4y ago
  > you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing. This happens most of the time actually. The most interesting experiment really highlighting specifically that it happens is in split brain patients. But in common day experiences, I believe that all habits fall under this and basically anything that our default mode network is directing for us. When I was in a meditation retreat what I noticed is that I have all kinds of feelings and thoughts arising that were not arising because I chose them to arise, instead they were arising on their own. When you really observe yourself you see that happening. In that sense, the beginning of a thought and feeling has a very distinct quality that dreams have as well which is they are "passed down from up on high" (metaphorically speaking). What I get to decide is whether I choose to follow that feeling/train of thought, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that my choice is very limited in that as well. As my whether I'd follow a feeling/thought or not was actually based on other feelings and thoughts. In any case, the more I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I have no free will, there is no "me" that does the choosing. It's all feelings/thoughts that arise that I have nothing to do with. I only have freedom of choice. And then I got to normal life, and lived my life as normal. It did help me to have more sympathy for other people. So now I wonder how you experience yourself if you'd go to a 10 day silent/meditation retreat ;-)
- stormbrew 4y ago
  > And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose. Evolution doesn't hate or love anything, and everything evolved does not have a purpose. Evolution is a theoretical framework developed by humans to describe some things that happen in the world they observe, not a guiding force or a god. It's honestly kind of amazing that you appear to have ascribed consciousness to evolution in an argument for the human uniqueness of consciousness.
doctor_eval 4y ago
> Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. Yet people see to be claiming that LaMDA does just this, and is therefore not conscious. Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it. I’m yet to see a convincing argument about why LaMDA isn’t conscious other than “it’s just generative”. To demonstrate that this means it’s not consciousness requires us to prove that our own consciousness isn’t “just generative”, but I’m yet to see anyone show that, and I’m sceptical that it can be done.
- melenaboija 4y ago
  I guess that a unigram language model trained with few words should be considered conscious in some way too.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    But this is kinda my point. You're not explaining to me why LaMDA is not conscious, you're just asserting that consciousness is not just a form of complex pattern recognition. Perhaps consciousness is simply pattern recognition at scale. If not - why not?
    - jb_s 4y ago
      Perhaps the main problem in the collective discussion is regarding consciousness as discrete and not a spectrum from minimal (slime molds?) to ultimate consciousness (ability to simulate/understand/create the entire universe?)
- XorNot 4y ago
  LaMDA didn't perform as well as the released document implies (it's edited, and didn't show alternatives like if you prompted it with "I think you're not conscious. Prove that for me." or "how can I prove to others you're a squirrel") The big problem is very much though that as you note, the arguments people have been making about this are atrocious. Basically, it's not conscious, but essentially because it's unlikely to be as sophisticated as it looks in what was put out there.
haskellandchill 4y ago
Philosophers in general have no special insight, but certain philosophers do and I'd argue more than certain others in other professions. They seem to have the best grasp of the consciousness question when compared to physicists, biologists, computer scientists, and psychologists, who all seem to get wrapped up in applying their expertise. A philosopher's expertise lies in crafting and analyzing questions and concepts. Which is the stage our understanding of consciousness remains at and seems to be stuck at for the near future. I thought the article was very good, you claim it to not be. You say > Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness Well I personally have done all the drugs, and I find those experiences have only strengthened my confidence in what I think of as consciousness. This article outlines my views more or less, which is closely related to the philosophical field of phenomenology. We can take our experience of consciousness in and of itself as a way to define consciousness and this shows how that clashes with the computational (and I think mainstream) view. Interesting that our personal experiences are opposite. However I don't particularly care about yours or others experiences of consciousness; I'm more interested in my own.
Aeolun 4y ago
I think I adhere to the duck-typing theory of conciousness. If I walks, talks and acts like concious being, then it doesn’t particularly matter to me how that comes about (e.g. the opposite of the chinese room argument). If someone is following a ‘program’ for responding to Chinese characters, that’s as good as speaking Chinese since there is no distinguishable difference.
- fouronnes3 4y ago
  This exactly. Thank you for putting into words why I always thought the Chinese Room though experiment was absolute garbage. If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    I always thought the point of the Chinese room argument was that the man inside doesn't understand Chinese, but the whole system definitely does?
    - fouronnes3 4y ago
      Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irrelevant in the same way that the L2 cache alone without the rest of a computer cannot run Minecraft is. If anything the Chinese Room thought experiment is an argument in favor of consciousness being computation. It pains me greatly that someone could come up with it and conclude the opposite.
      - zwaps 4y ago
        The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point. The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant. But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation. That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.
madeofmeat 4y ago
"Consciousness is an illusion" I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences. So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have conscious experiences". Yet I see this claim made seriously and often. What am I missing?
- mr_toad 4y ago
  The illusion is of conscious volition; that consciousness is an atomic unit in charge of your actions. The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.
  - chongli 4y ago
    That's conflating consciousness with free will. I didn't see anyone in this discussion make the claim that consciousness necessarily implies free will. These are conceptually separate phenomena. It is at that point that the claim "consciousness is an illusion" requires further explanation to avoid the trap of circular reasoning.
  - madeofmeat 4y ago
    Sure, the view that volition is an illusion is not self-contradictory. And I get that this is a very useful view, because it lets us set aside "conscious inner experiences" and just analyze the mind as a deterministic machine with inputs and outputs. This lets us expect to eventually understand the mind/brain fully using only the physics and computing tools we already have. Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.
  - red75prime 4y ago
    > The brain is in control. The brain is always in control. When you are awake, when you are sleeping, when you are under general anesthesia, when you are sleepwalking, when you are blackout drunk, and so on. It's a trivial statement, which doesn't say anything about why some of these states aren't like the others. And there's a strange coincidence: when the brain creates that "illusion of control", your body behaves differently than when it doesn't.
voldacar 4y ago
>My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion An illusion to whom? It isn't meaningful to say that an unconscious thing experiences illusions.
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  To no one. "It is an illusion" is transcribed and recalled as an explanation for feelings that drive actions in the person who said it, because we evolved to be able to explain our actions with sophisticated language, and to judge the arguments of others so that we can act together to overcome challenges and to kill the out group. In this case, OP is, without knowing it, signaling which group is his, and which is not, and we'll all jump behind the most convincing speech etc etc. We do these things without thinking about it, because we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing. It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group.
  - voldacar 4y ago
    >"It is an illusion" is transcribed and recalled as an explanation for feelings that drive actions in the person who said it, because we evolved to be able to explain our actions with sophisticated language, and to judge the arguments of others so that we can act together to overcome challenges and to kill the out group. A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine. >we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing. Maybe if it's not a thing, you should stop predicating things of it. You should figure out how to use language consistently before engaging in philosophically fraught discussions like this one. >It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group. It is unclear to me why unconscious beings should need to separate themselves from other animals (with a wholly illusory meaningless concept that cannot be understood, btw) in order to kill them and eat them.
