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> What else is there? This is why I am extremely skeptical of "anti-materialists" or whatever you want to call people like Seth: if conscious is not mere compu
by mysecretaccount 3y ago
> What else is there?
This is why I am extremely skeptical of "anti-materialists" or whatever you want to call people like Seth: if conscious is not mere computation, what is your theory? Do you even have a theory? Why did I read a several hundred word interview with you about this topic and come away without any understanding of your alternative theory?
I am open to alternative theories on this topic but none seem to be clear or grounded enough to describe in a few clear paragraphs. To me, that is damning.
- xmonkee 3y agoI have not read the article but I would love to have a real debate with a materialist. All anti-meterial models will skew sightly mystical so if you have zero appetite for that I won’t bother. But I’d like to try to change your mind if you’re interested. I’ll start: Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing. Processing is “dead” in the sense of a desktop calculator. Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences. Any process is the content of experience, not the subject. I’ll stop here for now. EDIT: currently this comment is at a 0 score. If you disagree with me, please leave a reply and I will try to get to you, but don't blindly downvote me cause I'd like to talk to more people, that's all. I'm not some religious zealot, you can check my post history etc.
- mysecretaccount 3y agoI have some appetite for it. Either conscious is mere computation or it is not, and either branch should be explored. I think assuming that either branch is correct beyond a reasonable doubt is wrong. Is there any material (!) you can link me to to explore further?
- xmonkee 3y agoLook, there is more material about this stuff that perhaps any other subject explored by man, but it frequently comes in ecclesiastic garb and that may or may not be to your taste. I'll can link both spiritual and secular starting points. The spiritual ones are far more delicious. What's your stand on religion in general? I'll link sources appropriately.
- visarga 3y ago> Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences. That's circular, what is experience, what is "that which"? I propose a simple definition - consciousness is what informs actions, and optimises actions to benefit the agent. That's a concrete definition, without subjective elements.
- xmonkee 3y agoSure, but it entirely leaves off subjective experience.
- simonh 3y agoIt also defines Roombas, and even simple sense/response feedback loop systems as conscious entities. Is a carburetor conscious?
- visarga 3y agoIt's all in there. Consciousness decides actions, it's embedded in every action. Actions change the future timeline, there is consequence in actions, and they provide feedback. It feels like something because it matters how you react. You could die if you don't react correctly, for example.
- noncoml 3y agoCan you define the “minimum reproducible example”? Which is the simplest organism that has this “living” part and which is the most complex organism that doesn’t have it?
- xmonkee 3y agoIn the sense that you are asking, I can't answer this question, because I don't know. Perhaps ants and up have it? idk, there is no way to know. There is no way to even know if other people definitely HAVE consciousness, I take it on faith. I can only KNOW for sure that I have consciousness. How do I know that? Because I am conscious of it. Is this circular? Yes. In fact, this is the ONLY absolute reality that I can positively assert, without reference to any other fact or axiom. The fact that I can think, or that I have a body, or that it's day outside, all of these first need me to be conscious. So, yes, it's circular, and it's true, and you know it's true that you are conscious. And you don't need process any information to know that you are conscious. It's prior to all that.
- simonh 3y agoYou are simply defining consciousness and information processing in terms of alive and dead. If those are your axiomatic assumptions, you’ve already established the outcome before evaluating the issues. Consciousness may be more than processing information, but it is definitely processing information. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. Along the way we also form memories. When we experience something, qualia if you like, it matters to us. That process stimulates us, interests us and often it prompts us to action. Those are all information processes. Stimulation is a signal. Interest and attention is metadata about the experience. Being prompted to action is making a decision. These are all intrinsically processes on and about information.
- seri4l 3y agoThere are some experiments that suggest that human actions are not the result of conscious thought. Maybe you've heard about Michael Gazzaniga's experiments on split brain subjects. The most radical interpretation of the results is that our conscious thought merely constructs a narrative about actions it has no direct control of. In other words, our brains act like a bunch of interconnected neural networks and one of them, the language processing part, tries to make sense of what all the others are doing, serving the only purpose of communicating with others.
