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I'm still left dumbfounded by the amount of nonsense surrounding the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness emerges from a PHYSICAL process, not from softwa
by waselighis 3y ago
I'm still left dumbfounded by the amount of nonsense surrounding the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness emerges from a PHYSICAL process, not from software or some trained model full of matrices of numbers. It doesn't matter how sophisticated/intelligent/capable your AI model might be, there's no reason to assume it's conscious. There's no evidence to suggest that any sufficiently complex system can emerge consciousness and that idea is nothing more than science fiction.
Consciousness in biological life is a product of evolution and natural selection. There's big unanswered questions about how consciousness emerges in the brain, and the benefit to life (what is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness), but there's little doubt that it is beneficial to life and that it evolved. This is evident by how much control your brain has over your conscious experience - everything you experience is the product of heavy processing in the brain. What you perceive as reality is whatever your brain tells you it is. My favorite example of this has to do with saccades [1]. This is not an "accident", per se, it's the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. How this happened is uncertain. It might be that consciousness is a natural byproduct of the neural activity in the brain. It could also be something like photosynthesis, the right set of random mutations allowed consciousness to suddenly emerge, and it has been evolving ever since.
The brain is often teetering on the edge of chaos, and there is evidence that this may be a mechanism for consciousness to emerge. When the brain moves away from chaos, the person generally becomes unconscious. And if the brain enters chaos, well, you have an epileptic seizure. There is also evidence that only some parts of the brain are responsible for consciousness, not all. These are evidence that imply consciousness emerges from some yet unknown physical process(es).
My point being, AI systems will not become conscious unless the underlying physical hardware fundamentally changes. Modern computers based on silicon chips and transistors and whatnot is most certainly not conscious, at least not in any meaningful way. If a computer does have any sort of "conscious experience", it would be nothing more than like when you tune an old analog TV to a channel that doesn't exist - random noise.
Maybe quantum computers or memristors have a greater chance of emerging consciousness, but without the evolutionary process to finetune the conscious experience, these systems are never going to have MEANINGFUL consciousness.
[1] https://twitter.com/foone/status/1014267515696922624 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1014267515696922624
- mistermann 3y ago> What you perceive as reality is whatever your brain tells you it is. Does this not cause a self-referential, recursive infinite loop of some sort here?
- waselighis 3y agoThere is likely some sort of feedback loop between the brain and consciousness. Our conscious experience does have some unknown effect on the brain that alters our behavior and thinking, otherwise we wouldn't be able to speak of our conscious experience or practice introspection. However, I feel like you're implying this leads to some sort of paradox, but I see no reason to assume that it's paradoxical. In mathematics, self-references or infinites don't always result in contradictions.
- mistermann 3y agoBy my way of thinking, the problem derives from what "reality" is. Is it the universe? Or is it something like the atmosphere, that we are "in"? Or, is it something else? > but I see no reason to assume that it's paradoxical. To a lot of people, the consequence of this is that "the reality (fact) of the matter" is that it is not(!) paradoxical...but is this actually true? Disagreements on this may be fairly trivial, just something fun to discuss. But what if the proposition is something that is important to the functioning of the country, and people can't sort out what "reality" "is"?
- waselighis 3y agoI have no doubt that there is an objective reality. Physics shows us that reality is weird and unintuitive, and we don't fully understand it. The mere existence of consciousness also raises big questions about the true nature of reality. But still I have no doubt there is an objective reality., There is massive amounts of evidence that show the universe evolved (matter condensed to form stars which formed heavier elements which formed planets and organized into galaxies ...) and also that life evolved (single celled organisms to multicellular organisms to animals which eventually gave way to sentient life). Why would there be such substantial evidence for any of this if there were no objective reality? If I take a psychedelic drug, my conscious experience is significantly altered. Why should that happen if there were no objective reality? Why should a chemical be able to have such a huge effect on my conscious experience if it "doesn't objectively exist"? Why should there be such a strong correlation between patterns of brain activity and our conscious experience if there were no objective reality? Why should the brain be organized into regions with well defined functions if there were no objective reality? Why should sensory organs be able to take in information from the environment through well understood physical processes, and transit that information through well structured nerve endings to the proper regions of the brain, if there were no objective reality? I don't claim to know the true nature of reality, far from it. I merely posit that there is an objective reality.