12 ms·
I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biologica
by pa7x1 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~. Then, of course, we will push the goalposts on what conscience is, so as to protect our fragile human egos.
EDIT: fixed spelling of consciousness. Apologies from an english second language speaker.
- number6 3y agoHumans are the only animals that create societies... Ok, that's not true. We are the only animals that laugh. Well, not true either. We are the only animal that... Create artificial intelligences... That's it!
- willbudd 3y agoYou jest, but that has a good likelihood of becoming the watershed moment. The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least. And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".
- pmarreck 3y agoIt's going to be a will-free intelligence though, and it's confusing for people because we've never seen that before so I don't think we can make any assumptions. There's no Darwinian forces in effect among entities that have no will, as it were...
- willbudd 3y agoWill-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.
- number6 3y agoBlindsight is a brilliant book exploring will free intelligences
- pmarreck 3y agoIs this the book you're referring to? The one by Peter Watts? Looks fascinating https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640 https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640
- number6 3y agoYes that's the book. It is great and uncanny. Definitely not an easy read
- pmarreck 3y ago> I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions The first problem is epistemological... If you think that creative decisions are made by complying with a "reward function," you are entirely missing something. Most values are fundamentally based on irrationality. I've literally spent an entire life doing things that everyone else told me was wrong and being interested in things that almost no one else saw the value in, but which ended up being "correct" (for me, at least, and also leading to tangible success). I have no reason to believe that any of my decisions were rational, functional, or acted according to a "reward function"... and I'm a programmer! So I COMPLETELY understand the appeal of the explanatory power of "reward functions." And yet, I can assure you that this is a piss-poor explanation for many creative decisions that literally no one else understands but the person making it, but which then bears fruit despite all reason to the contrary. Some might call this "intuition"
- lgas 3y agoI think perhaps you're just misunderstanding some of the terms you're attempting to use. Those things that everyone else told you were wrong and that no one else saw the value in... your reward function rewards pursuing those. And in that context your decisions were rational and functional.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y ago> The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least. How so? The vast majority of life on earth is far less intelligent than human beings by any objective measure, and yet it still thrives.
- willbudd 3y agoYeah, that was sloppy phrasing on my part: I meant that in a top of the food chain / king of the jungle sort of way rather than any extinction events per se.
- dangond 3y agoSure, but if you're a creature that's useful to humans, you'll find that you'll either get domesticated and lose all your freedom or get hunted to near (or total) extinction. Any life on earth with some semblance of intelligence is dominated by us. Dolphins, as smart as they are, have no way to use their intelligence to flip the script and become the dominant species, and are dependent on us not deciding that they would be useful to us (beyond the ones we take for aquariums). The only exceptions I can think of to the above rule are viruses and bacteria, where (in most cases) we can't really exterminate them entirely from the face of the earth even if we wanted to. However, it seems to me that sufficient intelligence would allow for better understanding of different bacterial/viral structures that would allow you to make a specific chemical that would be very good at killing that specific thing. Overall, the danger from a bootstrapping AI that becomes vastly more intelligent than humans (if possible) seems to me to be that we would lose full agency according to its whims as it gets more and more power.
- kaba0 3y agoI read a great comment on HN that argued that super-human intelligence is not that “OP” advantage — and it really did convince me. Life is a game with elements where intelligence matters, plenty where it is pure luck, and others where we have a bunch of unknowns (data). Would a super-intelligent AI have a significant advantage in a game of Monopoly, for example? I think many sci-fi scenarios fail to take this into account, especially the data aspect. Humans are quite intelligent (in the extremes at least), and any extra over that may well be in the diminishing returns category.
- interlinked 3y ago> it's pretty much game over Not if it takes the computational capacity of the entire world to simulate a brain with an iq of 65.
- jdietrich 3y agoWhy bother simulating a brain? GPT-4 scores 155 on the verbal section of the WAIS III. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an-iq-test-heres-what-i-discovered/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an...
- rvense 3y agoHow many monkeys and how many typewriters to write out the code for GPT-4?
- number6 3y agoI don't know how many but it took about 315,000 years
- kaba0 3y agoI mean, the problem was never about drawing boundaries, it was drawing a minimum boundary.
- detourdog 3y agoI wonder if anybody has graphed how long and how many genetic mutations have taken place between the miasma of life and 500,000 years ago. It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. One could also look at the death rate as error rate for the success of computations.
- heart4e 3y ago[dead]
- htag 3y ago> It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. How are those two even approximately related? 1. If you want to know about the amount of information inside of our genome then you can just look at the genome directly. You don't need to count the number of mutations. 2. A genetic mutation isn't a computation. It's a random event. 3. Why did you choose a 500,000BC goalpost for anything? Which 500,000 genome do you want to look at? Almost all of them are not-conscious 4. There's no reason to assume biological evolution is an efficient method of manifesting consciousness. 5. Is a genome enough for consciousness? I would argue we would be less conscious without language, which exists outside of our genome.