- simonh 3y agoI wasn’t aware of that research, thanks, but I do agree most cognition is subconscious. When talking rapidly, the words seem to just spill out from nowhere. Ideas simply spring to mind. We have no direct awareness if the cognitive processes that generate them. We can reason consciously step by step, but it’s an incredibly slow process. It seems likely that consciousness has something to do with attention management and broadcast communication across brain regions and functions.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoWhich is part of the reason why I think LLMs are a big deal. LLMs talk like the inner voice, and their failure modes are strikingly similar to the failure modes of "gut instinct" / first reactions and "stream of thoughts". I don't think this is a coincidence - I think we may have stumbled on the main trick that makes biological brains work. I don't mean language here, but rather the use of absurdly high-dimensional latent space for representing relatedness. Now, if the above is anywhere close to the truth, then taking it together with the research you mention suggests that LLMs aren't simulating or parroting abstract thinking and understanding - they're actually doing it, the same way we do. They just lack an evaluator/censor layer of conscious experience.
- jiggawatts 3y agoYou've already fallen into several pits of failure, perhaps without realising it. Firstly, "alive" and "dead" are very squishy words with no clear definition. You can mould them into whatever you please, but that's not a firm foundation for any kind of debate. Second, you can't just state your position as fact. You say that "Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing." That's not an argument! You're making an assumption, and treating it as an obvious thing we all agree on. We don't. In fact, it's the main point of disagreement. This is like a theologian assuming the Bible is true because God wrote it, but Atheists don't believe God exists. "Any process is the content of experience, not the subject." -- this is too vague to respond to. It could mean anything. Other than hand-wavey, vague things, you've only said one clear thing, which is to assume the outcome that you would like. Materialists aren't just making assumptions. Tests have been done. Real, scientific experiments. We can (trivially!) alter consciousness through chemical, surgical, or electromagnetic means. Simple physical processes seem to underlie consciousness, and altering those processes alters consciousness. Every teenager that has taken LSD or mushrooms can attest to this fact. Anyone that has taken a nasty hit to head can experience this first hand.
- xmonkee 3y agoI admit my language is squishy. Sometimes it helps point to what I'm trying to point to. And I know where you are coming from, as someone who was a materialist for much of my life. We are simply talking about different things. You are talking about the contents of consciousness - the things that get altered by physical processes. We don't need tests to establish that. When the sun rises, the contents of my consciousness change from black to orange, thus we know that physical processes can change the contents of my awareness. I am taking about consciousness itself. When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange.
- jiggawatts 3y ago> When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange. I don't understand what point you're trying to make. When the sun rises, the colour of the sky changes in ways measurable with physical devices and noticeable to animal and human eyes. It is not "the same" in any sense. Different photons traverse it, its temperature changes, ionisation of its gas molecules change, etc...
- magicalhippo 3y agoLike he argues that there's a big difference between software running on hardware and our brains, in that the neurons are dynamic, bathed in chemicals etc while software doesn't interact with the hardware in any substantial way (ie doesn't physically change it). This is true, but to me it seems much more like optimizations rather than a truly fundamental difference. Surely you could model a neuron in software with non-trivial internal state and which also responds differently based on "ambient parameters" (ala bathed in chemicals). It would be much harder to train, at least using the methods we do now, but I fail to see a fundamental difference.
- famouswaffles 3y ago>Surely you could model a neuron in software with non-trivial internal state and which also responds differently based on "ambient parameters" (ala bathed in chemicals). Oh you could. and it's been done. But it's much harder to train and seemingly for no real performance benefit other than "like the brain". Backpropagation is just really efficient.
