10 ms·

Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interes

by hsn915 4y ago

Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. There's no reason to expect that a certain type of circuit produces consciousness unless of you have a model of consciousness that allows for certain properties to cause it. But there's no such model. The only thing there is is our brains. You just think that since the brain is doing computations and the brain is conscious, therefore consciousness is a computation.

vbezhenar 4y ago
How do you know that? Lamda AI claims itself as conscious being. How can you distinguish between two entities which can communicate? Do you discriminate on meat factor?
- simonh 4y ago
  You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. I can write a one line program that claims to be conscious right now. Lamda and GTP-3 are amazing achievements, but they're still just chat bots that look good when they're being lobbed softball questions. If you ask something that maps to the input texts they're trained on you get credible looking responses, but critical or adversarial questioning very easily exposes how shallow these things are.
  - eru 4y ago
    Turing's original paper is worth a read here. He already pre-empted a lot of the objections back then. You are right that Turing's original test is much harder than just passing a few shallow softball questions. See https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 for the original paper. However, I do count responding well to softball questions as important markers of our progress. Ten years ago, no one was able to pass even this mark. (And from a commercial point of view, good enough 'understanding' and responses might be good enough for many tasks. For example, I am a native German speaker, but I found that Google Translate often already does a better job of translating English to German than I could do, unless I spent unreasonable amounts of time on the task. At the moment the most efficient way for me to produce a translation is to let Google Translate do the work, and then proof-read to spot cases were the machine didn't have enough context to resolve an ambiguity the right way.)
    - janekm 4y ago
      You might like to try out GPT-3 (seems access is widely available now) for translation some time, it's remarkably good, better than myself (well my German is pretty rusty) and I think much better than Google Translate... (Basically just write a prompt like "translate the following to German/Chinese/Whatever:")
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    The same reasoning could be applied to many people. You wouldn't deny their consciousness on that ground. The issue with general AI is like issue with chess. People are not happy when robot can win some games. People can only accept that robot really plays chess, when robot defeated best of the best. General AI is the same. Looking like some guy is not enough. You need to reason better than smartest human on the planet, only then people will admit that general AI is there. That's a high bar. You can definitely talk someone to agree that he's not conscious using some logic tricks. Not everyone, for sure, but someone who may be doesn't really care that much about that concept. You also can tune AI so it'll not agree that he's unconscious no matter what. What I'm trying to deliver is that there's no easy border which can divide conscious from unconscious. The only border was Turing test and robots passed it. Now you can test whether that particular robot talks like a very smart person, etc. But you can't distinguish bot from some random not-so-smart person.
    - simonh 4y ago
      This line of reasoning reduces to the philosophical zombie argument. It's true I can't prove to you that I have a first person experience of the world, but it doesn't therefore follow that anything that makes that claim does have such an experience. For myself I'm satisfied that, when questioned thoroughly, these models fail so completely and utterly and their output is so ludicrously nonsensical that I don't see how their behaviour can be consistent with consciousness, as I understand it. It's not just that the output is incoherent, but it's the ways that they fail too. Do I completely understand consciousness? No, but that doesn't mean these things are conscious either.
      - akimball 4y ago
        People frequently output ludicrous nonsense. Does this disqualify their consciousness?
        simonh 4y ago
        No it doesn't. So what？We have this exact problem to deal with when people suffer brain damage. To what extent are they conscious, or still people? Yet we do come to medical conclusions on that question. There's always a degree of uncertainty, but you still have to make the call based on the information you have. The information I have indicates to me with a very high probability, in my estimation, that these things are not conscious.
  - akimball 4y ago
    I can also get Daniel Dennett to agree that he is not conscious.
  - hsn915 4y ago
    > You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. Careful about how you word this. Only a conscious being can agree that is not conscious. I think you mean you can get the program to output text that proclaims its lack of consciousness.
- hsn915 4y ago
  > Do you discriminate on meat factor? Yes.
  - simonh 4y ago
    So does Searle actually. He thinks there is something special about biological systems. In fact I think he basically considers himself a materialist, but I think that's part of where he gets tangled up in his own arguments.
    - hsn915 4y ago
      I don't think that meat is the deciding factor. I simply don't know what the deciding factor is, but only animals seem to have consciousness. I say "seem" but only in a philosophical sense. Of course we can't really tell if an animal is really feeling things or is just and advanced robot/zombie with no internal experience. It's just that given what we know about the world and ourselves, it seems absurd that only I have internal experience, so unless I want to be overy hubristic, I must grant that other people have it too. Since other people have it too, there's no reason to think that animals don't have them. Plants on the other hand are very different kinds of biological machines, so we can't really say anything about them. It's possible that other kinds of entities can have self awareness, and it should be obvious that some kind of computation is a pre-requisite for that, but it also seems absurd to assume that it is sufficient.
- josefx 4y ago
  Did it? Or did it just reply to a question that already implied that it was a conscious being? Will it respond the same to a query implying otherwise? As far as I understand we cannot even trust the published chat since it was "cleaned up" for better reading.
