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I've been listening a lot to Sean Caroll's mindscape podcast [0]. In it they have this notion of complex-to-intelligent systems. Their loose definition is that

I've been listening a lot to Sean Caroll's mindscape podcast [0]. In it they have this notion of complex-to-intelligent systems. Their loose definition is that such systems can hold an internal state that represents the world around them. A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future events from (time travel!). In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced. One can imagine, somehow in the feedback loops (I think, that she thinks, that I think, that she thinks, ...), something like consciousness (awareness [a model?] of the self in the world?) evolved. Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events. I'm just a cocktail philosopher, but aren't we all. [0] https://podverse.fm/podcast/e42yV38oN https://podverse.fm/podcast/e42yV38oN

bcherny 3y ago
This is one of Hofstadter’s big ideas that he explored in his main work: GEB, Mind’s I, and I am a Strange Loop. The latter is a good intro to his work.
jebarker 3y ago
I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness different to just having a model of the world and self within it? Consciousness is the lived experience. The world model and feeling of self appear in consciousness. I think a complex system could plausibly be conscious without having a belief of a self within it. Not sure if consciousness is possible without any world model though. My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam Harris's Waking Up book and app.
- teekert 3y ago
  I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model? I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw. Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.
  - krzat 3y ago
    Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
    - teekert 3y ago
      I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences. I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable. It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
      - krzat 3y ago
        Perhaps, that's the question. What is required for the simplest possible consciousness?
        pegasus 3y ago
        Good question, being investigated in the field of consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8 https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
    - quonn 3y ago
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our world model has ideas like "the rock wants to fall down", it's possible that our self-model does too. We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness. So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively. Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.
  - jebarker 3y ago
    It definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience having a continual visual view of the world through our eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is actually happening physically. Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That implies some observer that the self-model is explaining things to.
    - evv555 3y ago
      Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.
moffkalast 3y ago
> A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future events from Something something LLMs can only predict the next word. I hate to spin up this trendy debate again, but it's always funny to me to see the dissonance when talking about the exact same things in biological and mathematical cases.
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  > predict This the right term to use here. > Something something If human brains have a model, then is language the transport layer on top of that? Is trying to get to intelligence via language no better than trying to get to "google" by modeling its TCP/IP traffic?
- crowbahr 3y ago
  LLMs don't even come close to the complexity of the human mind though. They're a pastiche of human language, a fuzzy jpeg of the Internet. The human mind is _so much more_ than a prediction machine, and incredibly complex... All that's before you get into the way the endocrine system interacts with your mind. A single neuron has an average of 250000 connections in some parts of the brain. The speed at which neuronal signals travel varies neuron to neuron from 2.5m/s to 200m/s. Human minds are more than just prediction. The anterior lateral prefrontal cortex has the sole responsibility of prediction (not that nothing else does, just that the ALPC seems solely dedicated to that task) and is extremely good at it. Prediction can influence all sorts of mental processes such as most all forms of perception... But it is _not_ the same as _being_ all forms of perception. If something unpredictable enough happens in front of you: you'll still see it. Sure there are limits to that: when focused on a task the predictive parts of sight tend to filter out visual data that doesn't match the signal you're looking for (see: basketball players passing the ball and a moon walking man in an ape suit) but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see the O's. So sure: LLMs do a good job at basic prediction but they're nowhere near the complexity of the human mind, of which prediction is only a small piece. (And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on 20W of power)
  - moffkalast 3y ago
rolisz 3y ago
Joscha Bach also talks about this a lot. He calls the consciousness the monkey with a stick controlling the elephant. For a starting point, listen to his Lex Fridman interviews.
indigochill 3y ago
> Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events. I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU). In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the value stored in a register).
- samus 3y ago
  CPUs are anticipating all the time how the future will evolve. They have caches (to be specific, expiration strategies), branch predictors, and speculative execution. Albeit for a very different purpose: to enhance processing speed, not to react to external events.
- DougBTX 3y ago
  > not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired What if it is wired to think?
- aaaaaaaaaajioad 3y ago
  > not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra If we are talking about which kind of complex systems (our brain, a cell, a computer, an LLM, a beehive, etc.) think and how we should note that there is nothing magical[0] in our brain that makes our thinking special and so other blobs of atoms that are not our brain can likely do things analogous to what our brain does. This to say that explaining in reductionist terms how supposedly something thinks is not a proof that it is not really thinking. Otherwise a sufficiently intelligent alien could prove that you are not really thinking (just a bunch of ions dancing) [0] and if there is something magical then we do understand how it works and where else it is magicing stuff.
lkadjal 3y ago
> In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced. You can generate all kind of sentences like this all day you want in your consciousness. That does not make it any true. There is zero evidence for existence of physical matter/materialism. The only thing we know for sure that exists is consciousness. And you suggest the complete opposite with zero evidence.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness aside one's own. This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince?
  - lkadjal 3y ago
    > There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness aside one's own. Yes. That is correct. > This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince? Ego dissolution/self realiszation takes time. It's my goal in life. But haven't achieved yet. But your comment do point that I should not waste time on engaging in things like this which builds up the ego more.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  You may want to read on Descartes critiques from last century. Not even your own consciousness is a given.
