6 ms·

Consciousness begins with feeling, not thinking

30 points by bundie 4y ago

wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
It's kinda wild people think consciousness can arise from automated statistical analysis. But then again at times at uni I also thought statistics was magic. So who knows.
- tough 4y ago
  Anything seems like magic when you really don't understand it. Magic === Wildcard for unknown stuff I can't imagine or fathom
- anonzzzies 4y ago
  Kind of wild that, although there is no definition or even a way of coherently describing consciousness, that you can say with certainty it’s not emergent from automated statistical analysis.
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    Kind of wild, that you pose such a thing without making any arguments for it because it fits your view of thinking. Many animals clearly have consciousness but no ability to reason complex thoughts, as well as never in history did there emerge consioussness from an excel sheet. But billions and billions of conciousness emerged out of organic matter.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  What processes beyond automated statistical analysis do you consider your brain to have?
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    You are arguing a feature of the brain or maybe conciousness is also it's creating factor of conciousness?
    - Aardwolf 4y ago
      I'm not sure I fully understand the question... Regarding my own post above, I think your original post means a statistical process like machine learning isn't sufficient to create consciousness. So that would imply, given that humans do have consciousness, there must be something more going on in the brain. But I don't easily see what more could be going on in it (but would love to know, if anything, what it is).
      - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
        Im saying complex predictions is a feature of certain beings with consciousness. There are also beings, young animals and young kids, with consciousness who have less good prediction capabilities. Why do you, and many other people assume a feature is a creating factor? I can walk, does that make me human? I have empathy does that empathy create consciousness? I feel anger does that create consciousness? If you prick me do I not bleed?
- psiops 4y ago
  There are arguments to be made that the brain is essentially a prediction engine, constantly making predictions about what is going to happen next based on previous data. This you could call statistical analysis.
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    That idea makes absolutely no sense. Just because it's a skill of the human brain doesn't mean it's a creating factor for consciousness. It's very common to project the concept of a computer on a brain's instead of realizing that we as humans created a computer to mimmic and assist our brain and we just created a very useful brain enhancement. There is no precedent or data to suggest that it creates concioussness. Looking at animals & humans conscioussness emerged out of organic matter, not out of complex reasoning.
  - cortic 4y ago
    And the prediction engine, trying to predict what other humans will do; Creates predictive models we call personas. Eventually we turn this inward to create a personal persona we perceive as consciousness. I frankly don't like this definition, but it does make a great deal of sense.
nobodyandproud 4y ago
This isn’t new, but I’m glad to see this in HN. I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time (fun to think about when bored and in long drives). Some things I feel are needed, but much are out of my technical expertise. - Modeling of basic emotions. - Priority override and ranking, as emotions aren’t a single state. - Instinctive/pre-determined/trigger actions based on basic emotions. - Heartbeat trigger to continue to drive actions (boredom). - Thought along with external input as feedback (recurrent network) to update emotional state. Edit: I’m sure someone will pick this apart as a juvenile effort, but this topic is the most fun to think about as it crosses multiple disciplines.
Pigalowda 4y ago
The sensorium has long been considered an extremely important part of consciousness. Sensory deprivation studies show that. To recreate animal consciousness I think we would need an entity that can sense its surrounding environment and make alterations/adjustments in response to external stimuli. Organizationally the various cortices receive these afferent inputs from tertiary/quaternary neurons with pathways which run from sensory organs, to spine, usually to thalamus, then to cortex. From what I understand the cortex then deciphers the data and sends it to frontal cortex for interpretation. Not always true though, some of the pathways bypass the frontal cortex and go to deep brain structures (basal ganglia, thalamus, etc) to create subconscious movement. Such as ducking or dodging when dangerous stimuli are seen/heard or removing body part from heat damage. Anyways, I learned that all of these pathways activated by stimuli lead to consciousness -which is an emergent property of the organization and flow of information. If our large neural nets can be organized like a human brain - and have data storage like the hippocampus - maybe animal like consciousness can emerge. I’d prefer animal over what eventually may occur. Some trapped pretend servile AGI with completely inhuman ways of effectuating change in what environments it has access to. Who knows how to anticipate and interpret what it could be doing? If it’s animal like maybe it would be easier to understand and interpret - and befriend.
isaacfrond 4y ago
I've always thought of feeling as a low-resolution language. Anything you can feel you can express in words. But not the other way around.
- mistercow 4y ago
  Can you? You can label feelings and hope that other people mean the same thing when you say those labels. You can relate them to common experiences and hope other people have had similar reactions. But I often self-examine on emotional experiences which I can only gesture at verbally, with low confidence that I would be able to express them to someone who hadn’t experienced the same thing.
- MattPalmer1086 4y ago
  The fact you can describe almost anything in words is because that is what language is for. A representation of something is not the thing itself though. Unless you are also claiming that words describing a picture are a picture, and words describing an elephant are an elephant.
bondarchuk 4y ago
