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People say this a lot online in this kind of debate but you can see which areas of the brain light up in people who are conscious and how that’s different from

People say this a lot online in this kind of debate but you can see which areas of the brain light up in people who are conscious and how that’s different from people who are asleep or in a persistent vegetative state. We have a very good idea of what consciousness is and it’s definitely not linear neural net with a discrete input and output. Having said that, the nerve that connects the eye to the brain could be considered similar to a modern neural net. It looks like we’re beginning to get the building blocks of consciousness together. But we don’t yet know how to combine the wave functions into a chorus necessary to achieve GI

stormbrew 4y ago
I think you're using a different meaning of the word conscious than the GP? You seem to be talking about awake, they're talking about a much more abstract idea. A person who is sleeping or in a vegetative state is not currently getting new inputs fed into some parts of their brain, so it's not surprising that their brain "lights up differently," nor does it imply anything about a piece of software that is getting new inputs that might be being integrated into its model (of course, a model that is trained and then repeatedly used without further integration is not in any way comparable to a brain). This more abstract idea of consciousness is definitely not a solved problem - people can't even manage to agree on whether non-human animals have it. And a lot of internet arguments for why this or that neural network can't be conscious probably also rule 5 year olds out of it too.
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benlivengood 4y ago
We have fairly good ways of detecting human consciousness now, but not a lot of understanding of why physically or precisely which neural circuits produce conscious experience, which is the understanding we'd need to infer what sort of conscious experience is possible for ML models. We also can't reliably detect or predict whether a given animal is conscious or not (related to the problem of minimal viable neurons required for consciousness), and this is the biggest evidence I have that our study of consciousness is far from complete. The best we can do with humans (and maybe animals) is behaviorism and inference on our own personal consciousness at this point, with brain imaging to demonstrate at least gross prediction of consciousness in humans.
visarga 4y ago
> consciousness is definitely not linear neural net with a discrete input and output Just neural circuits are not going to be conscious by themselves, for one they need to learn concepts from the environment and those concepts shape the neural circuits. Thus the way they act shape how they develop. You can't separate consciousness from the environment where it develops. In other words it was not the neural net that was lacking, but the environment.

stormbrew 4y ago

I think you're using a different meaning of the word conscious than the GP? You seem to be talking about awake, they're talking about a much more abstract idea. A person who is sleeping or in a vegetative state is not currently getting new inputs fed into some parts of their brain, so it's not surprising that their brain "lights up differently," nor does it imply anything about a piece of software that is getting new inputs that might be being integrated into its model (of course, a model that is trained and then repeatedly used without further integration is not in any way comparable to a brain). This more abstract idea of consciousness is definitely not a solved problem - people can't even manage to agree on whether non-human animals have it. And a lot of internet arguments for why this or that neural network can't be conscious probably also rule 5 year olds out of it too.

deleted 4y ago
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benlivengood 4y ago

We have fairly good ways of detecting human consciousness now, but not a lot of understanding of why physically or precisely which neural circuits produce conscious experience, which is the understanding we'd need to infer what sort of conscious experience is possible for ML models. We also can't reliably detect or predict whether a given animal is conscious or not (related to the problem of minimal viable neurons required for consciousness), and this is the biggest evidence I have that our study of consciousness is far from complete. The best we can do with humans (and maybe animals) is behaviorism and inference on our own personal consciousness at this point, with brain imaging to demonstrate at least gross prediction of consciousness in humans.

visarga 4y ago

> consciousness is definitely not linear neural net with a discrete input and output Just neural circuits are not going to be conscious by themselves, for one they need to learn concepts from the environment and those concepts shape the neural circuits. Thus the way they act shape how they develop. You can't separate consciousness from the environment where it develops. In other words it was not the neural net that was lacking, but the environment.