tsimionescu 4y ago
> Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with DNA). In contrast, non-computational physical processes are following the laws of physics which are not encoded anywhere. A simple way to test this difference is to check whether there is some way, at least in principle, to get the computer to perform a different computation. For a cell, we have successfully done this: change the DNA, and the output changes, without affecting the computer itself. With a system simply evolving according to physical laws there is no way to change its behavior. At best, you can claim that the universe itself is a computer, and all fields/particles are the symbols that it is manipulating (the laws of physics being then part of the internal implementation, akin to microcode in a CPU).
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  How do you know the rules of physics aren't encoded anywhere? Clearly they have to be defined somewhere - or at least somehow - or they wouldn't be rules. They may not defined anywhere we can access, never mind change. But that's a different problem.
  - iainmerrick 4y ago
    You're paraphrasing the last paragraph of the parent.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Sure, we can't discount that possibility. But, as far as we know, the laws of physics are not encoded anywhere, they just exist in an abstract sense. This is similar to the axioms of, say, Euclidean geometry: they exist, but are not part of the system that they "govern", circles and squares don't contain the laws that define them.
- hsn915 4y ago
  > This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with DNA). 1) No. The rules are just physics. Electric signals going through physical material. 2) Why is this event relevant? I can say the same about water pipes in a sweage system . The way the water moves through pipes is encoded in the design and connections of the pipes. You can inspect it to figure out how it behaves. I've yet to see a model of consciousness that does not imply that the sewage system is conscious.
kazinator 4y ago
> There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers There is no reason to expect a neuron to be aware that it's propagating part of the evolution of an epiphany.
- hsn915 4y ago
  I suppose your argument is, consciousness on the system level does not require individual parts to be conscious. So let me expand a bit of why I used the adder circuit as an example. There's nothing about addition that can say "this is addition" in an objective sense. We are dealing with binary encoding of numbers. There's nearly an infinite number of ways to encode information. The design of any circuit deals with particular encoding of information. This extends all the way up to the higher levels. There are an infinite number of ways to encode the state of a go board. Any AI that plays go will deal with some specific ways of encoding the state of the board, and that will be both its input and output. The most popular "intuitive" model of how consciousness arises is basically hand waving about a system inspecting itself. But you have to understand, a system inspecting its own state is not any different from a system inspecting any other arbitrary state. For the state of the system will be encoded in some way that was chosen arbitrarily. There's nothing essential about any encoding of any state that can possibly give raise to a phenomenon like consciousness. You can come study the behavior of any arbitrary system, given certain inputs and outputs, and assign any meaning you want to its states. You can retro-fit any intepretation of state to the system. Because the thing is with encoding information is it can be completely arbitrary. I can interpret the state [01010101] to be my username, and then interpret [1111000111] to be my real life name. This would allow me to say that a system that takes 01010101 as input and produces 1111000111 is actually a system that can derive my real life name from my username.
  - simonh 4y ago
    >You can come study the behavior of any arbitrary system, given certain inputs and outputs, and assign any meaning you want to its states. You can retro-fit any intepretation of state to the system. All you are saying here is that no external interpretation of a system can experience the consciousness of a system, if it is conscious. Yes, that is correct. No matter how thoroughly I scan and analyse your brain state I can't use that to demonstrate your internal experience, so why would we expect that to be true of any other form of consciousness? I'm going out of sequence with your comment here but: >But you have to understand, a system inspecting its own state is not any different from a system inspecting any other arbitrary state. For the state of the system will be encoded in some way that was chosen arbitrarily. There's nothing essential about any encoding of any state that can possibly give raise to a phenomenon like consciousness. I don't see how you can possibly demonstrate that, you're just essentially saying materialism is wrong 'because'. From my perspective in a sense yes, you're right, it's all just information processing of a particular kind. There's no magic. If you're looking for a special genie in an AI, or a human brain, that makes it conscious I don't think you'll find one. It's all just stuff. But then, I'm a materialist so I don't see that as being a problem.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
The argument seems to be that beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness. Clearly it's unlikely this is a hard cut off. Adding one more byte of RAM, expanding the CPU from 64 to 128-bit words, or adding another dimension to a neural network isn't going to do it. But if consciousness emergent, how do you measure the amount of consciousness? Because the experience is subjective, you can't just assume that behaviours that appear conscious are proof that consciousness exists. You could - presumably - build a Turing bot, but it would still be an automaton. So you're left with people making very definitive statements about something which everyone experiences, but no one can measure or even define.
- simonh 4y ago
  >beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness Right, that's the argument, but I don't believe this at all. Consciousness is a computation therefore all computations are conscious. That doesn't follow. In any other philosophical or scientific discourse that sort of naive conceptual inversion would be laughed out of the room. Horses are animals therefore animals are all horses. It's absurd. Personally I think consciousness arises out of reflection on an internal model of one's own thought processes and behaviour. See Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I see no reason why a system like that wouldn't be tractable to computation.