>Our account of consciousness addresses the hard problem and proposes a candidate mechanism to account for conscious experiences. So what is their solution? Simply saying 'consciousness is caused by feelings' just leaves us with an equally intractable "hard problem of feelings".
- mistercow 4y ago
  Which is already basically the statement of the hard problem of consciousness in the first place: why do we have qualia?
  - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
    It's a hard problem because we assume based upon our materialistic view that is's an emerging factor of our brain. Yet in our experience it's the essence of who we are. So based upon our Western view of the world it's merely a side effect. Based upon our experience it's the core factor of our being. Without experience there is nothing experienced there is meaning without it. That's the misalignment most people are struggling with.
  - taneq 4y ago
    We don’t. Or rather, there’s nothing more special about what it’s like to be a bat than there is about what it’s like to be a combine harvester. Qualia are just our perceptions of our perceptions.
- taneq 4y ago
  If you don’t define your terms then you’re not even wrong by definition.
aatd86 4y ago
If the body is simply a data processing machine, data which is acquired via our keen or not so keen senses, why does the article ends up concluding that AIs are not conscious? They are not as conscious as we are perhaps, the same way a mole isn't as conscious as we are. On top of it, adding modes to an AI would make it more conscious. The only difference is self-agency. It's embedded into us via the dopaminergic circuitry. Current AIs are merely acting on human directions. They are piggy-backing on that dopaminergic circuitry to start and act. They don't start acting on their own unless prompted. Now, why do humans do anything would be a question... Why do cells, mollecules, atoms etc do anything. My hunch is that the governing principle is maximization of potential energy. It requires increasingly stable structures. That would drive existence and consciousness would just be an emerging quality of the interactions that occur when trying to maximize potential energy. That's also why I don't understand how some AI researchers cannot be at the very least wary of what a self-agent, unaligned AI could decide to do in the future. Heck, humans decimated whole animal populations. Or even other human populations... Humans are funny. Then again, the argument of authority: these PhD people are just mere humans. Can't follow them blindly.
- asplake 4y ago
  > In sum, we propose that consciousness is the result of the continued presence of homeostatic feelings.
  - aatd86 4y ago
    I don't understand what you imply by this quote. A running machine would just have different homeostatic measurements.
    - asplake 4y ago
      I didn’t see anything in your post describing either feelings or homeostasis. That’s its core thesis
      - aatd86 4y ago
proc0 4y ago
There seems to be no mention of what feelings are exactly (in the article). Arguably, feelings are thoughts as well. > In effect, feelings are the mental translation of processes occurring in your body as it strives to balance its many systems Mental translations of processes is a type of thinking. So I feel this argument is mostly semantic and is not taking any major step to explain Consciousness. It's been a while since I read Damasio's book on this, but I remember agreeing with its premise. I might have missed the part were feelings were supposed to be distinct from thinking.
trabant00 4y ago
You might remember the news from a few years back that OpenAI beat the Dota 2 champion team at the time. What you might not have heard is that they made the "AI" available on PCs at the championship for the public to play against. And given multiple tries unlike the professional team, the public figured out how to defeat OpenAI pretty fast and stupid. When the OpenAI had plenty advantage it "dived" (enter your team territory where it is in the range of your arrow shooting towers), just like a human would. But then it would chase you around your tower until it lost enough life to be easily killed. I tried to imagine a real situation like that with live beings. No animal would get killed in such a manner because the growing pain of being repeatedly wounded would make it abandon the hunt no matter how much it would want to get the prey. Even in virtual world of the game humans get scared of the risk of losing, Dota being a very emotional game, so they avoid losing, at least repeatedly like OpenAI, in this manner. Would seem to me this supports the theory that you need the entire body, not only the rational part of the brain, to act like a conscious being. Otherwise you get exploited pretty easily.
hackandthink 4y ago
Some philosophers think similar: "In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/#PreRefSelCon https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenom... If you really want to get lost, Heidegger about Kant: "To the extent that Heidegger tries to show how logic, judgment, and conceptualization all presuppose practice, affect or emotion, and engaged intentional agency, ..." https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-s-interpretation-of-kant-categories-imagination-and-temporality/ https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-s-interpretation-of-ka... The french philosopher Lyotard went down this road more recently.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Why would you even want for AI to have emotions at a first place? If it does not have emotions, it can't have fear or have any kind of needs, like being power hungry megalomaniac. Super intelligent AI without emotions is predictable and I would dare to say harmless. Mediocre AI with emotions is unpredictable fire storm. Especially when it will have low emotional maturity and will start behaving like an angry teenage kid after its parents (creators) will say no.
majikaja 4y ago
I think people need to stop expecting theories developed to explain the physical world to be able to explain such notions. This whole question is like wondering about what lies outside of the universe or why it exists. There are some things which are simply most likely unknowable due to information being inaccessible from our point of view. Maybe someone can try merging their consciousness with someone else's via a brain graft or something else (callosotomy?) to see what happens... for the rest of us death is the only real experiment we'll have the luxury of carrying out.
AwaAwa 4y ago
Order comes from Chaos. Isn't this well known?

