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I don't think the undergrad math and statistics are really the problem. I think even if people understood the math, there would be some who questioned whether t
by abeppu 4y ago
I don't think the undergrad math and statistics are really the problem. I think even if people understood the math, there would be some who questioned whether there's something epiphenomenon arising from the math, because there are more fundamental issues. Students in philosophy of mind classes were confronting these issues long before the DL boom started, with the Chinese Room argument. I.e. even if we accept as premise that there's a pre-described and deterministic set of steps that gives rise to seemingly intelligent behavior, we can be divided over what properties to ascribe to that system. Does it "understand"? Is it "thinking"? Is it a "person"? Why?
- we've never settled on a definition of consciousness
- we don't understand how biological brains create qualia
- we're not entirely in agreement over when human biological brains stop having ethical standing
- we disagree about how necessary embodiment or the material world outside the brain is to "mind"
- we disagree on what ethical standing to give to non-human animals with biological brains
Because we know so little, perhaps the only people that can believe strongly that current ML models are conscious have embraced panpsychism. But also because we know so little, including _what consciousness is_, I also don't think one can be confident that no ML model today has any consciousness whatsoever.
Recently I was re-reading some Douglas Hofstadter and in Metamagical Themas he has a dialogue about the "Careenium" in which on different (time)scales a physical system of balls and barriers appears to have qualitatively different kinds of dynamics. Hofstadter earnestly wants to use this to explain how "I" can direct or constrain in a top-down way some of the physical mechanisms that make me up while at the same time in a bottom-up way they comprise and animate me. I don't know if it was intentional, but it seems awfully similar to a beer-can apparatus that Searle somewhat dismissively uses as example of a potential computing substrate which could surely never support a "mind" no matter how it is programmed.
Two academics, both well respected, both who spent decades thinking about the mind and how it comes to be and how we should think about it, and both used an inscrutable complex physical (non-biological) apparatus to make points which are diametrically opposed about how the mind arises from more or less specific physical conditions.
I have in mind a property fwomp which I can't clearly define. But I have fwomp, and I'm pretty sure you have fwomp. I don't know where fwomp comes from, how it works or what are the necessary conditions for its persistence. From the preceding sentences, can you know with certainty that U-Nets don't have fwomp?
- data_maan 4y agoWell, you could write down a model for the full interaction between synapses and probably endow the whole thing with an RL-like environment so that you can model the interactions. The solutions of the model would then represent pretty exactly what a conscious being would do. But it is hopeless to solve such a model, already writing it down would be a challenge. There is some work in this direction to find a meaningful model by Eliasmith.
- abeppu 4y agoI think we're missing each other. Whether you can write it down as a giant complex pile of more simple operations does not cut to the core issue: is consciousness a property of a computation which is present or not regardless of the physical substrate on which the computation happens, is consciousness a property of certain physical systems which isn't present even in extremely faithful computer simulations of those systems, or consciousness something else? (And how does ethical consideration of a system depend on consciousness?) A computer simulation of weather doesn't have the actual wetness of rain, no matter how detailed the simulation is. Addition can be present in a 4th-grader doing arithmetic, an abacus, an analogue computer or an electronic computer, even if they have different limitations on the size of numbers they can handle, at what speed, etc. I'm going to ignore the 'full interaction between synapses' part b/c we don't know what kind of detail is needed for a computer model to capture the behavior of a conscious being. But the point is -- if you _had_ such a model, and could run it forward, people would still be divided as to whether it was actually conscious or not, because the basic properties of consciousness are not settled.
- data_maan 4y agoOk, I see the point you wanted to make. You ask "is consciousness a property of certain physical systems which isn't present even in extremely faithful computer simulations of those systems, or consciousness something else?" and later say "if you _had_ such a model, and could run it forward, people would still be divided as to whether it was actually conscious or not". It seems to me that you thereby answer your first question with "no", as it seems that for you, by the last sentence, consciousness is a metaphysical property... Which I would be fine with: I think we will only know more once we have an entity that looks and acts humanly (so there is reason to suppose consciousness might exist in it) and then try to understand its formal, inner workings and compare it to the human brain. No matter the outcome, it will be very interesting.