  - aneil 4y ago
    You could execute a loop that reflects on an internal model using pen and paper. Is that system conscious? Imagine only one computational step of that loop happening everyday. Does qualia arise from that? What is detecting that that one step is part of a larger series of steps that can be considered a computation? What provides the continuity? This is why the strange loop idea implemented using traditional computation doesn't make sense to me.
    - simonh 4y ago
      That's just a restating of the Chinese room argument. Like Searle you're bamboozling yourself with scale. If I was put in a magnetic field of some kind that slowed down my physical and neurological processes by 1000x would I be any less conscious? Would I be any less a human being? It would seem so to people observing me for sure, but would it change my essential nature?
seanwilson 4y ago
> There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. What about an AI that creates models of what humans are thinking to predict their behaviour, and is able to turn this upon itself (i.e. theory of mind)? Is there a story somewhere following this idea as a justification for why humans might have consciousness?
- js8 4y ago
  I think there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
  - sitkack 4y ago
    I could listen to Hofstadter forever. Perhaps consciousness is just a byproduct of our ability to anticipate the outcomes of our decisions and reflect on the decisions we have made (that itself is a whole other ball of wax [1]). Consciousness is a sort of neuroreflective Narcissus, we end up navel gazing at our own existence as a mind in the universe. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/
gfodor 4y ago
It’s hard to ignore the fact that physical dynamics in the brain tightly correspond to qualia. There almost certainly is a connection between the computation going on in the brain and the experience of qualia - the question is more about the direction of causality.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  Since we can alter, temporarily suspend or stop qualia with various physical and chemical alterations to the brain, the direction of causality is quite clear.
  - gfodor 4y ago
    It becomes less clear when you consider theories like the “user interface” theory of reality by Donald Hoffman. The tl;dr is under that model the chemical and physical alterations we undertake are perceptual models far removed from the nature of underlying reality, and so causality is less obvious with regards to how much those chemicals being administered are determined upstream. “The case against reality” is a book with the longer form of this.
vidarh 4y ago
Without an understanding of what consciousness is, there is also no reason to expect an implementation of an adder to not have some subjective experience. We simply do not know. Formulating this is terms of what there is "no reason to expect" simply obscures that we do not know by glossing over that we have no reason to expect pretty much any other explanation either, because we have pretty much nothing to go on.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  > Without an understanding of what consciousness is, there is also no reason to expect an implementation of an adder to not have some subjective experience. I don't think we need to understand what consciousness is, but rather define what it is that we want to talk about. The english word "consciousness" is a sloppy catch-all for a bunch of experiential phenomena including things like self-awareness (only marginally more specific!), qualia, etc. However, even without a rigorous definition (make up 10 new words if current ones don't cover it), it seems the core of what most people mean when they say "consciousness" has an introspective aspect to it - what something "feels like", which requires some perceptive/analytic machinery to be put to use. You can feel anything without using a "feeler". So, with that said, it seems pretty clear than things like thermostats and adder circuits are not conscious in the slightest since they neither have the feedback paths nor feedback-directed perceptual and analytical machinery that would be required. OTOH it's perhaps not so absurd to consider that something with an architecture like GPT-3 might be a "tiny bit conscious" since it DOES have some of those necessary architectural/functional abilities. Of course many people will ridicule any such suggestion due to their own emotional investment. If people don't feel comfortable with the idea of a machine being conscious under any circumstance, then they are necessarily going to refute it in the case of today's simplistic "AI" architectures.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    I feel you're falling in exactly the same trap as the article of assuming that the "feeling" is a property of the analytical machinery of our brains rather than gaining it's perceived complexity as an effect of being combined with that while being separate. It seems wildly presumptuous to assume that lack of ability to communicate some level of awareness necessarily implies the awareness itself is lacking. It could be, but we don't know, because we don't know what lies at the core of the subjective experience. We don't even have a way of assessing what has and does not have consciousness.
mistermann 4y ago
While I agree with parts of this, there are others that I can't resist critiquing: > Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. -- > The only thing there is is our brains. You just think that since the brain is doing computations and the brain is conscious, therefore consciousness is a computation. I think we have to be very careful when we are using consciousness itself to contemplate consciousness. In this case, what you are referring to is not the mind and consciousness themselves, but rather your ~conscious (subconscious + conscious) model of them. It is certainly possible that "all there is is the brain", but this is not known - absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, but it is not proof of absence. You (or more precisely, your consciousness, and that of many other consciousnesses, which affect yours and your model of reality) think that what you say is true, but it is currently speculative, necessarily.
feet 4y ago
The adder circuit doesn't have other circuits that allow the whole to understand what its parts are doing Our brain does

