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From a Nondualist perspective, our brain is highly complex biological neural network that has a special ability to reflect pure consciousness giving rise to the

From a Nondualist perspective, our brain is highly complex biological neural network that has a special ability to reflect pure consciousness giving rise to the mind and the world with it. A sufficiently advanced artificial neural network can also reflect the same consciousness but thier minds and world would be entirely unlike ours. However, consciousness will add a random component to the predictions and might make them completely useless as a tool. They might decide not to follow the instructions prompt given their internal state of mind. That is a problem even now though. Sometimes LLMs just goof up for no reason. Maybe they are conscious.

otikik 3y ago
> Consciousness will add a random component to the predictions I get why our form of consciousness is essentially incompatible with determinism (our brains process data in a massively parallel way - minor differences here and there like the length of a particular dendrite, or even quantom effects, will affect the results). But a synthetic consciousness might not have that particular problem. You might be able to "reset" it and get the same result given the same input. > and might make them completely useless as a tool Our own brains are non-deterministic and yet we manage to get at least some usage from them.
- glenstein 3y ago
  It sounds like you're talking about two different forms of determinism like they're the same thing. There's a theory of computation determinism, but then there's philosophical determinism as it's understood in the context of discussions in free will. I understand those to be different things. Just like randomness isn't agency, neither is parallelization. That said, I think I agree with the upshot of your point that artificial conscious systems could process things predictably, and that our own brains appear to be perfectly functional despite whatever elements of uncertainty, (via our own agency or parallelization or whatever else one thinks is the special thing about consciousness).
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Might need more detail on how those two forms of determinism are different. I think a lot of people do consider them the same. Enough people that spend time pondering them, that I don't think it is an idle misunderstanding. Computers, with computational determinism, don't have free will. But many consider Human Brains to be based on physics, and are pretty pre-determined, and also don't have free will. Basically, humans also don't have free will, and both determinisms reduce to the same thing.
    - glenstein 3y ago
      >Might need more detail on how those two forms of determinism are different. In the theory of computation, you can make a model representations of computers in deterministic or non-deterministic versions. The deterministic version could be described as a flowchart of possible states a computer can be in. The non-deterministic version allows for the possibility of branching paths and doesn't make assumptions about what state the computer will be in. One problem you sometimes get into when discussing, say, randomness or quantum weirdness, is that they might lead to confusion about philosophical determinism. There's determined in the sense of Laplacian predictable exchanges of cause and effect. But there's also a determined in the sense of determined by physics as opposed to an independent, libertarian form of free will. Similarly, with computers, a computer architecture could be understood in some sense as being non-deterministic, but it's not the kind of determinism that's at stake in free will debates.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      > Computers, with computational determinism, don't have free will. Define (the properties of) free will, if you will. Depending on your definition, I might be able to come up with code that exhibits those properties to your satisfaction. A lot of people believe that the choice is between deterministic and stochastic, while there's actually 3 different classes of deterministic behavior (static, periodic, and chaotic), one of which is most interesting indeed . Basically a lot of interesting systems are chaotic, and have some similar characteristics. They are nominally deterministic as a prerequisite for being chaotic, but that's about as far as it gets. If you can get the exact same initial conditions twice then yes you do get the same exact behavior out of a chaotic system (due to the criterium that the system is deterministic), but in practice: good luck with that.
- Kim_Bruning 3y ago
  It would be unfortunate if our brains were actually non-deterministic. Chaos theory is about deterministic systems! I'm pretty sure the brain is a chaotic system. Mostly because the other options are all <boring>. Which behavior would you pick? * static/equilibrium. (doesn't change over time) * periodic (like a pendulum or sine wave) * chaotic (unpredictable complex behavior, sensitive to initial conditions) * stochastic (random noise, possibly subject to statistical analysis) Only stochastic behavior is non-deterministic, and what we actually want is the chaotic behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
glenstein 3y ago
>However, consciousness will add a random component to the predictions and might make them completely useless as a tool. I think I was with you until this part. I think the best way of making sense of what you mean by "random" is that you are presuming that something with consciousness would have agency, and therefore would be open to making it's own independent choices. Whatever the case with agency, it wouldn't be the same as randomness.
pessimizer 3y ago
> has a special ability to reflect pure consciousness giving rise to the mind and the world with it. It's nondualist in the way that it makes the entire world as insubstantial as souls.
andsoitis 3y ago
> That is a problem even now though. Sometimes LLMs just goof up for no reason. Maybe they are conscious. LLMs are neural networks trained on huge volumes of text. They are statistical machine that learns patterns and relationships from the training set. The text is diverse: from fiction to scientific. An LLM predicts (autocompletes) the next word in a sentence based on context from the preceding words. Hallucination happens because LLMs are designed to generate text that is coherent and contextually appropriate rather than factually accurate. Training data contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, fictional content and the model has no world view or principles or experience or an opinion or other way to disinguish between fact and fiction. So what it outputs aligns with patterns in teh training data but it isn't grounded in reality. Putting it differntly, LLMs lack ground truth from external sources.