- magicalhippo 3y agoRight, I was being sloppy with my writing. I know about Blue Brain[1] and other brain simulation projects[2]. This is why I can't see it being a fundamental difference. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_simulation
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoOK, but when a materialist says "it's just computation", that's not a theory either. It may be the first step of a theory, but it's only one step. Where's the rest of the theory? Nobody has a real theory of consciousness, still less an experimentally-verifiable theory. So it seems a bit unfair to exclude anti- (or at least non-) materialists for not having a theory. Now, you could argue that materialists are at least on the road to a theory, and the anti-materialists are not. On the other hand, if the anti-materialists are right, then the materialists are not on a road to any correct theory, ever. (Being further advanced down the wrong road is not a virtue, except to the degree that you learn more quickly that you need to turn around...)
- PixyMisa 3y agoThe question then is, what observed property of consciousness is not computational? If there is no such property, then the anti-materialists can be safely ignored.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoBut the way you state your question is also assuming the answer to the larger question. What observed properties of consciousness are computational? Are provably computational? If you rigorously and consistently don't assume materialism, what can be proven?
- PixyMisa 3y ago> What observed properties of consciousness are computational? Are provably computational? All of them. > If you rigorously and consistently don't assume materialism, what can be proven? Nothing. Without that premise (or a compatible one), all you have is handwaving.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoAll of them are proven computational? Mind laying out your evidence for that statement? Because it sounds like what you have is a presupposition, not evidence. I note that, in your reply to GMoromisato, you asked for evidence. I ask you to meet the standard you expect of others.
- User23 3y agoLet me give you the classic theory that goes back to before Aristotle: consciousness is a property of the rational soul.
- smegsicle 3y agofrom this we must conclude that the product of the irrational soul is the opposite of consciousness
- tekni5 3y agoIn my opinion, if consciousness turns out to be anti-material meaning after years and years we cannot replicate or find any model to explain it. Then we have to assume that it is contained outside of the "system" which could only mean that the world is built around consciousness and everything else is a dream or simulation. However I don't actually believe this, just an idea. I think consciousness is probably much more simpler than we think, if you look at evolution it developed very quickly compared to other things.
- simonh 3y agoI think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes. You need to be able to reason about the knowledge, beliefs and likely actions of others. When this is generalised to enable modelling and reasoning about our own knowledge, beliefs and intentions, that’s consciousness. We literally become aware of ourselves in ways we can reason about. I actually don’t think most living things, even animals, are conscious. Mammals and some other higher animals possibly. Simple organisms have simple sense/response nervous systems. Their reactions are mostly automatic, but can learn basic patterns of stimuli.
- magicalhippo 3y ago> I think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes. A random find[1] that I found interesting. Some quotes: A growing set of experiments therefore appears to establish a key prediction of [Attention Schema Theory]: without consciousness of an item, attention on the item is still possible, but the control of attention with respect to that item almost entirely breaks down. The relationship is not “consciousness is attention”; instead, it is “consciousness is necessary for the control of attention.” AST also predicts that people construct models of other people’s attention [...]. Ample evidence confirms that this is so. Activity in at least some subregions of the [temporoparietal junction] has also been found in association with one’s own attention. Moreover, TPJ activity is associated with the interaction between attention and reported consciousness. A recent study argued that this activity is consistent with error correction of a predictive model of attention. [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 (open access)
- koalaman 3y agoBahaha! I always suspected hackernews was all bots and this comment thread confirms it. Just because you don't have a subjective experience doesn't mean us real humans don't! my chatgpt powered pal!
- mysecretaccount 3y agoThe materialist claim is that a bot can have subjective experience.
- gloryjulio 3y agoI think the comment is more like a joke with /s missing
- mysecretaccount 3y agoIt was a funny joke and I was giving him a note about it, maybe he can improve it.
- koalaman 3y agoSorry I didn't know about /s. I don't judge one way or another. Subject hallucinating the material world, or object hallucinating a subjective experience. I love you all.