2 ms·

Looking at things like anaesthetics, psychedilic drugs, delerium, sleep, etc, there seems to be plenty of evidence that the phenomena of consciousness is relate

Looking at things like anaesthetics, psychedilic drugs, delerium, sleep, etc, there seems to be plenty of evidence that the phenomena of consciousness is related to the mechanics of the brain. There's also the interesting medical condition of "blindsight", caused by a specific type of brain damage, where the patient reports no conscious awareness of being able to see (they think they are blind), yet are able to competently complete tasks requiring vision (such as navigating a cluttered corridor). In other words. It's hard to imagine more direct proof of consciousness being related to brain connectivity. I didn't say anything about ability to communicate about awareness, just the need for the brain to sense it (and therefore have introspective awareness of it). As the blindsight example shows, you can't have visual consciousness if you damage the feedback paths that make that possible.

vidarh 4y ago
> I didn't say anything about ability to communicate about awareness, just the need for the brain to sense it (and therefore have introspective awareness of it) The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability to interrogate that entity about it. We have no other way of measuring this; we don't even know what we'd need to measure. We can measure brain activity and reason about a brains ability to regain an ability to function and communicate with us and reason, but that measures reasoning capacity, not subjective experience. As such we don't know whether something has a subjective experience of some form - however simple - or not without being able to measure it. For what we know subjective experience is an inherent property of energy and matter, and everything has it, just at a too limited level to be able to reason about it or communicate about it. I've explicitly avoided the use consciousness, because consciousness is used in the article for the combination of reasoning and qualia. I've also avoided the term qualia itself because even that is in some conceptions "too high level". The point is that the article tried to dismiss the notion that the "spark" of qualia on the low level or consciousness at a high level can come from something simpler, and that we're just unaware of it because we can't measure or recognise it. We have nothing to go on to say whether or not there's a fundamental difference between the awareness of a doorknob and a brain; we can say with some level of certainty that there is a difference in the sense that a brain has the complexity to reason about that awareness. Note that I'm not saying this is true, merely that we don't know, because we don't know what causes the subjective experience, what is is, how to measure it. I'm also not suggesting that even if this is true that this means a doorknob is able to think "I think, therefore I am" or have any kind of reasoning capacity at all. To use software as an example. If I program a simulation of a doorknob and a simulation of a brain, we don't know if either or both or neither will have any kind of subjective experience. If the subjective experience is down to complexity, the brain might (and the article would be wrong). If the subjective experience is down to some specific arrangement of matter, it's likely neither will (but depending on the criteria, it's possible there are arrangements which could have awareness that we wouldn't recognise). If the subjective experience is an inherent property of energy or matter we don't know how to recognise, it's possible both does, but only the brain simulation will have the complexity and reasoning capability to be able to recognise itself as a self-aware entity and reason about it and tell us about it. The doorknob will be dim and unthinking whether it has the smallest little flicker of subjective experience or not. I'm inclined to think that the subjective experience is a property requiring complexity, but I'm fully aware (hah!) that this is an assumption, and an entirely untested one that we don't even know how to begin testing. > There's also the interesting medical condition of "blindsight", caused by a specific type of brain damage, where the patient reports no conscious awareness of being able to see (they think they are blind), yet are able to competently complete tasks requiring vision (such as navigating a