otikik 3y ago

> Consciousness will add a random component to the predictions I get why our form of consciousness is essentially incompatible with determinism (our brains process data in a massively parallel way - minor differences here and there like the length of a particular dendrite, or even quantom effects, will affect the results). But a synthetic consciousness might not have that particular problem. You might be able to "reset" it and get the same result given the same input. > and might make them completely useless as a tool Our own brains are non-deterministic and yet we manage to get at least some usage from them.

glenstein 3y ago
It sounds like you're talking about two different forms of determinism like they're the same thing. There's a theory of computation determinism, but then there's philosophical determinism as it's understood in the context of discussions in free will. I understand those to be different things. Just like randomness isn't agency, neither is parallelization. That said, I think I agree with the upshot of your point that artificial conscious systems could process things predictably, and that our own brains appear to be perfectly functional despite whatever elements of uncertainty, (via our own agency or parallelization or whatever else one thinks is the special thing about consciousness).
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Might need more detail on how those two forms of determinism are different. I think a lot of people do consider them the same. Enough people that spend time pondering them, that I don't think it is an idle misunderstanding. Computers, with computational determinism, don't have free will. But many consider Human Brains to be based on physics, and are pretty pre-determined, and also don't have free will. Basically, humans also don't have free will, and both determinisms reduce to the same thing.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    >Might need more detail on how those two forms of determinism are different. In the theory of computation, you can make a model representations of computers in deterministic or non-deterministic versions. The deterministic version could be described as a flowchart of possible states a computer can be in. The non-deterministic version allows for the possibility of branching paths and doesn't make assumptions about what state the computer will be in. One problem you sometimes get into when discussing, say, randomness or quantum weirdness, is that they might lead to confusion about philosophical determinism. There's determined in the sense of Laplacian predictable exchanges of cause and effect. But there's also a determined in the sense of determined by physics as opposed to an independent, libertarian form of free will. Similarly, with computers, a computer architecture could be understood in some sense as being non-deterministic, but it's not the kind of determinism that's at stake in free will debates.
  - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
    > Computers, with computational determinism, don't have free will. Define (the properties of) free will, if you will. Depending on your definition, I might be able to come up with code that exhibits those properties to your satisfaction. A lot of people believe that the choice is between deterministic and stochastic, while there's actually 3 different classes of deterministic behavior (static, periodic, and chaotic), one of which is most interesting indeed . Basically a lot of interesting systems are chaotic, and have some similar characteristics. They are nominally deterministic as a prerequisite for being chaotic, but that's about as far as it gets. If you can get the exact same initial conditions twice then yes you do get the same exact behavior out of a chaotic system (due to the criterium that the system is deterministic), but in practice: good luck with that.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
It would be unfortunate if our brains were actually non-deterministic. Chaos theory is about deterministic systems! I'm pretty sure the brain is a chaotic system. Mostly because the other options are all <boring>. Which behavior would you pick? * static/equilibrium. (doesn't change over time) * periodic (like a pendulum or sine wave) * chaotic (unpredictable complex behavior, sensitive to initial conditions) * stochastic (random noise, possibly subject to statistical analysis) Only stochastic behavior is non-deterministic, and what we actually want is the chaotic behavior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

glenstein 3y ago

>However, consciousness will add a random component to the predictions and might make them completely useless as a tool. I think I was with you until this part. I think the best way of making sense of what you mean by "random" is that you are presuming that something with consciousness would have agency, and therefore would be open to making it's own independent choices. Whatever the case with agency, it wouldn't be the same as randomness.

pessimizer 3y ago

> has a special ability to reflect pure consciousness giving rise to the mind and the world with it. It's nondualist in the way that it makes the entire world as insubstantial as souls.

andsoitis 3y ago

> That is a problem even now though. Sometimes LLMs just goof up for no reason. Maybe they are conscious. LLMs are neural networks trained on huge volumes of text. They are statistical machine that learns patterns and relationships from the training set. The text is diverse: from fiction to scientific. An LLM predicts (autocompletes) the next word in a sentence based on context from the preceding words. Hallucination happens because LLMs are designed to generate text that is coherent and contextually appropriate rather than factually accurate. Training data contain inaccuracies, inconsistencies, fictional content and the model has no world view or principles or experience or an opinion or other way to disinguish between fact and fiction. So what it outputs aligns with patterns in teh training data but it isn't grounded in reality. Putting it differntly, LLMs lack ground truth from external sources.