- detourdog 3y ago1. Each generation was a branch based on the reaction not necessarily a genetic mutation as we understand them. 2. I'm not sure if that is what I said but I believe that. * I did state it but I plead sloppy articulation rathe than believe each branch is a genetic mutation(an increment smaller than a mutation). 3. I figured it was far enough away to be a valid timeframe for sophisticated consciousness but not so close that the thread would be distracted by historical interpretations. 4.Something manifested consciousness and my thinking it based on some sort of survival reward system. 5.A genome maybe too much for a consciousness.
- hackinthebochs 3y ago>How are those two even approximately related? Computation is roughly equivalent to iterating over a space of possibilities and selecting the subset that satisfy some evaluative function. To determine the inverse of a matrix, I can take the rough shape of the outcome and iterate over all possibilities, picking out the ones that multiply to the identity matrix. Evolution is the process of randomly testing variations in organisms to select the subset that satisfy the objective of superior fitness. So in a sense, evolution "computes" the blueprint for organisms that maximize fitness. The computational complexity of a given genome is then some function of the size of the species-wide population of each ancestor generation summed, with massive time and space constants.
- hcks 3y ago> an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’ll realise it’s meaningless. Also it’s not possible to measure consciousness (in the ”hard“ sense, as in ”why do I have qualia”, obviously you can assert something respond to external stimuli easily), therefore the question won’t ever be answered.
- colonwqbang 3y agoMaybe you could try to explain why you think the person is wrong? If the answer was so obvious as you seem to suggest, why was a bet made in the first place?
- andrepd 3y agoExactly. It's an "unscientific" question in the sense that it cannot be measured empirically, as the "hard question of consciousness" is precisely explaining the subjective experience of internal consciousness, which by definition cannot be externally observed.
- hnfong 3y agoI think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument. The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?
- imtringued 3y agoThis isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'. If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses. For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.
- tunnuz 3y agoDo we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?
- hnfong 3y agoShort answer is no. The working definition is "I am conscious, I know it. Anything that looks sufficiently like me is presumed to have consciousness."
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoThat sounds like a rather anthropocentric application of anthropomorphism. (I'd have gone further but I ran out of applicable anthro- terms) It does feel a lot like the definition of "life" though. That's also a slippery moving-goalposts kind of thing.
- literalis 3y agoHow many angels can dance on the head of a pin? LLMs should make us take seriously that the whole idea of consciousness is just superstition and unnecessary. That definition is precisely how people define something that isn't real and doesn't exist. If you can get there, it is quite amusing to think about a huge group of people who would think the idea of angels as complete foolish superstition but consciousness? Of course, we just haven't located this extra property of the brain, yet! It is there though, I know it is because I know is.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoThere's something that goes on inside the heads of organisms sufficiently like us. We give that something the name consciousness. It doesn't make much sense to deny that it is there. Denying consciousness because it doesn't fit well into our ontology derived from science is to elevate science to unreasonable heights. Science is great, but it's subject matter is inferred (the external world). It doesn't have the power to undermine non-inferred knowledge.
- mannykannot 3y ago
- agumonkey 3y agoI still can't fathom that I feel that I feel what I feel.
- imtringued 3y agoThe problem with this argument is that everything is conscious at that point. The consciousness may operate at geological or faster than human time scales but who is to say that we operate very quickly or slowly to begin with? Your computer is already conscious before you even loaded software into it, before you added your fancy machine learning AI. The software merely gives the conscious processor its ability to express consciousness in a way that humans can understand.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 3y agoIs that a problem? Panpsychists don't seem to think so. Why must human beings believe that, in all the universe, they are a particularly special arrangement of energy?
- mannykannot 3y agoPanpsychism is also, at this point, just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation, and it is not necessary for dispelling the notion that humans are unique (in fact, it is quite plausible that other (now extinct) hominids also had self-aware, theory-of-mind-holding, language-using consciousness.) As to whether there is something special about it, I personally feel that the difficulty of explaining it is enough to regard it as such.
- mannykannot 3y agoInsofar as this premise (it is not really an argument) says any sufficiently powerful cognitive system is conscious, it is not saying that everything (or even most things) are. A more pertinent objection is that the phrase I quoted above is just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation.
- LocalH 3y agoThe only "problem" with that argument is largely that it assumes that human consciousness is somehow different from all other possible forms of consciousness, and that's not at all a given. What if the universe itself is conscious? We'd have absolutely no way to measure that from our limited perspective.