cluttered corridor). In other words. It's hard to imagine more direct proof of consciousness being related to brain connectivity. You're missing the point. It is clear that an ability to reason is tied to the structure of the brain. Nobody here is suggesting e.g. an adder circuit can reason. Again, there is a reason I keep talking about a subjective experience and "some level of awareness". Blindsight, severed brain stems, or e.g. less obscure conditions such as aphantasia (which I have) can tell us interesting things about how decoupled our subjective experience is from our conscious reasoning (e.g. despite not being able to "see" things for my minds eye, I can "visually reason" about them just fine - I know what things, even things I imagine that has never existed, would look like but I can't see them), but they tell us nothing about whether or not removing the reasoning ability entirely removes awareness or just removes the ability to reason about and communicate about the subjective experience. We have no way of testing that, because relying on the feedback of a conscious entity with the ability to reason and communicate is our only current way of assessing self awareness and subjective experience given that we don't know what the subjective experience is. And given that this is subject to self-reporting by an entity we can't independently verify, we can't even tell if people other than ourselves have that subjective experience or are just reasoning machines acting as if they do. I can probably convince you that I have a subjective experience, but you have no way of proving that I do. We choose to act on the assumption that everyone does because it's the only reasonable assumption in most circumstances - if I went around questioning if everyone I met were "NPC's" it'd wreak havoc on ethics for example. Absent evidence they are NPCs we need to treat people as self-aware, conscious entities. But it remains an assumption that we at present have no way of testing, and might well never find a way to test, and when trying to talk about the nature of consciousness, like the article does, being aware that it is merely an assumption becomes material to the argument.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  > The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability to interrogate that entity about it. We have no other way of measuring this; we don't even know what we'd need to measure. You can't have any subjective experience of something unless that something exists in the first place, so interrogating about "how does it feel" seems rather secondary, as well as not being proof of anything. If LaMBDA says it's conscious, is that all the proof you want? Let's also note that IF we knew, for sure, that the bag of subjective phenomena we're calling "consciousness" is nothing more than an emergent experience based on a sensory/cognitive apparatus having access to it's own internal states, then it would be pretty clear what type of animals/systems are likely have this (and which ones certainly not), since without any sensory/cognitive apparatus it could not exist. It then would seem very likely that the guy in the next cubicle is conscious since he has the same brain architecture as us, and most animals too, unless you get down to the level of insects and below in terms of complexity of nervous systems. So, your assertion that the only way to assess whether something is conscious is to interrogate it, rests entirely on the above being incorrect and consciousness being some mystical/dualistic phenomena who's existence we can't deduce from a functional analysis of the "brain" of the thing in question. You may still be correct in a round about sort of way since I doubt most people will accept that AIs could be conscious until such things exist, and are common enough that people can spend considerable time interacting with them, and through the unreliable measure of interrogation eventually convince themselves that "yeah, well, I suppose it might be .. is does SEEM to be ..". It seems long due really ... first we had people denying Copernicus, then Darwin, and perhaps this will be the final step in people eventually accepting that there's really nothing much special about humans at all. Who knows, maybe we're too dumb as a species to realize it, and it'll be some more advanced future species writing textbooks about the odd beliefs of homo sapiens at this "emerging intelligence" phase of evolution.