by hsn915 4y ago

vbezhenar 4y ago

How do you know that? Lamda AI claims itself as conscious being. How can you distinguish between two entities which can communicate? Do you discriminate on meat factor?

simonh 4y ago
You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. I can write a one line program that claims to be conscious right now. Lamda and GTP-3 are amazing achievements, but they're still just chat bots that look good when they're being lobbed softball questions. If you ask something that maps to the input texts they're trained on you get credible looking responses, but critical or adversarial questioning very easily exposes how shallow these things are.
- eru 4y ago
  Turing's original paper is worth a read here. He already pre-empted a lot of the objections back then. You are right that Turing's original test is much harder than just passing a few shallow softball questions. See https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 for the original paper. However, I do count responding well to softball questions as important markers of our progress. Ten years ago, no one was able to pass even this mark. (And from a commercial point of view, good enough 'understanding' and responses might be good enough for many tasks. For example, I am a native German speaker, but I found that Google Translate often already does a better job of translating English to German than I could do, unless I spent unreasonable amounts of time on the task. At the moment the most efficient way for me to produce a translation is to let Google Translate do the work, and then proof-read to spot cases were the machine didn't have enough context to resolve an ambiguity the right way.)
  - janekm 4y ago
    You might like to try out GPT-3 (seems access is widely available now) for translation some time, it's remarkably good, better than myself (well my German is pretty rusty) and I think much better than Google Translate... (Basically just write a prompt like "translate the following to German/Chinese/Whatever:")
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  The same reasoning could be applied to many people. You wouldn't deny their consciousness on that ground. The issue with general AI is like issue with chess. People are not happy when robot can win some games. People can only accept that robot really plays chess, when robot defeated best of the best. General AI is the same. Looking like some guy is not enough. You need to reason better than smartest human on the planet, only then people will admit that general AI is there. That's a high bar. You can definitely talk someone to agree that he's not conscious using some logic tricks. Not everyone, for sure, but someone who may be doesn't really care that much about that concept. You also can tune AI so it'll not agree that he's unconscious no matter what. What I'm trying to deliver is that there's no easy border which can divide conscious from unconscious. The only border was Turing test and robots passed it. Now you can test whether that particular robot talks like a very smart person, etc. But you can't distinguish bot from some random not-so-smart person.
  - simonh 4y ago
    This line of reasoning reduces to the philosophical zombie argument. It's true I can't prove to you that I have a first person experience of the world, but it doesn't therefore follow that anything that makes that claim does have such an experience. For myself I'm satisfied that, when questioned thoroughly, these models fail so completely and utterly and their output is so ludicrously nonsensical that I don't see how their behaviour can be consistent with consciousness, as I understand it. It's not just that the output is incoherent, but it's the ways that they fail too. Do I completely understand consciousness? No, but that doesn't mean these things are conscious either.
    - akimball 4y ago
      People frequently output ludicrous nonsense. Does this disqualify their consciousness?
      - simonh 4y ago
        No it doesn't. So what？We have this exact problem to deal with when people suffer brain damage. To what extent are they conscious, or still people? Yet we do come to medical conclusions on that question. There's always a degree of uncertainty, but you still have to make the call based on the information you have. The information I have indicates to me with a very high probability, in my estimation, that these things are not conscious.