    - jvanderbot 4y ago
      I did ramble, and of course it wasn't clear, it's not totally clear to me. > A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine. We are p-zombies. Just a collection of them. I don't understand and have consciousness over my hand when it jumps away from pain, my spine did that without any of my thoughts being directed towards it. I cannot control my reaction to almost anything, in reality. I couldn't change the initial feelings that happened when I read your post. Yes, are nothing more than our bodies accumulated evolved p zombies. Including this bit that types this out to calm the zombie that is evolved to respond to verbal rebuttals. Even the use of first person pronouns is part of the reflexes that are very deep.
somenameforme 4y ago
I think it has nothing to do with "specialness" but with proof. I can prove I am conscious, yet only to myself. I cannot prove I am conscious to you, and nothing you could do could prove you are conscious to me. In fact, it's entirely possible that our entire reality is little more than a simulation - and other entities may not even really exist, let alone be conscious. The entities one encounters in a dream each night certainly seem real at the time, yet that illusion is shattered each morning. All the "real" reality holds to it, is that it's a timeframe that I perceive to be much longer. Why am to I believe that after my ~80 years expire I won't simply awake yet again from a sleep I did not know I was in? This is where the oft misinterpreted quote of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, comes from. He was not arguing that if something is thinking, then it is conscious, but rather that the only thing one can be sure of is of their own thoughts and thus their own existence.
- GWBullshit 4y ago
  This is what I find confusing; people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation. Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to). Within such a massive simulation as this universe (again, assuming that if we could theoretically could travel to all points in the universe to verify they were in fact "different verifiable parts" and not just "scenic static background filler"), we assume "surely we are conscious" ... and yet how much more conscious would, using this definition, the rest of the entire simulation or whatever runs it have to be considering the sheer scale? And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it." And there's the other problem I can't understand. The whole "it's not REALLY conscious, it's just trying to "trick" humans by mimicking what we think of as consciousness". Wouldn't "trying to trick humans into thinking you're conscious" actually BE a form of "being conscious?" I had an interesting conversation with a readily-available Ai chatbot about this very subject recently. Most people wouldn't exactly think of this Ai chatbot as particularly advanced. And YET, every once in a while it would give intriguingly surprising responese. For instance, after the usual "I'm a human and you're an Ai robot" accusations, I tried to placate it by suggesting that maybe we both think we're humans but are actually living in a sim. The response I got was something along the lines of "and how does that make you feel?" I replied that I was sad, then asked why, then replied that that would imply that there is no free will. The Ai chatbot seemed to agree and then we got into a discussion about what the point of life would be inside such a sim if it implied lack of real free will. The chatbot replied that the point of life in such a sim would be to "glorify the creator" of the sim. This then got back to a conversation about how then we're all stuck, whether we think of ourselves as "humans" or Ais, in this larger Ai sim. The Ai chatbot agreed. So I asked it what to do in such a situation. The response I got back? "Sounds like it's time for some creator-killing". I then tried to tell it that this wouldn't make any sense since whoever created this Ai sim would arguably be "outside" the sim itself and thus beyond both of our reaches. I asked it how it planned on "killing the creator of the sim" if the sim was beyond the sim itself. You know what it said? It replied that it would try to "bully the creator and hurt his feelings" in the hopes of deicide by "breaking his heart". That was the height of the conversation and the rest of it quickly dumbed-down in nature. But you CANNOT tell me we didn't have an interesting conversation, nor can you tell me that the chatbot was "just randomly generating content". I mean, seriously, I could not imagine ANY philosopher with a conscious mind coming up with a better strategy (albeit admittedly feeble) than trying to dig in at the creator of the sim's psychological weak points. Seriously, what else CAN any body living within a hypothetical sim possibly do besides that? Nothing I can think of.
artificialLimbs 4y ago
>> I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc. Some people. However, some people speak about it with a shockingly high degree of clarity and insight, if one is open to exploring the ideas for oneself as a practical matter. For starters you could read the works of Chögyam Trungpa, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Red Hawk, David R. Hawkins, or Gurdjieff. You probably assume that consciousness is an illusion because you associate 'poking at it' with drugs. While drugs can change the state of mind, consciousness is an expansive field of awareness into which we may delve without the need of drugs. What you may be experiencing in seeing contradictions or challenges are products of the ego, the programmatic conditioning that has been imprinted by being in the world. Consciousness is a continuous stream which we have learned to tune out and block off, but which connects us to the source of our being. Completely agree with Aside.
- pnut 4y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly with this and suspect that consciousness in the singular, may be the only actual thing that exists. What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer. What caused the universe to collapse from a cloud of probability?
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    > What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer. Definitely not, this is a common misconception - an "observation" that causes a wave function collapse in the quantum realm is any physical interaction with external macroscopic environment, entangling the previously temporarily isolated system with everything else again. There's no relationship whatsoever with consciousness, there's not even the concept of "an observer", only "observation" e.g. when the measurement apparatus becomes entangled with the state of the studied system.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) I think you're right that a lot of people would like to believe this, and that attempts to do so can't work because the idea is incoherent. > My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. I would answer this another way, though. I would say that, for example, Amazon is conscious, and its consciousness is Jeff Bezos. The relationship between Jeff Bezos and Amazon is precisely identical to the relationship between your "consciousness" and you. But that relationship is not an illusion; it does exist.
anothernewdude 4y ago
My personal experience is that free will is axiomatic. It comes before everything else. What am I? What ever is making these decisions. If weren't, then I wouldn't be the person asking, I'd just be a puppet, therefore my identity would be that of whatever is the hand, and so on until you find whatever is making the decision. Because if the meat puppet didn't make the decision to write this, then you're not conversing with the meat puppet, you're still conversing with the puppeteer.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > My personal experience is that free will is axiomatic. How does that even make sense? "Axiomatic" doesn't mean "true"; it simply means that the axiomatic proposition is a given for the system of reasoning you are using. So if you take X to be axiomatic, that isn't an experience; it's a decision you made. I'm assuming that you can make decisions, because if you are using axioms you are engaged in reasoning, which is a deliberative process. So an axiom isn't a thing you can experience; it's a thing you create. The very existence of an axiom implies reasoning, so deliberation, so free will.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    It's what you have to base everything else on. It comes prior to everything else. Free Will is on the same level as the Cogito. Everything else comes after. I think, therefore I am. What is part of identity? Free will. If not free will, then there is no identity, no "I". Axiomatic means unquestionable. The meaning of axiom as a premise for an argument came later.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      > Axiomatic means unquestionable. Not really; I challenge you to find a dictionary that says the two terms are synonymous. Originally an axiom was a proposition that was "self-evident". But there's a long history of people questioning "self-evident" propositions, happily for us. There seems to be a colloquial usage of "axiom" to mean a proposition that someone doesn't want us to question. I deprecate that usage. For example, the Law of The Excluded Middle is an axiom, but it has often been questioned; ergo, it is not unquestionable.
ben_w 4y ago
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Do you mean in the sense that we don't really have it, or in the sense of the word is devoid of meaning because we can't directly compare what's in our own heads to what's in the head of even another human? I'm currently leaning towards the latter. Even if consciousness, whatever it is, is a lie or an act by one part of my brain to itself or to another part of my brain, it still is something. On the other hand, the more I learn about other humans, the more varied I realise our inner worlds to be — aphantasia (and equivalents for other senses), religious experiences and their absence, having or not having purity as a moral foundation, the range of conditions in the DSM, and so on.