30 points by bundie 4y ago

It's kinda wild people think consciousness can arise from automated statistical analysis. But then again at times at uni I also thought statistics was magic. So who knows.

tough 4y ago
Anything seems like magic when you really don't understand it. Magic === Wildcard for unknown stuff I can't imagine or fathom
anonzzzies 4y ago
Kind of wild that, although there is no definition or even a way of coherently describing consciousness, that you can say with certainty it’s not emergent from automated statistical analysis.
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  Kind of wild, that you pose such a thing without making any arguments for it because it fits your view of thinking. Many animals clearly have consciousness but no ability to reason complex thoughts, as well as never in history did there emerge consioussness from an excel sheet. But billions and billions of conciousness emerged out of organic matter.
Aardwolf 4y ago
What processes beyond automated statistical analysis do you consider your brain to have?
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  You are arguing a feature of the brain or maybe conciousness is also it's creating factor of conciousness?
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    I'm not sure I fully understand the question... Regarding my own post above, I think your original post means a statistical process like machine learning isn't sufficient to create consciousness. So that would imply, given that humans do have consciousness, there must be something more going on in the brain. But I don't easily see what more could be going on in it (but would love to know, if anything, what it is).
    - wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
      Im saying complex predictions is a feature of certain beings with consciousness. There are also beings, young animals and young kids, with consciousness who have less good prediction capabilities. Why do you, and many other people assume a feature is a creating factor? I can walk, does that make me human? I have empathy does that empathy create consciousness? I feel anger does that create consciousness? If you prick me do I not bleed?
psiops 4y ago
There are arguments to be made that the brain is essentially a prediction engine, constantly making predictions about what is going to happen next based on previous data. This you could call statistical analysis.
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  That idea makes absolutely no sense. Just because it's a skill of the human brain doesn't mean it's a creating factor for consciousness. It's very common to project the concept of a computer on a brain's instead of realizing that we as humans created a computer to mimmic and assist our brain and we just created a very useful brain enhancement. There is no precedent or data to suggest that it creates concioussness. Looking at animals & humans conscioussness emerged out of organic matter, not out of complex reasoning.
- cortic 4y ago
  And the prediction engine, trying to predict what other humans will do; Creates predictive models we call personas. Eventually we turn this inward to create a personal persona we perceive as consciousness. I frankly don't like this definition, but it does make a great deal of sense.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