- akimball 4y ago
  I can also get Daniel Dennett to agree that he is not conscious.
- hsn915 4y ago
  > You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. Careful about how you word this. Only a conscious being can agree that is not conscious. I think you mean you can get the program to output text that proclaims its lack of consciousness.
hsn915 4y ago
> Do you discriminate on meat factor? Yes.
- simonh 4y ago
  So does Searle actually. He thinks there is something special about biological systems. In fact I think he basically considers himself a materialist, but I think that's part of where he gets tangled up in his own arguments.
  - hsn915 4y ago
    I don't think that meat is the deciding factor. I simply don't know what the deciding factor is, but only animals seem to have consciousness. I say "seem" but only in a philosophical sense. Of course we can't really tell if an animal is really feeling things or is just and advanced robot/zombie with no internal experience. It's just that given what we know about the world and ourselves, it seems absurd that only I have internal experience, so unless I want to be overy hubristic, I must grant that other people have it too. Since other people have it too, there's no reason to think that animals don't have them. Plants on the other hand are very different kinds of biological machines, so we can't really say anything about them. It's possible that other kinds of entities can have self awareness, and it should be obvious that some kind of computation is a pre-requisite for that, but it also seems absurd to assume that it is sufficient.
josefx 4y ago
Did it? Or did it just reply to a question that already implied that it was a conscious being? Will it respond the same to a query implying otherwise? As far as I understand we cannot even trust the published chat since it was "cleaned up" for better reading.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with DNA). In contrast, non-computational physical processes are following the laws of physics which are not encoded anywhere. A simple way to test this difference is to check whether there is some way, at least in principle, to get the computer to perform a different computation. For a cell, we have successfully done this: change the DNA, and the output changes, without affecting the computer itself. With a system simply evolving according to physical laws there is no way to change its behavior. At best, you can claim that the universe itself is a computer, and all fields/particles are the symbols that it is manipulating (the laws of physics being then part of the internal implementation, akin to microcode in a CPU).

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
How do you know the rules of physics aren't encoded anywhere? Clearly they have to be defined somewhere - or at least somehow - or they wouldn't be rules. They may not defined anywhere we can access, never mind change. But that's a different problem.
- iainmerrick 4y ago
  You're paraphrasing the last paragraph of the parent.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Sure, we can't discount that possibility. But, as far as we know, the laws of physics are not encoded anywhere, they just exist in an abstract sense. This is similar to the axioms of, say, Euclidean geometry: they exist, but are not part of the system that they "govern", circles and squares don't contain the laws that define them.
hsn915 4y ago
> This is not true. Computing is a system where the physical hardware (the computer) is following rules that are explicitly encoded in itself - you can analyze the system and discover where and how the program it is following is encoded (as we did with DNA). 1) No. The rules are just physics. Electric signals going through physical material. 2) Why is this event relevant? I can say the same about water pipes in a sweage system . The way the water moves through pipes is encoded in the design and connections of the pipes. You can inspect it to figure out how it behaves. I've yet to see a model of consciousness that does not imply that the sewage system is conscious.

kazinator 4y ago

> There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers There is no reason to expect a neuron to be aware that it's propagating part of the evolution of an epiphany.