- chrisweekly 3y agoYou repeatedly typed "conscience" (ethics and morals, right vs wrong) but this discussion is about "consciousness" (awareness, self vs other).
- williamdclt 3y agoMight be a non-native English speaker mistake, « conscience » means both in eg French
- pa7x1 3y agoYou are absolutely right. Thanks for bringing it up. English is my second language, first one being a romance language, and the spelling is closer to "conscience".
- rozab 3y agoBlindsight by Peter Watts has some interesting ideas about how consciousness may not be a necessarily condition for advanced life, and indeed may be a hindrance and an evolutionary dead end. The appendices also have a lot of good references on the subject. You can read under CC here https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
- TotalCrackpot 3y agoBlindsight is lit! Great novel.
- amelius 3y ago> consciousness may not be a necessarily condition for advanced life This will probably be shown true when silicon-based life takes over.
- rozab 3y agoIndeed! I won't spoil it, but there's some very prescient ideas about what are essentially LLMs and how they behave
- __s 3y agoThis is the premise used in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Lunar base has a central computer that becomes self aware because it hits a critical mass of "neuristors" > When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic — "High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L" — a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him — decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. And woke up.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoExactly. Basically an inward looking sense, with it's own qualia. Of course the only way to know if someone/something else has a similar subjective experience of something as ourselves is to ask them, so there's always going to be wiggle room for people who don't want to believe that a future AI reporting conscious experience really is conscious in the same way that they are.
- pmarreck 3y ago> just an emergent phenomenon The lack of tangibility or measurability ("rationality") of said "emergent phenomenon" is a problem with this line of reasoning IMHO. This is essentially no different in utility as an explanatory theory than the religious explanations.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoI think a lot of people misunderstand what emergence is [*]. But that might actually be a red herring anyway. The real problem is how does one measure consciousness in the first place? [*] it's less of a super strange magical phenomenon, and more like a rather mundane philosophical version of mathematics' integration.
- pmarreck 3y agoThat's in fact the real problem, and I don't think it's solvable because it's irrational. Only rational things are "solvable". Here's a similar conundrum: Without using a human as a "living proxy ruler" or actual sales data, come up with an algorithm that uses only empirical data (not touching human behavior around it!) to determine the fair market value of the Mona Lisa. Then, apply that to some artwork it's never seen before and see if it concords with what "meat computers" (humans) believe the value of it is. My strong position is that not only will you not be able to do this now, but you will not be able to do this ever. I think rationality will get us VERY far, though, so we should keep doubling down on it. My money's on it being insufficient to produce an apparent intelligent and unique being, though.
- jnwatson 3y agoThis is called “emergentism”.
- 1differential 3y agoyou would enjoy this video - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/112wa88/arguments_about_the_possibility_of_consciousness/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/112wa88/argumen...
- westurner 3y agoAutomata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory#Hierarchy_in_terms_of_powers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automata_theory#Hierarchy_in_t... Sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Digital_sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Digital_sentience Artificial consciousness > Testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory : > In constructor theory, a transformation or change is described as a task. A constructor is a physical entity that is able to carry out a given task repeatedly. A task is only possible if a constructor capable of carrying it out exists, otherwise it is impossible. To work with constructor theory, everything is expressed in terms of tasks. The properties of information are then expressed as relationships between possible and impossible tasks. Counterfactuals are thus fundamental statements, and the properties of information may be described by physical laws.[4] If a system has a set of attributes, then the set of permutations of these attributes is seen as a set of tasks. A computation medium is a system whose attributes permute to always produce a possible task. The set of permutations, and hence of tasks, is a computation set . If it is possible to copy the attributes in the computation set, the computation medium is also an information medium. Is computation medium sufficient to none, some, or all of the sentient computational tasks done by humans?
- alienicecream 3y agoClaiming something might be emergent is a way of hand waiving away your responsibility to explain the mechanism in your hypothesis. It means nothing.
- pa7x1 3y agoI think you misunderstand what it means for a property to be emergent. It's not about hand waiving its origin, but about highlighting that the property progressively appears ("emerges") as the scale of the system changes in some direction. What I'm suggesting with the above, is that there is nothing magical or distinctive about the mechanisms that generate consciousness vs. those that generate the understanding of semantics, grammar, syntax in a GPT or the ability to keep a pole in vertical position on a rolling cart with some reinforcement learning. Instead, it views consciousness as the mental model that is generated by a sufficiently complex intelligence (biological or not) when it has the ability to perceive inputs of its environment, and crucially, of itself. That is, a sufficiently complex brain with the ability to observe its environment and itself, will inevitably generate a model of both and their relationship. The model of itself and how it distinguishes itself from the environment is what I think is consciousness. What I mean with emergent is that this mental model progressively becomes more and more rich ("emerges") as the cognitive abilities becomes more complex and the inputs of itself and the environment increase. A tapeworm with a very minimal central nervous system, scarce sensory inputs of the environment, and likely even less of itself will develop an excessively simple model that can hardly be recognized as consciousness. As you scale the cognitive abilities and the inputs it processes of both; environment and itself, a richer model of both will emerge. And that thing will start to look a whole lot like consciousness.