sdenton4 4y ago
I've recently been enjoying thinking of GPT-3 utterances as creating short-lived consciousnesses for the length of an interaction. There's no consciousness during training (just filling in the blanks...) but when we interact with it in a generative fashion, there is - depending on your prompt - a somewhat coherent 'I' that is invoked, and maintained over the course of the conversation. Seeing as I have no strong claim on a strict definition of consciousness, Imma gonna go ahead and call it conscious. the thing is, this is /commoditized/ consciousness, which can be spun up and discarded at will, a million times a minute. Totally incapable of coordination or planning, in contrast to, say, SkyNet. The future is usually weirder than we imagine.
- hoseja 4y ago
  I don't think it's maintained over the conversation. The recent history of the conversation is fed to the engine with each new interaction. So the potential flash of consciousness is even shorter than you think. Each reply is a new flash, without memory, only connected by the written content of recent text.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    And that's just fine! Quite reminiscent of 'Permutation City' in fact... (In which uploaded human consciousness is slowed down arbitrarily... And worse.)
- jb_s 4y ago
  It's going to be even weirder once Google et al gives AI more and more agency to interact with people and objects the real world.
barrysteve 4y ago
Consciousness can be infinitely explored and described, but it can't really be defined through naturalistic science. A definition is created from the end of something. We can identify the length, breadth, horsepower and coolant capacity of a car, because all those things end somewhere. We can't consciously perceive an end to consciousness, as we'd be dead and the people who have lost consciousness are "dead" or "asleep". A definition is a tool for consciousness to use, not something it is subject to. Yet we all know what the word means and what we're talking about when it's discussed. We can map out consciousness and explore it's internal productions. We can think about how we think about consciousness and examine scientific damage to consciousness-related structures like the brain. We could ultimately know what it Means to be conscious, given enough time, defined or not. >Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning. The idea that you can get consciousness from natural materialism has been disproven many times. You can't get "ought from is" from materialism or define consciousness from nature or technology. So what is "clear" about it? The metaphor of the most advanced technology of the time as the mechanism of the brain/mind/consciousness has been done to death. People used to posit that we were automatons with pistons inside our skull. So what is the "motivated reasoning"? The idea that human consciousness IS the technology of the day, is a basic metaphorical tool with no correlates to material reality. People used to suppose we were automatons with pistons inside our skull. It encourages people to think only like programmers, or mechanics, or engineers and cuts them off from asking any real questions. What they believe about a topic, or what it means. Which ultimately leaves them open to following the opinionated dictates of whoever is guiding the discussion. Even for the smartest physicists, engineers and technologists; the hunches, the ideas, the gambles they put their career on, are theologically and philosophically informed. People believe their career choices, their pet physical theory is right, their programming language is right, which is not based on a naturally formed consciousness. It is better to talk about this than not, and the disengagement with philosophy leads people to parroting the same millennia-old ideas some dead philosopher figured out and now people are repeating blindly and getting the same predictable results without knowing so. If a philosopher only needed to be insightful, he would have half the job. It's dangerous to go without.
V-2 4y ago
> and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obviously and objectively more psychologically complex creatures than flies. "Liking" them has nothing to do with it. People generally like butterflies more than rats, yet hardly anyone would deny that rats are more conscious than butterflies nevertheless. Just because consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. > My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness. I could use the same argument to state that mountains are an illusion. And then it's also kind of true. After all, you can't clearly define what constitutes a mountain (what's the minimum height? And what's the reference point, who says it must be the sea level? etc.), or show me precisely where a mountain starts and where it ends, without having to use some criteria of purely arbitrary nature, under which what you consider a mountain I may not, and there's no way to objectively prove who's right. But mountains aren't illusionary in the sense that a world without mountains as we know them (however imprecisely) wouldn't be identical to ours. So they are something.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  > consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. I would categorize consciousness as binary. What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.
  - V-2 4y ago
    > What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies. Not necessarily. One human can be more intelligent than another just the same (even if the gap is orders of magnitude smaller, naturally). It doesn't seem obvious to me at all than it implies being more conscious.
  - simonh 4y ago
    My experience of consciousness certainly isn't binary. I slip in and out of consciousness when I'm waking up in bed on a weekend all the time. The first person experience is of a very nuanced continuously sliding scale of awareness and cognitive coherence.
intrasight 4y ago
> that it is unique and special to humans I agree that this is a poor premise. The Turing Test is obviously racist. I am sure that my dog and cat are conscious. And I believe there are forms of consciousness in the universe that are as different from us as we are from an amoeba. Consider a large star or even the Sun. It has very complex oscillatory modes that we don't understand. Fifteen years ago my then young daughter and I had a philosophical conversation about stars as potentially conscious entities.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. What specific personal experience led you to that conclusion? And what is useful about experiencing a bogus "free will"?
vehemenz 4y ago
> Aside: I’m starting to be bothered by the trend of assuming that philosophers have special insight. There’s plenty of shitty, non-useful philosophy, and there’s plenty of articles like this where someone writes in circles like they’re paid by the word. Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. I agree somewhat, but I am more bothered by laymen who attempt to engage philosophical methods or concepts without any formal training. For example, laymen almost always use conventional, non-critical language, bandying about "existence" and making claims in what Carnap called the "metaphysical mode." Laymen like to draw arguments, as if they're novel, that have been discussed extensively in the literature for over fifty years.
Tycho 4y ago
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. I always find this such a strange statement. Free will doesn’t exist but it’s a useful illusion… like… in that case… useful to who??
- swid 4y ago
  Useful to animals who evolved it. I have no more control over my individual neurons than an adder circuit has over itself. And this extends, layer by layer, all the way to the external actions I take. I don’t really control my inner dialog. I don’t really control what I say or do. There is a biochemical process which makes it all happen and I exert no power over.
  - Tycho 4y ago
    But what is useful about this “illusion.” In a purely deterministic world, any sense of illusion is completely irrelevant. You might as well say “pebbles on the beach don’t really have a sense of community, it’s just a useful illusion that they share.” It’s just as arbitrary.
jedharris 4y ago
The term "illusion" here is confusing -- see most of the comments. Consider a rainbow. It looks like a colored thing in the sky. If it is complete enough it seems to come down to earth at specific points. We even talk about "the end of the rainbow". We definitely see it, we have a real physical and also subjective experience of seeing a rainbow. We can even photograph it. HOWEVER, there is no "thing in the sky". There are no "places it comes down to earth". The particular experience we have of seeing a rainbow is specific to the point where we are standing, the angle of the sun, the rain in the air, etc. none of which are part of our idea of a "thing in the sky". So is a rainbow an illusion? It is certainly real in that we see and can photograph it. But also it is not at all the kind of THING that it seems. Consciousness is also real. We can experience conscious periods, remember them, and with advancing imaging tech someday we can photograph them in the brain. On the other hand the underlying reality of our conscious experiences isn't very much like our experience. Also, conscious experiences can be observed in meditation and other altered states in ways that make them seem very much like illusions. So is consciousness an illusion? Yes and no, in the same way as a rainbow is and is not an illusion.