hsn915 4y ago
I suppose your argument is, consciousness on the system level does not require individual parts to be conscious. So let me expand a bit of why I used the adder circuit as an example. There's nothing about addition that can say "this is addition" in an objective sense. We are dealing with binary encoding of numbers. There's nearly an infinite number of ways to encode information. The design of any circuit deals with particular encoding of information. This extends all the way up to the higher levels. There are an infinite number of ways to encode the state of a go board. Any AI that plays go will deal with some specific ways of encoding the state of the board, and that will be both its input and output. The most popular "intuitive" model of how consciousness arises is basically hand waving about a system inspecting itself. But you have to understand, a system inspecting its own state is not any different from a system inspecting any other arbitrary state. For the state of the system will be encoded in some way that was chosen arbitrarily. There's nothing essential about any encoding of any state that can possibly give raise to a phenomenon like consciousness. You can come study the behavior of any arbitrary system, given certain inputs and outputs, and assign any meaning you want to its states. You can retro-fit any intepretation of state to the system. Because the thing is with encoding information is it can be completely arbitrary. I can interpret the state [01010101] to be my username, and then interpret [1111000111] to be my real life name. This would allow me to say that a system that takes 01010101 as input and produces 1111000111 is actually a system that can derive my real life name from my username.
- simonh 4y ago
  >You can come study the behavior of any arbitrary system, given certain inputs and outputs, and assign any meaning you want to its states. You can retro-fit any intepretation of state to the system. All you are saying here is that no external interpretation of a system can experience the consciousness of a system, if it is conscious. Yes, that is correct. No matter how thoroughly I scan and analyse your brain state I can't use that to demonstrate your internal experience, so why would we expect that to be true of any other form of consciousness? I'm going out of sequence with your comment here but: >But you have to understand, a system inspecting its own state is not any different from a system inspecting any other arbitrary state. For the state of the system will be encoded in some way that was chosen arbitrarily. There's nothing essential about any encoding of any state that can possibly give raise to a phenomenon like consciousness. I don't see how you can possibly demonstrate that, you're just essentially saying materialism is wrong 'because'. From my perspective in a sense yes, you're right, it's all just information processing of a particular kind. There's no magic. If you're looking for a special genie in an AI, or a human brain, that makes it conscious I don't think you'll find one. It's all just stuff. But then, I'm a materialist so I don't see that as being a problem.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago

The argument seems to be that beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness. Clearly it's unlikely this is a hard cut off. Adding one more byte of RAM, expanding the CPU from 64 to 128-bit words, or adding another dimension to a neural network isn't going to do it. But if consciousness emergent, how do you measure the amount of consciousness? Because the experience is subjective, you can't just assume that behaviours that appear conscious are proof that consciousness exists. You could - presumably - build a Turing bot, but it would still be an automaton. So you're left with people making very definitive statements about something which everyone experiences, but no one can measure or even define.

simonh 4y ago
>beyond a certain level of complexity you'll somehow automatically get consciousness Right, that's the argument, but I don't believe this at all. Consciousness is a computation therefore all computations are conscious. That doesn't follow. In any other philosophical or scientific discourse that sort of naive conceptual inversion would be laughed out of the room. Horses are animals therefore animals are all horses. It's absurd. Personally I think consciousness arises out of reflection on an internal model of one's own thought processes and behaviour. See Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I see no reason why a system like that wouldn't be tractable to computation.
- aneil 4y ago
  You could execute a loop that reflects on an internal model using pen and paper. Is that system conscious? Imagine only one computational step of that loop happening everyday. Does qualia arise from that? What is detecting that that one step is part of a larger series of steps that can be considered a computation? What provides the continuity? This is why the strange loop idea implemented using traditional computation doesn't make sense to me.
  - simonh 4y ago
    That's just a restating of the Chinese room argument. Like Searle you're bamboozling yourself with scale. If I was put in a magnetic field of some kind that slowed down my physical and neurological processes by 1000x would I be any less conscious? Would I be any less a human being? It would seem so to people observing me for sure, but would it change my essential nature?

