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I think we have different definitions of consciousness and this is what's causing the confusion. For me consciousness is simply having any subjective experience

I think we have different definitions of consciousness and this is what's causing the confusion. For me consciousness is simply having any subjective experience at all. You could be completely numbed out of your mind just staring at a wall and I would consider that consciousness. It seems that you are referring to introspection.

jjoonathan 3y ago
In your wall-staring example, high-level planning is still happening, the plan is just "don't move / monitor senses." Even if control has been removed and you are "locked in," (some subset of) thoughts still must be directed, not to mention attempts to reassert control. My claim is that the subjective experience is tied up in the mechanism that performs this direction. Introspection is a distinct process where instead of merely doing the planning you try to figure out how the planning was done. If introspection were 100% accurate and real-time, then yes, I claim it would reveal the nature of consciousness, but I don't believe it is either. However, for planning purposes it doesn't need to be: you don't need to know how the plan was formed to follow the plan. You do need to be able to run hypotheticals, but this seems to match up nicely with the ability to deploy alternative subjective experiences using imagination / daydreaming, though again, you don't need to know how those work to use them. In any case, regardless of whether or not I am correct, this is a non-woo explanation for why someone might reasonably think consciousness is the key for building models that can plan.
- adroniser 3y ago
  Again when I say consciousness I mean a subjective experience. If you define consciousness to literally just mean models that plan then of course tautologically if you can't reach consciousness you can't get to a certain level of planning. But this is just not what most people mean by consciousness.
  - visarga 3y ago
    > when I say consciousness I mean a subjective experience Then it would be worthwhile to review embeddings. They create a semantic space that can represent visual, language or other inputs. The question "what is it like to be a bat?" or anything else then is based on relating external states with this inner semantic space. And it emerges from self-supervised training, on its own.
    - adroniser 3y ago
      I'm not claiming anything about what causes consciousness to arise. I'm not claiming it doesn't or that it does. I'm saying it's irrelevant. That is all. You can come up with all sorts of theories about what causes subjective experience to arise and you aren't going to be able to prove any of it.

jjoonathan 3y ago

In your wall-staring example, high-level planning is still happening, the plan is just "don't move / monitor senses." Even if control has been removed and you are "locked in," (some subset of) thoughts still must be directed, not to mention attempts to reassert control. My claim is that the subjective experience is tied up in the mechanism that performs this direction. Introspection is a distinct process where instead of merely doing the planning you try to figure out how the planning was done. If introspection were 100% accurate and real-time, then yes, I claim it would reveal the nature of consciousness, but I don't believe it is either. However, for planning purposes it doesn't need to be: you don't need to know how the plan was formed to follow the plan. You do need to be able to run hypotheticals, but this seems to match up nicely with the ability to deploy alternative subjective experiences using imagination / daydreaming, though again, you don't need to know how those work to use them. In any case, regardless of whether or not I am correct, this is a non-woo explanation for why someone might reasonably think consciousness is the key for building models that can plan.

adroniser 3y ago
Again when I say consciousness I mean a subjective experience. If you define consciousness to literally just mean models that plan then of course tautologically if you can't reach consciousness you can't get to a certain level of planning. But this is just not what most people mean by consciousness.
- visarga 3y ago
  > when I say consciousness I mean a subjective experience Then it would be worthwhile to review embeddings. They create a semantic space that can represent visual, language or other inputs. The question "what is it like to be a bat?" or anything else then is based on relating external states with this inner semantic space. And it emerges from self-supervised training, on its own.
  - adroniser 3y ago
    I'm not claiming anything about what causes consciousness to arise. I'm not claiming it doesn't or that it does. I'm saying it's irrelevant. That is all. You can come up with all sorts of theories about what causes subjective experience to arise and you aren't going to be able to prove any of it.