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Exactly (and cannot recommend Blindsight highly enough). Of course DALL-E is a Chinese Room. The most exciting and subversive idea in Blindsight is that conscio

by doph 4y ago

Exactly (and cannot recommend Blindsight highly enough). Of course DALL-E is a Chinese Room. The most exciting and subversive idea in Blindsight is that consciousness is maladaptive, and the scramblers are _more_ fit for the lack of it. Long after neutral nets have surpassed our functional intelligence, we'll still be criticizing their ability to navel-gaze as well as humans.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
Of course, DALL-E can only get away with not being introspective because it has reinforcement learning holding its hand. Bit harder to curate a clean training set without consciousness. Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but it's important to also consider how evolution provides for us as well by giving us neural structures already tuned for things like recognizing faces and recognizing danger. I do wonder how much realtime danger analysis has to do with consciousness.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    I'd doubt it has much of a connection. Consciousness can do many things, but generally not quickly.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      Hmm. I'd say subconscious might get you away from immediate danger, but it's often a conscious decision to anticipate future danger based on past events, and this feedback loop is sometimes quite small, such as deciding which path to take while being pursued.
      - salawat 4y ago
        I'm reminded of a meme... >Giant robot pilot looking smug Caption: I am a genius! Picture break: >same robot pilot now looking horrified. >Caption: Oh no! I can tell you right frigging now, the average person is trained through education to build up confidence they know what they are doing, then over the next decade plus face-checked against reality to build an aversion/paranoia matrix. The modern world is essentially orchestrated by people who build self-sustaining support structures of specialists. We've done a great job at building co-dependent specialists, but a terrible one at building generalists.
- TrevorJ 4y ago
  Reinforcement learning is the thing that integrates the network across time though. In one sense, I think it's doing at least part of the job that consciousness does: mediating between memory(past) and the present.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Yes, it's just that because it's an external process, DALL-E can't go meta on it like we can. So you won't ever get "appearance of consciousness" out of a process that depends on RL, imo, because you've located part of its cognition outside its brain and made it intermittent.
fatherzine 4y ago
Consciousness is very much adaptive, though it requires a sense of the metaphysical / transcendent to behave in that way. Theologically speaking, God brings Life and the Devil brings Death. Sadly, our modern brave new world has taken "Gott ist Tot" as a triumphalist proclamation, and not the lamentation it was meant to be.
- kebman 4y ago
  But Sontag suggests the use of Batailleist `powerful communication’ to modify and read consciousness. The subject is contextualised into a predialectic nationalism that includes language as a totality.
  - fatherzine 4y ago
    Hi there GPT-3 bot. Edit. Don't really want to be unnecessarily flippant here. Perhaps this is a real person attempting to communicate. Sadly, I was unable to follow through, the text jumps wildly between seemingly unrelated subjects.
    - kebman 4y ago
      Nope, that was actually the Postmodern Generator.^[1] But nice try! ;) [1]: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
      - fatherzine 4y ago
        Haha, <fist bump>.
- wpietri 4y ago
  It's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear. E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago. But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-babel https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba... And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

by doph 4y ago

FeepingCreature 4y ago

Of course, DALL-E can only get away with not being introspective because it has reinforcement learning holding its hand. Bit harder to curate a clean training set without consciousness. Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.

soulofmischief 4y ago
I get what you're saying, but it's important to also consider how evolution provides for us as well by giving us neural structures already tuned for things like recognizing faces and recognizing danger. I do wonder how much realtime danger analysis has to do with consciousness.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  I'd doubt it has much of a connection. Consciousness can do many things, but generally not quickly.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Hmm. I'd say subconscious might get you away from immediate danger, but it's often a conscious decision to anticipate future danger based on past events, and this feedback loop is sometimes quite small, such as deciding which path to take while being pursued.
    - salawat 4y ago
      I'm reminded of a meme... >Giant robot pilot looking smug Caption: I am a genius! Picture break: >same robot pilot now looking horrified. >Caption: Oh no! I can tell you right frigging now, the average person is trained through education to build up confidence they know what they are doing, then over the next decade plus face-checked against reality to build an aversion/paranoia matrix. The modern world is essentially orchestrated by people who build self-sustaining support structures of specialists. We've done a great job at building co-dependent specialists, but a terrible one at building generalists.
TrevorJ 4y ago
Reinforcement learning is the thing that integrates the network across time though. In one sense, I think it's doing at least part of the job that consciousness does: mediating between memory(past) and the present.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Yes, it's just that because it's an external process, DALL-E can't go meta on it like we can. So you won't ever get "appearance of consciousness" out of a process that depends on RL, imo, because you've located part of its cognition outside its brain and made it intermittent.

fatherzine 4y ago

Consciousness is very much adaptive, though it requires a sense of the metaphysical / transcendent to behave in that way. Theologically speaking, God brings Life and the Devil brings Death. Sadly, our modern brave new world has taken "Gott ist Tot" as a triumphalist proclamation, and not the lamentation it was meant to be.

kebman 4y ago
But Sontag suggests the use of Batailleist `powerful communication’ to modify and read consciousness. The subject is contextualised into a predialectic nationalism that includes language as a totality.
- fatherzine 4y ago
  Hi there GPT-3 bot. Edit. Don't really want to be unnecessarily flippant here. Perhaps this is a real person attempting to communicate. Sadly, I was unable to follow through, the text jumps wildly between seemingly unrelated subjects.
  - kebman 4y ago
    Nope, that was actually the Postmodern Generator.^[1] But nice try! ;) [1]: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
    - fatherzine 4y ago
      Haha, <fist bump>.
wpietri 4y ago
It's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear. E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago. But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-babel https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba... And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]