seanwilson 4y ago

> There's no reason to expect an adder circuit to be aware that it's adding numbers. There's no reason to expect an implementation of AlphaGo to know that it's playing Go. This should be extendable without limitation. What about an AI that creates models of what humans are thinking to predict their behaviour, and is able to turn this upon itself (i.e. theory of mind)? Is there a story somewhere following this idea as a justification for why humans might have consciousness?

js8 4y ago
I think there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
- sitkack 4y ago
  I could listen to Hofstadter forever. Perhaps consciousness is just a byproduct of our ability to anticipate the outcomes of our decisions and reflect on the decisions we have made (that itself is a whole other ball of wax [1]). Consciousness is a sort of neuroreflective Narcissus, we end up navel gazing at our own existence as a mind in the universe. [1] https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ https://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/

gfodor 4y ago

It’s hard to ignore the fact that physical dynamics in the brain tightly correspond to qualia. There almost certainly is a connection between the computation going on in the brain and the experience of qualia - the question is more about the direction of causality.

PeterisP 4y ago
Since we can alter, temporarily suspend or stop qualia with various physical and chemical alterations to the brain, the direction of causality is quite clear.
- gfodor 4y ago
  It becomes less clear when you consider theories like the “user interface” theory of reality by Donald Hoffman. The tl;dr is under that model the chemical and physical alterations we undertake are perceptual models far removed from the nature of underlying reality, and so causality is less obvious with regards to how much those chemicals being administered are determined upstream. “The case against reality” is a book with the longer form of this.

vidarh 4y ago

Without an understanding of what consciousness is, there is also no reason to expect an implementation of an adder to not have some subjective experience. We simply do not know. Formulating this is terms of what there is "no reason to expect" simply obscures that we do not know by glossing over that we have no reason to expect pretty much any other explanation either, because we have pretty much nothing to go on.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
> Without an understanding of what consciousness is, there is also no reason to expect an implementation of an adder to not have some subjective experience. I don't think we need to understand what consciousness is, but rather define what it is that we want to talk about. The english word "consciousness" is a sloppy catch-all for a bunch of experiential phenomena including things like self-awareness (only marginally more specific!), qualia, etc. However, even without a rigorous definition (make up 10 new words if current ones don't cover it), it seems the core of what most people mean when they say "consciousness" has an introspective aspect to it - what something "feels like", which requires some perceptive/analytic machinery to be put to use. You can feel anything without using a "feeler". So, with that said, it seems pretty clear than things like thermostats and adder circuits are not conscious in the slightest since they neither have the feedback paths nor feedback-directed perceptual and analytical machinery that would be required. OTOH it's perhaps not so absurd to consider that something with an architecture like GPT-3 might be a "tiny bit conscious" since it DOES have some of those necessary architectural/functional abilities. Of course many people will ridicule any such suggestion due to their own emotional investment. If people don't feel comfortable with the idea of a machine being conscious under any circumstance, then they are necessarily going to refute it in the case of today's simplistic "AI" architectures.
- vidarh 4y ago
  I feel you're falling in exactly the same trap as the article of assuming that the "feeling" is a property of the analytical machinery of our brains rather than gaining it's perceived complexity as an effect of being combined with that while being separate. It seems wildly presumptuous to assume that lack of ability to communicate some level of awareness necessarily implies the awareness itself is lacking. It could be, but we don't know, because we don't know what lies at the core of the subjective experience. We don't even have a way of assessing what has and does not have consciousness.

mistermann 4y ago

While I agree with parts of this, there are others that I can't resist critiquing: > Computation does not have anything essential to it that makes it different from other "atoms jumping around" other than it produces outputs that we find interesting. -- > The only thing there is is our brains. You just think that since the brain is doing computations and the brain is conscious, therefore consciousness is a computation. I think we have to be very careful when we are using consciousness itself to contemplate consciousness. In this case, what you are referring to is not the mind and consciousness themselves, but rather your ~conscious (subconscious + conscious) model of them. It is certainly possible that "all there is is the brain", but this is not known - absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, but it is not proof of absence. You (or more precisely, your consciousness, and that of many other consciousnesses, which affect yours and your model of reality) think that what you say is true, but it is currently speculative, necessarily.

feet 4y ago

The adder circuit doesn't have other circuits that allow the whole to understand what its parts are doing Our brain does