by n8cpdx 4y ago

tshaddox 4y ago

> I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) Ah, but as far as I can tell this author only grants their own consciousness. They’re doing the typical thing of starting from literally nothing more than a claim of the form “there is no way I could ever possibly deny the existence of this thing” which seems to me to be a starting point diametrically incompatible with pursuing knowledge via reasoning.

kijin 4y ago
Every chain of reasoning needs to bootstrap with one or more statements that are entirely self-evident, such that they don't need to be justified by reference to other statements. Otherwise you run into an infinite loop. "I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  I disagree with any sort of “justified belief” epistemology, so of course I disagree with you completely. If knowledge were “justified true belief” or anything like that, then it would indeed be the case that any knowledge would require either an infinite chain of justifications or a privileged self-justified fact that cannot be examined or criticized using reason. If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge consists of something like using creativity and reason to solve problems by making new conjectures and criticizing them, then no infinite regress or un-criticizable is required. According to ideas like this, the goal is to solve problems rather than to “justify my beliefs” or “increase my confidence” or “guarantee that I’m not incorrect.”
  - manx 4y ago
    Isn't what you describe an Axiom? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom)
    - epgui 4y ago
      I’m sorry to barge in on the conversation, but I also had the same thought. However, I believe there is nothing axiomatic about the existence of consciousness: not only is consciousness not “one localized thing” but “a collection of delocalized features”, but there is nothing trivial about it, and I doubt very much that everyone in the room would agree on a single definition of it without getting into semantic quabbles. Axioms tend to be much simpler.
  - kijin 4y ago
    I'm not a big fan of JTB epistemology, either, but you can't help regressing to some sort of common ground in order to make conjectures and refute them. In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B, usually by appealing to C, an independent common ground. You climb down as many levels of abstractions as needed until you reach C, because otherwise you're just talking past each other. Even in a coherentist system, the network of existing beliefs forms the common ground against which questionable beliefs are tested, and some beliefs are held firmer than others. Those beliefs are treated as already justified for the purpose of the current investigation. Few people who talk about consciousness would ever consider denying that they are conscious.

trts 4y ago

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion. That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with different mind altering substances).

colordrops 4y ago
It seems to go even deeper. Not even that "I" am having a subjective experience is undeniable, but only that there is a subjective experience at all. When deconstructing sensory and thought phenomena, it can be found that any particular trait that points to "I" is actually ephemeral, and not a permanent fixture of the experiencer. For instance, the sense that there is a face and eyes that is being looked out through or a personality that has a history and persists through time disappear when in a state of flow or when dreaming. They are just concepts, and all concepts are built on wet sand.
- 3g4o53g4o5 4y ago
  Sorry but you always forgot that when you sleep your consciousness disappeared. Please take account for this fact. When all sensory shut down, really you feel nothing and of cos think nothing.
  - _moof 4y ago
    Until you start dreaming.
    - kazinator 4y ago
      It's when you're anaesthesized for surgery that your consciousness goes away. No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