- alienicecream 3y agoIs a map conscious? It is a model of the environment. Would you classify it as conscious if it could give you output on demand? Is Google maps conscious but a paper map not?
- arp242 3y agoI don't think this really explains anything though; even if we assume what you're saying is true (it might be, although not something I would bet on) that still leaves us with unexplained mechanisms of action.
- FollowingTheDao 3y agoMy theory: Consciousness is a comparison of current sense input with memory. No sense input, no consciousness. No memory, no consciousness. A rock, can have a memory (its chips and wear), but no consciousness since it has no sense input. Self Consciousness is therefore a comparison of the input of our senses with the memory of our Self.
- WillAdams 3y agoThere's a lot of science fiction which touches on this --- notable things: - Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ which has already been mentioned - Harry Harrison's _The Turing Option_ (with forward by Marvin Minsky): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1807642 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1807642 - Victor Milán's _The Cybernetic Samurai_ which is notable for a major character in it has the afore-mentioned Heinlein as a favorite book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/472944 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/472944 Biology is _incredibly_ efficient in terms of energy usage --- it's rather striking to me that the a single query of early iterations of ChatGPT were so demanding that Microsoft was able to put a price on them and monetize them so as to get their stake in the company.
- quadcore 3y agoAnother theory of mine is that survival instincts is (or is part of or is strongly linked to) consciousness. Take an AI for example, like say gpt4, and picture it being tought or being able of survival instincts. How would one differentiate such a beast from life? I know it's imprecise at best but still, Id bet the key is there. Maybe the question should not be "what is consciousness?" but rather "what is survival instincts?".
- fzaninotto 3y agoMany neuroscientists think like you, see Attention Schema Theory [1], popularized by Michael Graziano at Princeton University. This is a form of Illusionism [2] - according to Graziano, consciousness is an illusion. I've explored this idea by building a chatbot with an inner monologue, Molly [3], based on GPT-3. The result is spectacular: it gives the illusion of consciousness. And, according to Information Schema Theory, that means that this cognitive system IS conscious. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi... [3]: https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/06/06/artificial-consciousness.html https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/06/06/artificial-consciousnes...
- 20after4 3y agoReally interesting experiment! Thanks for sharing.
- goatlover 3y agoWhat would it mean for the sensations of pain or color to be an illusion? Do you really think that you can be wrong about experiencing a colored-in world around you, or feeling pain when you kick a rock? If so, what gives you confidence that the world exists, given how wrong all you would be about your own experiences?
- kaba0 3y agoThere is literally no way to differentiate between whether we are living in a real world, or we are just the single agent of a simulation or whatever.
- waselighis 3y agoI strongly disagree with this view, not so much the emergent part, but rather that "any sufficiently powerful cognitive system" can gain consciousness. To me, it suggests that consciousness is magic, because it doesn't matter how information is organized and stored, it doesn't matter how information is processed, consciousness will be able to emerge miraculously from even the most disorganized chaotic mess of information processing. This view has come up a lot recently, because it's the only explanation that allows for AI to be sentient, AI models which are just software running on computers. However, the brain is highly organized, wherein the various types of sensory input are fed into specific regions of the brain which specialize in processing that type of input. Many areas of the brain have topographical structures which are reminiscent of the type of sensory input they process. This is evident in Retinotopy for visual inputs and Tonotopy for auditory inputs. You will not find such topographical structures in a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinotopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinotopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonotopy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonotopy You have to ask the questions, why do we have meaningful conscious experience that is sensible, coherent, and well formed? And why is consciousness not random chaotic nonsense? Because the brain has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve to process sensory input such that it yields a sensible conscious experience. This simply isn't true of any technology today. On the other hand, experiment with psychedelic drugs and see how crazy your conscious experience can be. The fact that our day to day experiences aren't like that is significant and evident that the brain evolved to process sensory input for conscious experience.
- 20after4 3y agoRichard Feynman had an interesting observation about the way in which people differ in how they process thoughts and experiences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm92w2DlflA&t=41s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm92w2DlflA&t=41s
- s4i 3y ago> I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system But does a system exist which we would describe as ”cognitive” but not also ”conscious”? To me this definition gets nowhere.