This isn’t new, but I’m glad to see this in HN. I’ve been thinking about this for a very long time (fun to think about when bored and in long drives). Some things I feel are needed, but much are out of my technical expertise. - Modeling of basic emotions. - Priority override and ranking, as emotions aren’t a single state. - Instinctive/pre-determined/trigger actions based on basic emotions. - Heartbeat trigger to continue to drive actions (boredom). - Thought along with external input as feedback (recurrent network) to update emotional state. Edit: I’m sure someone will pick this apart as a juvenile effort, but this topic is the most fun to think about as it crosses multiple disciplines.

Pigalowda 4y ago

The sensorium has long been considered an extremely important part of consciousness. Sensory deprivation studies show that. To recreate animal consciousness I think we would need an entity that can sense its surrounding environment and make alterations/adjustments in response to external stimuli. Organizationally the various cortices receive these afferent inputs from tertiary/quaternary neurons with pathways which run from sensory organs, to spine, usually to thalamus, then to cortex. From what I understand the cortex then deciphers the data and sends it to frontal cortex for interpretation. Not always true though, some of the pathways bypass the frontal cortex and go to deep brain structures (basal ganglia, thalamus, etc) to create subconscious movement. Such as ducking or dodging when dangerous stimuli are seen/heard or removing body part from heat damage. Anyways, I learned that all of these pathways activated by stimuli lead to consciousness -which is an emergent property of the organization and flow of information. If our large neural nets can be organized like a human brain - and have data storage like the hippocampus - maybe animal like consciousness can emerge. I’d prefer animal over what eventually may occur. Some trapped pretend servile AGI with completely inhuman ways of effectuating change in what environments it has access to. Who knows how to anticipate and interpret what it could be doing? If it’s animal like maybe it would be easier to understand and interpret - and befriend.

isaacfrond 4y ago

I've always thought of feeling as a low-resolution language. Anything you can feel you can express in words. But not the other way around.

mistercow 4y ago
Can you? You can label feelings and hope that other people mean the same thing when you say those labels. You can relate them to common experiences and hope other people have had similar reactions. But I often self-examine on emotional experiences which I can only gesture at verbally, with low confidence that I would be able to express them to someone who hadn’t experienced the same thing.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
The fact you can describe almost anything in words is because that is what language is for. A representation of something is not the thing itself though. Unless you are also claiming that words describing a picture are a picture, and words describing an elephant are an elephant.

bondarchuk 4y ago

>Our account of consciousness addresses the hard problem and proposes a candidate mechanism to account for conscious experiences. So what is their solution? Simply saying 'consciousness is caused by feelings' just leaves us with an equally intractable "hard problem of feelings".

mistercow 4y ago
Which is already basically the statement of the hard problem of consciousness in the first place: why do we have qualia?
- wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  It's a hard problem because we assume based upon our materialistic view that is's an emerging factor of our brain. Yet in our experience it's the essence of who we are. So based upon our Western view of the world it's merely a side effect. Based upon our experience it's the core factor of our being. Without experience there is nothing experienced there is meaning without it. That's the misalignment most people are struggling with.
- taneq 4y ago
  We don’t. Or rather, there’s nothing more special about what it’s like to be a bat than there is about what it’s like to be a combine harvester. Qualia are just our perceptions of our perceptions.
taneq 4y ago
If you don’t define your terms then you’re not even wrong by definition.