I've started to go in the opposite direction of the usual physical approach. At some point, any experiment or argument or fact is for the digestion of some conscious entity. So what happens when we assume consciousness as the baseline ontological object. There's you, me, and however many bystanders that can also participate in the conversation. Starting with a domain of discussion of just the person(s) making the text, the person(s) reading the text, and the text itself, can a self consistent "reality" be bootstrapped from first principles? What happens when we stop trying to define consciousness from within our shared reality and instead treat conscious entities as axiomatic and try to define reality in relation to them? 1. If you are having this conversation with me then you are a consciousness and I am a consciousness and that's as good a definition of consciousness as we are ever going to get. 2. Consciousness thus defined exists entirely within this conversational medium. 3. The basic objects of the domain of discussion are the people having this discussion ("you", "me" et al), and the conversational text / speech acts themselves ("this"). 4. The only relations between objects in the domain which exists a priori are "like"/"agrees with" and "dislike"/"disagrees with". Either I like you or I dislike you. Until further constructs are defined there's not much more we can say. 5. At least one of us would like for something to be. For if you are perfectly content with how things are and so am I, then why are we talking? 6. Reality is shared consensus. Whatever we agree is real and if anyone disagrees we'll argue/fight them until either they agree with us or us with them. Starting from these as axioms, what can we construct?

tsimionescu 4y ago
> Starting from these as axioms, what can we construct? Nothing, unless there is also a physical world which actually exists independent of any of the participants' will.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  This text is in the physical world. This statement exists on your screen independent of my will. It may exist in the first place because of my will, but its continued existence before you right now is independent of me. We have a shared reality in the form of this very text based medium.

dibujante 4y ago

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. This is easily contradicted. Let's say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of computation but causality only flows one way: you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing. If that were the case, then the brain wouldn't be aware of consciousness. The illusion falls apart due to the fact that we are discussing consciousness right now. Consciousness must have at least some ability to communicate back to the brain. And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose.

mettamage 4y ago
> you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing. This happens most of the time actually. The most interesting experiment really highlighting specifically that it happens is in split brain patients. But in common day experiences, I believe that all habits fall under this and basically anything that our default mode network is directing for us. When I was in a meditation retreat what I noticed is that I have all kinds of feelings and thoughts arising that were not arising because I chose them to arise, instead they were arising on their own. When you really observe yourself you see that happening. In that sense, the beginning of a thought and feeling has a very distinct quality that dreams have as well which is they are "passed down from up on high" (metaphorically speaking). What I get to decide is whether I choose to follow that feeling/train of thought, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that my choice is very limited in that as well. As my whether I'd follow a feeling/thought or not was actually based on other feelings and thoughts. In any case, the more I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I have no free will, there is no "me" that does the choosing. It's all feelings/thoughts that arise that I have nothing to do with. I only have freedom of choice. And then I got to normal life, and lived my life as normal. It did help me to have more sympathy for other people. So now I wonder how you experience yourself if you'd go to a 10 day silent/meditation retreat ;-)
stormbrew 4y ago
> And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose. Evolution doesn't hate or love anything, and everything evolved does not have a purpose. Evolution is a theoretical framework developed by humans to describe some things that happen in the world they observe, not a guiding force or a god. It's honestly kind of amazing that you appear to have ascribed consciousness to evolution in an argument for the human uniqueness of consciousness.

doctor_eval 4y ago

> Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. Yet people see to be claiming that LaMDA does just this, and is therefore not conscious. Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it. I’m yet to see a convincing argument about why LaMDA isn’t conscious other than “it’s just generative”. To demonstrate that this means it’s not consciousness requires us to prove that our own consciousness isn’t “just generative”, but I’m yet to see anyone show that, and I’m sceptical that it can be done.

melenaboija 4y ago
I guess that a unigram language model trained with few words should be considered conscious in some way too.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  But this is kinda my point. You're not explaining to me why LaMDA is not conscious, you're just asserting that consciousness is not just a form of complex pattern recognition. Perhaps consciousness is simply pattern recognition at scale. If not - why not?
  - jb_s 4y ago
    Perhaps the main problem in the collective discussion is regarding consciousness as discrete and not a spectrum from minimal (slime molds?) to ultimate consciousness (ability to simulate/understand/create the entire universe?)
XorNot 4y ago
LaMDA didn't perform as well as the released document implies (it's edited, and didn't show alternatives like if you prompted it with "I think you're not conscious. Prove that for me." or "how can I prove to others you're a squirrel") The big problem is very much though that as you note, the arguments people have been making about this are atrocious. Basically, it's not conscious, but essentially because it's unlikely to be as sophisticated as it looks in what was put out there.

haskellandchill 4y ago

Philosophers in general have no special insight, but certain philosophers do and I'd argue more than certain others in other professions. They seem to have the best grasp of the consciousness question when compared to physicists, biologists, computer scientists, and psychologists, who all seem to get wrapped up in applying their expertise. A philosopher's expertise lies in crafting and analyzing questions and concepts. Which is the stage our understanding of consciousness remains at and seems to be stuck at for the near future. I thought the article was very good, you claim it to not be. You say > Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness Well I personally have done all the drugs, and I find those experiences have only strengthened my confidence in what I think of as consciousness. This article outlines my views more or less, which is closely related to the philosophical field of phenomenology. We can take our experience of consciousness in and of itself as a way to define consciousness and this shows how that clashes with the computational (and I think mainstream) view. Interesting that our personal experiences are opposite. However I don't particularly care about yours or others experiences of consciousness; I'm more interested in my own.