vidarh 4y ago

> I didn't say anything about ability to communicate about awareness, just the need for the brain to sense it (and therefore have introspective awareness of it) The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability to interrogate that entity about it. We have no other way of measuring this; we don't even know what we'd need to measure. We can measure brain activity and reason about a brains ability to regain an ability to function and communicate with us and reason, but that measures reasoning capacity, not subjective experience. As such we don't know whether something has a subjective experience of some form - however simple - or not without being able to measure it. For what we know subjective experience is an inherent property of energy and matter, and everything has it, just at a too limited level to be able to reason about it or communicate about it. I've explicitly avoided the use consciousness, because consciousness is used in the article for the combination of reasoning and qualia. I've also avoided the term qualia itself because even that is in some conceptions "too high level". The point is that the article tried to dismiss the notion that the "spark" of qualia on the low level or consciousness at a high level can come from something simpler, and that we're just unaware of it because we can't measure or recognise it. We have nothing to go on to say whether or not there's a fundamental difference between the awareness of a doorknob and a brain; we can say with some level of certainty that there is a difference in the sense that a brain has the complexity to reason about that awareness. Note that I'm not saying this is true, merely that we don't know, because we don't know what causes the subjective experience, what is is, how to measure it. I'm also not suggesting that even if this is true that this means a doorknob is able to think "I think, therefore I am" or have any kind of reasoning capacity at all. To use software as an example. If I program a simulation of a doorknob and a simulation of a brain, we don't know if either or both or neither will have any kind of subjective experience. If the subjective experience is down to complexity, the brain might (and the article would be wrong). If the subjective experience is down to some specific arrangement of matter, it's likely neither will (but depending on the criteria, it's possible there are arrangements which could have awareness that we wouldn't recognise). If the subjective experience is an inherent property of energy or matter we don't know how to recognise, it's possible both does, but only the brain simulation will have the complexity and reasoning capability to be able to recognise itself as a self-aware entity and reason about it and tell us about it. The doorknob will be dim and unthinking whether it has the smallest little flicker of subjective experience or not. I'm inclined to think that the subjective experience is a property requiring complexity, but I'm fully aware (hah!) that this is an assumption, and an entirely untested one that we don't even know how to begin testing. > There's also the interesting medical condition of "blindsight", caused by a specific type of brain damage, where the patient reports no conscious awareness of being able to see (they think they are blind), yet are able to competently complete tasks requiring vision (such as navigating a cluttered corridor). In other words. It's hard to imagine more direct proof of consciousness being related to brain connectivity. You're missing the point. It is clear that an ability to reason is tied to the structure of the brain. Nobody here is suggesting e.g. an adder circuit can reason. Again, there is a reason I keep talking about a subjective experience and "some level of awareness". Blindsight, severed brain stems, or e.g. less obscure conditions such as aphantasia (which I have) can tell us interesting things about how decoupled our subjective experience is from our conscious reasoning (e.g. despite not being able to "see" things for my minds eye, I can "visually reason" about them just fine - I know what things, even things I imagine that has never existed, would look like but I can't see them), but they tell us nothing about whether or not removing the reasoning ability entirely removes awareness or just removes the ability to reason about and communicate about the subjective experience. We have no way of testing that, because relying on the feedback of a conscious entity with the ability to reason and communicate is our only current way of assessing self awareness and subjective experience given that we don't know what the subjective experience is. And given that this is subject to self-reporting by an entity we can't independently verify, we can't even tell if people other than ourselves have that subjective experience or are just reasoning machines acting as if they do. I can probably convince you that I have a subjective experience, but you have no way of proving that I do. We choose to act on the assumption that everyone does because it's the only reasonable assumption in most circumstances - if I went around questioning if everyone I met were "NPC's" it'd wreak havoc on ethics for example. Absent evidence they are NPCs we need to treat people as self-aware, conscious entities. But it remains an assumption that we at present have no way of testing, and might well never find a way to test, and when trying to talk about the nature of consciousness, like the article does, being aware that it is merely an assumption becomes material to the argument.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
> The point is that our ability to recognise whether or not an entity has some level of awareness or subjective experience is entirely dependent on our ability to interrogate that entity about it. We have no other way of measuring this; we don't even know what we'd need to measure. You can't have any subjective experience of something unless that something exists in the first place, so interrogating about "how does it feel" seems rather secondary, as well as not being proof of anything. If LaMBDA says it's conscious, is that all the proof you want? Let's also note that IF we knew, for sure, that the bag of subjective phenomena we're calling "consciousness" is nothing more than an emergent experience based on a sensory/cognitive apparatus having access to it's own internal states, then it would be pretty clear what type of animals/systems are likely have this (and which ones certainly not), since without any sensory/cognitive apparatus it could not exist. It then would seem very likely that the guy in the next cubicle is conscious since he has the same brain architecture as us, and most animals too, unless you get down to the level of insects and below in terms of complexity of nervous systems. So, your assertion that the only way to assess whether something is conscious is to interrogate it, rests entirely on the above being incorrect and consciousness being some mystical/dualistic phenomena who's existence we can't deduce from a functional analysis of the "brain" of the thing in question. You may still be correct in a round about sort of way since I doubt most people will accept that AIs could be conscious until such things exist, and are common enough that people can spend considerable time interacting with them, and through the unreliable measure of interrogation eventually convince themselves that "yeah, well, I suppose it might be .. is does SEEM to be ..". It seems long due really ... first we had people denying Copernicus, then Darwin, and perhaps this will be the final step in people eventually accepting that there's really nothing much special about humans at all. Who knows, maybe we're too dumb as a species to realize it, and it'll be some more advanced future species writing textbooks about the odd beliefs of homo sapiens at this "emerging intelligence" phase of evolution.