4 ms·
Your post touches two points worth to think about: The test for consciousness: if we do have zero criterion, how we are gonna find out if something is consciou
by kbrkbr 3y ago
Your post touches two points worth to think about:
The test for consciousness: if we do have zero criterion, how we are gonna find out if something is conscious?
That is already a good indicator how much we do not know about the „mechanism” of consciousness.
Point two is that we in fact know so little, that we cannot even nail a probability for some complex mechanism if is conscious.
A car: probably not, too far away from things that are conscious.
An ant?
A microphone that listens to its output?
A k-means run on some data?
An llm?
Some electricity in a biological neural network?
If only we had a proven criterion to decide!
- goatlover 3y agoNed Block explores this difficulty in his The Harder Problem of Consciousness paper. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621 He uses Commander Data from Star Trek as the example. Since we don't know whether it is something unique about our biology that leads to consciousness or consciousness is functional, then we can't determine whether Data is conscious. It also gets into the weeds about what sort of functional equivalence might or might not count. Data is obviously not the exact same functionally as we are, neither are LLMs. There are important differences. We know neurons don't use backpropagation, for example. So what is the basis for being conscious?