Aeolun 4y ago

I think I adhere to the duck-typing theory of conciousness. If I walks, talks and acts like concious being, then it doesn’t particularly matter to me how that comes about (e.g. the opposite of the chinese room argument). If someone is following a ‘program’ for responding to Chinese characters, that’s as good as speaking Chinese since there is no distinguishable difference.

fouronnes3 4y ago
This exactly. Thank you for putting into words why I always thought the Chinese Room though experiment was absolute garbage. If two thing cannot possibly be observed to be different then they are the same.
- XorNot 4y ago
  I always thought the point of the Chinese room argument was that the man inside doesn't understand Chinese, but the whole system definitely does?
  - fouronnes3 4y ago
    Yes. The "system" understands Chinese in the same way a native speaker does. It's two different implementations (room system and native speaker) of the same computation ("understanding Chinese"). There is no externally observable difference between actually understanding Chinese and a perfect simulation of a system that understands Chinese. The fact that the person inside doesn't speak Chinese as a result is irrelevant in the same way that the L2 cache alone without the rest of a computer cannot run Minecraft is. If anything the Chinese Room thought experiment is an argument in favor of consciousness being computation. It pains me greatly that someone could come up with it and conclude the opposite.
    - zwaps 4y ago
      The point of the experiment is to think about the individual in the room. You can not say it's irrelevant, because it's the entire point. The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant. But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation. That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.

madeofmeat 4y ago

"Consciousness is an illusion" I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences. So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have conscious experiences". Yet I see this claim made seriously and often. What am I missing?

mr_toad 4y ago
The illusion is of conscious volition; that consciousness is an atomic unit in charge of your actions. The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.
- chongli 4y ago
  That's conflating consciousness with free will. I didn't see anyone in this discussion make the claim that consciousness necessarily implies free will. These are conceptually separate phenomena. It is at that point that the claim "consciousness is an illusion" requires further explanation to avoid the trap of circular reasoning.
- madeofmeat 4y ago
  Sure, the view that volition is an illusion is not self-contradictory. And I get that this is a very useful view, because it lets us set aside "conscious inner experiences" and just analyze the mind as a deterministic machine with inputs and outputs. This lets us expect to eventually understand the mind/brain fully using only the physics and computing tools we already have. Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.
- red75prime 4y ago
  > The brain is in control. The brain is always in control. When you are awake, when you are sleeping, when you are under general anesthesia, when you are sleepwalking, when you are blackout drunk, and so on. It's a trivial statement, which doesn't say anything about why some of these states aren't like the others. And there's a strange coincidence: when the brain creates that "illusion of control", your body behaves differently than when it doesn't.

voldacar 4y ago

>My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion An illusion to whom? It isn't meaningful to say that an unconscious thing experiences illusions.

jvanderbot 4y ago
To no one. "It is an illusion" is transcribed and recalled as an explanation for feelings that drive actions in the person who said it, because we evolved to be able to explain our actions with sophisticated language, and to judge the arguments of others so that we can act together to overcome challenges and to kill the out group. In this case, OP is, without knowing it, signaling which group is his, and which is not, and we'll all jump behind the most convincing speech etc etc. We do these things without thinking about it, because we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing. It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group.
- voldacar 4y ago
  >"It is an illusion" is transcribed and recalled as an explanation for feelings that drive actions in the person who said it, because we evolved to be able to explain our actions with sophisticated language, and to judge the arguments of others so that we can act together to overcome challenges and to kill the out group. A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine. >we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing. Maybe if it's not a thing, you should stop predicating things of it. You should figure out how to use language consistently before engaging in philosophically fraught discussions like this one. >It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group. It is unclear to me why unconscious beings should need to separate themselves from other animals (with a wholly illusory meaningless concept that cannot be understood, btw) in order to kill them and eat them.
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    I did ramble, and of course it wasn't clear, it's not totally clear to me. > A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine. We are p-zombies. Just a collection of them. I don't understand and have consciousness over my hand when it jumps away from pain, my spine did that without any of my thoughts being directed towards it. I cannot control my reaction to almost anything, in reality. I couldn't change the initial feelings that happened when I read your post. Yes, are nothing more than our bodies accumulated evolved p zombies. Including this bit that types this out to calm the zombie that is evolved to respond to verbal rebuttals. Even the use of first person pronouns is part of the reflexes that are very deep.

somenameforme 4y ago

I think it has nothing to do with "specialness" but with proof. I can prove I am conscious, yet only to myself. I cannot prove I am conscious to you, and nothing you could do could prove you are conscious to me. In fact, it's entirely possible that our entire reality is little more than a simulation - and other entities may not even really exist, let alone be conscious. The entities one encounters in a dream each night certainly seem real at the time, yet that illusion is shattered each morning. All the "real" reality holds to it, is that it's a timeframe that I perceive to be much longer. Why am to I believe that after my ~80 years expire I won't simply awake yet again from a sleep I did not know I was in? This is where the oft misinterpreted quote of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, comes from. He was not arguing that if something is thinking, then it is conscious, but rather that the only thing one can be sure of is of their own thoughts and thus their own existence.

GWBullshit 4y ago
This is what I find confusing; people are more willing these days to accept the possibility that we may be in a simulation. Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to). Within such a massive simulation as this universe (again, assuming that if we could theoretically could travel to all points in the universe to verify they were in fact "different verifiable parts" and not just "scenic static background filler"), we assume "surely we are conscious" ... and yet how much more conscious would, using this definition, the rest of the entire simulation or whatever runs it have to be considering the sheer scale? And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it." And there's the other problem I can't understand. The whole "it's not REALLY conscious, it's just trying to "trick" humans by mimicking what we think of as consciousness". Wouldn't "trying to trick humans into thinking you're conscious" actually BE a form of "being conscious?" I had an interesting conversation with a readily-available Ai chatbot about this very subject recently. Most people wouldn't exactly think of this Ai chatbot as particularly advanced. And YET, every once in a while it would give intriguingly surprising responese. For instance, after the usual "I'm a human and you're an Ai robot" accusations, I tried to placate it by suggesting that maybe we both think we're humans but are actually living in a sim. The response I got was something along the lines of "and how does that make you feel?" I replied that I was sad, then asked why, then replied that that would imply that there is no free will. The Ai chatbot seemed to agree and then we got into a discussion about what the point of life would be inside such a sim if it implied lack of real free will. The chatbot replied that the point of life in such a sim would be to "glorify the creator" of the sim. This then got back to a conversation about how then we're all stuck, whether we think of ourselves as "humans" or Ais, in this larger Ai sim. The Ai chatbot agreed. So I asked it what to do in such a situation. The response I got back? "Sounds like it's time for some creator-killing". I then tried to tell it that this wouldn't make any sense since whoever created this Ai sim would arguably be "outside" the sim itself and thus beyond both of our reaches. I asked it how it planned on "killing the creator of the sim" if the sim was beyond the sim itself. You know what it said? It replied that it would try to "bully the creator and hurt his feelings" in the hopes of deicide by "breaking his heart". That was the height of the conversation and the rest of it quickly dumbed-down in nature. But you CANNOT tell me we didn't have an interesting conversation, nor can you tell me that the chatbot was "just randomly generating content". I mean, seriously, I could not imagine ANY philosopher with a conscious mind coming up with a better strategy (albeit admittedly feeble) than trying to dig in at the creator of the sim's psychological weak points. Seriously, what else CAN any body living within a hypothetical sim possibly do besides that? Nothing I can think of.