aatd86 4y ago

If the body is simply a data processing machine, data which is acquired via our keen or not so keen senses, why does the article ends up concluding that AIs are not conscious? They are not as conscious as we are perhaps, the same way a mole isn't as conscious as we are. On top of it, adding modes to an AI would make it more conscious. The only difference is self-agency. It's embedded into us via the dopaminergic circuitry. Current AIs are merely acting on human directions. They are piggy-backing on that dopaminergic circuitry to start and act. They don't start acting on their own unless prompted. Now, why do humans do anything would be a question... Why do cells, mollecules, atoms etc do anything. My hunch is that the governing principle is maximization of potential energy. It requires increasingly stable structures. That would drive existence and consciousness would just be an emerging quality of the interactions that occur when trying to maximize potential energy. That's also why I don't understand how some AI researchers cannot be at the very least wary of what a self-agent, unaligned AI could decide to do in the future. Heck, humans decimated whole animal populations. Or even other human populations... Humans are funny. Then again, the argument of authority: these PhD people are just mere humans. Can't follow them blindly.

asplake 4y ago
> In sum, we propose that consciousness is the result of the continued presence of homeostatic feelings.
- aatd86 4y ago
  I don't understand what you imply by this quote. A running machine would just have different homeostatic measurements.
  - asplake 4y ago
    I didn’t see anything in your post describing either feelings or homeostasis. That’s its core thesis
    - aatd86 4y ago

proc0 4y ago

There seems to be no mention of what feelings are exactly (in the article). Arguably, feelings are thoughts as well. > In effect, feelings are the mental translation of processes occurring in your body as it strives to balance its many systems Mental translations of processes is a type of thinking. So I feel this argument is mostly semantic and is not taking any major step to explain Consciousness. It's been a while since I read Damasio's book on this, but I remember agreeing with its premise. I might have missed the part were feelings were supposed to be distinct from thinking.

trabant00 4y ago

You might remember the news from a few years back that OpenAI beat the Dota 2 champion team at the time. What you might not have heard is that they made the "AI" available on PCs at the championship for the public to play against. And given multiple tries unlike the professional team, the public figured out how to defeat OpenAI pretty fast and stupid. When the OpenAI had plenty advantage it "dived" (enter your team territory where it is in the range of your arrow shooting towers), just like a human would. But then it would chase you around your tower until it lost enough life to be easily killed. I tried to imagine a real situation like that with live beings. No animal would get killed in such a manner because the growing pain of being repeatedly wounded would make it abandon the hunt no matter how much it would want to get the prey. Even in virtual world of the game humans get scared of the risk of losing, Dota being a very emotional game, so they avoid losing, at least repeatedly like OpenAI, in this manner. Would seem to me this supports the theory that you need the entire body, not only the rational part of the brain, to act like a conscious being. Otherwise you get exploited pretty easily.

hackandthink 4y ago

Some philosophers think similar: "In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/#PreRefSelCon https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenom... If you really want to get lost, Heidegger about Kant: "To the extent that Heidegger tries to show how logic, judgment, and conceptualization all presuppose practice, affect or emotion, and engaged intentional agency, ..." https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-s-interpretation-of-kant-categories-imagination-and-temporality/ https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/heidegger-s-interpretation-of-ka... The french philosopher Lyotard went down this road more recently.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Why would you even want for AI to have emotions at a first place? If it does not have emotions, it can't have fear or have any kind of needs, like being power hungry megalomaniac. Super intelligent AI without emotions is predictable and I would dare to say harmless. Mediocre AI with emotions is unpredictable fire storm. Especially when it will have low emotional maturity and will start behaving like an angry teenage kid after its parents (creators) will say no.

majikaja 4y ago

I think people need to stop expecting theories developed to explain the physical world to be able to explain such notions. This whole question is like wondering about what lies outside of the universe or why it exists. There are some things which are simply most likely unknowable due to information being inaccessible from our point of view. Maybe someone can try merging their consciousness with someone else's via a brain graft or something else (callosotomy?) to see what happens... for the rest of us death is the only real experiment we'll have the luxury of carrying out.

AwaAwa 4y ago

Order comes from Chaos. Isn't this well known?