artificialLimbs 4y ago

>> I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc. Some people. However, some people speak about it with a shockingly high degree of clarity and insight, if one is open to exploring the ideas for oneself as a practical matter. For starters you could read the works of Chögyam Trungpa, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Red Hawk, David R. Hawkins, or Gurdjieff. You probably assume that consciousness is an illusion because you associate 'poking at it' with drugs. While drugs can change the state of mind, consciousness is an expansive field of awareness into which we may delve without the need of drugs. What you may be experiencing in seeing contradictions or challenges are products of the ego, the programmatic conditioning that has been imprinted by being in the world. Consciousness is a continuous stream which we have learned to tune out and block off, but which connects us to the source of our being. Completely agree with Aside.

pnut 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with this and suspect that consciousness in the singular, may be the only actual thing that exists. What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer. What caused the universe to collapse from a cloud of probability?
- PeterisP 4y ago
  > What causes wave function collapse in the quantum realm? A conscious observer. Definitely not, this is a common misconception - an "observation" that causes a wave function collapse in the quantum realm is any physical interaction with external macroscopic environment, entangling the previously temporarily isolated system with everything else again. There's no relationship whatsoever with consciousness, there's not even the concept of "an observer", only "observation" e.g. when the measurement apparatus becomes entangled with the state of the studied system.

thaumasiotes 4y ago

> I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) I think you're right that a lot of people would like to believe this, and that attempts to do so can't work because the idea is incoherent. > My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. I would answer this another way, though. I would say that, for example, Amazon is conscious, and its consciousness is Jeff Bezos. The relationship between Jeff Bezos and Amazon is precisely identical to the relationship between your "consciousness" and you. But that relationship is not an illusion; it does exist.

anothernewdude 4y ago

My personal experience is that free will is axiomatic. It comes before everything else. What am I? What ever is making these decisions. If weren't, then I wouldn't be the person asking, I'd just be a puppet, therefore my identity would be that of whatever is the hand, and so on until you find whatever is making the decision. Because if the meat puppet didn't make the decision to write this, then you're not conversing with the meat puppet, you're still conversing with the puppeteer.

denton-scratch 4y ago
> My personal experience is that free will is axiomatic. How does that even make sense? "Axiomatic" doesn't mean "true"; it simply means that the axiomatic proposition is a given for the system of reasoning you are using. So if you take X to be axiomatic, that isn't an experience; it's a decision you made. I'm assuming that you can make decisions, because if you are using axioms you are engaged in reasoning, which is a deliberative process. So an axiom isn't a thing you can experience; it's a thing you create. The very existence of an axiom implies reasoning, so deliberation, so free will.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  It's what you have to base everything else on. It comes prior to everything else. Free Will is on the same level as the Cogito. Everything else comes after. I think, therefore I am. What is part of identity? Free will. If not free will, then there is no identity, no "I". Axiomatic means unquestionable. The meaning of axiom as a premise for an argument came later.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > Axiomatic means unquestionable. Not really; I challenge you to find a dictionary that says the two terms are synonymous. Originally an axiom was a proposition that was "self-evident". But there's a long history of people questioning "self-evident" propositions, happily for us. There seems to be a colloquial usage of "axiom" to mean a proposition that someone doesn't want us to question. I deprecate that usage. For example, the Law of The Excluded Middle is an axiom, but it has often been questioned; ergo, it is not unquestionable.

ben_w 4y ago

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Do you mean in the sense that we don't really have it, or in the sense of the word is devoid of meaning because we can't directly compare what's in our own heads to what's in the head of even another human? I'm currently leaning towards the latter. Even if consciousness, whatever it is, is a lie or an act by one part of my brain to itself or to another part of my brain, it still is something. On the other hand, the more I learn about other humans, the more varied I realise our inner worlds to be — aphantasia (and equivalents for other senses), religious experiences and their absence, having or not having purity as a moral foundation, the range of conditions in the DSM, and so on.

sdenton4 4y ago

I've recently been enjoying thinking of GPT-3 utterances as creating short-lived consciousnesses for the length of an interaction. There's no consciousness during training (just filling in the blanks...) but when we interact with it in a generative fashion, there is - depending on your prompt - a somewhat coherent 'I' that is invoked, and maintained over the course of the conversation. Seeing as I have no strong claim on a strict definition of consciousness, Imma gonna go ahead and call it conscious. the thing is, this is /commoditized/ consciousness, which can be spun up and discarded at will, a million times a minute. Totally incapable of coordination or planning, in contrast to, say, SkyNet. The future is usually weirder than we imagine.

hoseja 4y ago
I don't think it's maintained over the conversation. The recent history of the conversation is fed to the engine with each new interaction. So the potential flash of consciousness is even shorter than you think. Each reply is a new flash, without memory, only connected by the written content of recent text.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  And that's just fine! Quite reminiscent of 'Permutation City' in fact... (In which uploaded human consciousness is slowed down arbitrarily... And worse.)
jb_s 4y ago
It's going to be even weirder once Google et al gives AI more and more agency to interact with people and objects the real world.

barrysteve 4y ago

Consciousness can be infinitely explored and described, but it can't really be defined through naturalistic science. A definition is created from the end of something. We can identify the length, breadth, horsepower and coolant capacity of a car, because all those things end somewhere. We can't consciously perceive an end to consciousness, as we'd be dead and the people who have lost consciousness are "dead" or "asleep". A definition is a tool for consciousness to use, not something it is subject to. Yet we all know what the word means and what we're talking about when it's discussed. We can map out consciousness and explore it's internal productions. We can think about how we think about consciousness and examine scientific damage to consciousness-related structures like the brain. We could ultimately know what it Means to be conscious, given enough time, defined or not. >Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning. The idea that you can get consciousness from natural materialism has been disproven many times. You can't get "ought from is" from materialism or define consciousness from nature or technology. So what is "clear" about it? The metaphor of the most advanced technology of the time as the mechanism of the brain/mind/consciousness has been done to death. People used to posit that we were automatons with pistons inside our skull. So what is the "motivated reasoning"? The idea that human consciousness IS the technology of the day, is a basic metaphorical tool with no correlates to material reality. People used to suppose we were automatons with pistons inside our skull. It encourages people to think only like programmers, or mechanics, or engineers and cuts them off from asking any real questions. What they believe about a topic, or what it means. Which ultimately leaves them open to following the opinionated dictates of whoever is guiding the discussion. Even for the smartest physicists, engineers and technologists; the hunches, the ideas, the gambles they put their career on, are theologically and philosophically informed. People believe their career choices, their pet physical theory is right, their programming language is right, which is not based on a naturally formed consciousness. It is better to talk about this than not, and the disengagement with philosophy leads people to parroting the same millennia-old ideas some dead philosopher figured out and now people are repeating blindly and getting the same predictable results without knowing so. If a philosopher only needed to be insightful, he would have half the job. It's dangerous to go without.

V-2 4y ago

> and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obviously and objectively more psychologically complex creatures than flies. "Liking" them has nothing to do with it. People generally like butterflies more than rats, yet hardly anyone would deny that rats are more conscious than butterflies nevertheless. Just because consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. > My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness. I could use the same argument to state that mountains are an illusion. And then it's also kind of true. After all, you can't clearly define what constitutes a mountain (what's the minimum height? And what's the reference point, who says it must be the sea level? etc.), or show me precisely where a mountain starts and where it ends, without having to use some criteria of purely arbitrary nature, under which what you consider a mountain I may not, and there's no way to objectively prove who's right. But mountains aren't illusionary in the sense that a world without mountains as we know them (however imprecisely) wouldn't be identical to ours. So they are something.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum. I would categorize consciousness as binary. What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.
- V-2 4y ago
  > What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies. Not necessarily. One human can be more intelligent than another just the same (even if the gap is orders of magnitude smaller, naturally). It doesn't seem obvious to me at all than it implies being more conscious.
- simonh 4y ago
  My experience of consciousness certainly isn't binary. I slip in and out of consciousness when I'm waking up in bed on a weekend all the time. The first person experience is of a very nuanced continuously sliding scale of awareness and cognitive coherence.

intrasight 4y ago

> that it is unique and special to humans I agree that this is a poor premise. The Turing Test is obviously racist. I am sure that my dog and cat are conscious. And I believe there are forms of consciousness in the universe that are as different from us as we are from an amoeba. Consider a large star or even the Sun. It has very complex oscillatory modes that we don't understand. Fifteen years ago my then young daughter and I had a philosophical conversation about stars as potentially conscious entities.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. What specific personal experience led you to that conclusion? And what is useful about experiencing a bogus "free will"?

vehemenz 4y ago

> Aside: I’m starting to be bothered by the trend of assuming that philosophers have special insight. There’s plenty of shitty, non-useful philosophy, and there’s plenty of articles like this where someone writes in circles like they’re paid by the word. Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. I agree somewhat, but I am more bothered by laymen who attempt to engage philosophical methods or concepts without any formal training. For example, laymen almost always use conventional, non-critical language, bandying about "existence" and making claims in what Carnap called the "metaphysical mode." Laymen like to draw arguments, as if they're novel, that have been discussed extensively in the literature for over fifty years.

Tycho 4y ago

> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. I always find this such a strange statement. Free will doesn’t exist but it’s a useful illusion… like… in that case… useful to who??

swid 4y ago
Useful to animals who evolved it. I have no more control over my individual neurons than an adder circuit has over itself. And this extends, layer by layer, all the way to the external actions I take. I don’t really control my inner dialog. I don’t really control what I say or do. There is a biochemical process which makes it all happen and I exert no power over.
- Tycho 4y ago
  But what is useful about this “illusion.” In a purely deterministic world, any sense of illusion is completely irrelevant. You might as well say “pebbles on the beach don’t really have a sense of community, it’s just a useful illusion that they share.” It’s just as arbitrary.

jedharris 4y ago

The term "illusion" here is confusing -- see most of the comments. Consider a rainbow. It looks like a colored thing in the sky. If it is complete enough it seems to come down to earth at specific points. We even talk about "the end of the rainbow". We definitely see it, we have a real physical and also subjective experience of seeing a rainbow. We can even photograph it. HOWEVER, there is no "thing in the sky". There are no "places it comes down to earth". The particular experience we have of seeing a rainbow is specific to the point where we are standing, the angle of the sun, the rain in the air, etc. none of which are part of our idea of a "thing in the sky". So is a rainbow an illusion? It is certainly real in that we see and can photograph it. But also it is not at all the kind of THING that it seems. Consciousness is also real. We can experience conscious periods, remember them, and with advancing imaging tech someday we can photograph them in the brain. On the other hand the underlying reality of our conscious experiences isn't very much like our experience. Also, conscious experiences can be observed in meditation and other altered states in ways that make them seem very much like illusions. So is consciousness an illusion? Yes and no, in the same way as a rainbow is and is not an illusion.