  - lkadjal 3y ago
    Obviously there is no you. Just the experience. I thought that was pretty obvious.
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
As another cocktail philosopher. I think everyone should ponder this, when thinking about how they think, like as if they are the one thinking at all. "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Just tried will willing ... success!
  - haswell 3y ago
    And yet, whatever it is that you willed is inexplicable. Why didn’t you will something else?
    - svieira 3y ago
      Ah - dare I say, "free"?
mewpmewp2 3y ago
But still - why is consciousness required? Because a model of the World could be held even without it, in my view. E.g., I wouldn't think GPT-4 is conscious, but I'm pretty sure there's a representation of abstract World and relationships within it following the neurons and weights. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to do much of it, that it is. Also I think model of the World is just that - which can be represented as relationships between neurons, symbolising that model of the World. And I think you can have a complex and a perfect set of neurons and their connections to represent everything in the most efficient manner for that size of parameters (neurons and connections together). There probably is the perfect configuration, but it couldn't even be achieved using training or evolutionary methods. And none of it requires consciousness in my view.
- Avicebron 3y ago
  I highly recommend reading "Blindsight" by Watts it touches on that.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  It's true, p-zombies make more sense to physics, yet here we are.
  - naasking 3y ago
    Indeed, here we are, literal p-zombies.
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      p-zombies don't require an illusion of free will for the universe's entertainment.
    - goatlover 3y ago
      You don't have any experiences? Weird, I see a colored-in world, enjoy the aroma of fresh coffee, don't enjoy the wet cold in winter, don't like being awakened up from an engaging dream, and feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments.
harha_ 3y ago
You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've emerged. But I cannot fathom how material interacting with other material and forces gives arise to subjective experience. It simply makes no sense to me. If I create a copy of my brain, it would be conscious, but with its own unique subjective experience. This makes sense so far, but what exactly is this subjective experience and how can "mere" mechanical matter create such an entity. So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.
- visarga 3y ago
  It only makes sense if - you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal - the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Experience isn’t the right way to put it. The system you describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it can understand and act upon its environment. What is unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the surrounding world from me what I’m left with is a pure awareness that groups of neurons simply can’t explain. Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton? Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I, and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.
    - visarga 3y ago
      You can never remove internal body sensations even in meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this inner space, an element referenced in most situations, but not all, such as when listening to great music we can forget about ourselves. So my idea was - we have an actual system for representing sensations, a system for imagination and a system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it, and we train our consciousness hardware on environment data. If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.
Etheryte 3y ago
Not everyone is a philosopher with a cocktail, but surely we're all cocktail philosophers.
wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
We have a deep-founded believe that the atom is the core of reality. And everything emerges from there. This materialism stems from René Descartes and his fellow philosophers. And in the West it's often subconsciously combined it with evolutional theory. consciousness developed because it was useful somehow. However that's a very big leap to make. Both theories have good arguments going for them but are very theoretical and need a lot more proof. Yet they form the basis for pretty much all Western thought From a scientific perspective we have no idea how to create new consciousness or what it is. From a human's experience it's more the other way around, reality is an emerging property of consciousness. At the same time we also learned that matter & time is not as solid as we thought a few centuries ago.
- tracerbulletx 3y ago
  In the brain there is an emergent reflection of a material reality happening where the brain is creating a fully constructed model of the world with its own independent existence, our day to day experience is a dream that's cohering to sense input. Whether or not that is what consciousness or our apparent point of view lives I don't know because I don't see how to logically prove it either way, but experimentally it seems like it does because our experiences align, and because you can alter people's state of consciousness through chemical and physical means.
  - wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
    What you're saying is the brain creates the illusion of a consciousness, that's something you would need more proof for now you're just assuming it because it's the dominant view based op on our materialistic culture. If anything you are arguing the world is an illusion, not consciousness. You can change what inputs a being get visually & other stimuli. But you don't the change consciousness itself. The pictures & emotions change, but the experiencer doesn't. Same with dementia, the body & connection to the world changes, the inner consciousness & it's ability to experience doesn't. The irony is that we believe the world is real because our brain/conciousness does a really good job. Take for instance the simple fact that certain cultures can't distuingish green from blue. Or certain animals almost live based on feel of audio. Which experience of reality is the "real" world? Materialism feels natural because our world feels real. But what we think is real and solid is what our brain has created for us, in reality both us and the world is very intertwined and hard to separate experience & experiencer.
wrycoder 3y ago
The particular podcast didn’t come across with that link. Can you provide the title or number? I’d like to listen to it! I reviewed a fair amount the podcast list, but didn’t find a match to your description.
- teekert 3y ago
  The title of the podcast series is: "Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas".
  - wrycoder 3y ago
    Thanks. My problem is finding the specific podcast!
beambot 3y ago
A thermostat is a system that can hold an internal state (nominally, temperature) that represents the world around them. You can also build a thermostat with a switch and a bimetallic strip with differing rates of thermal expansion -- a device that is clearly not intelligent. I'm not sure I can subscribe to this definition...
- jampekka 3y ago
  In lectures I thermostats as an example of an intelligent system that matches most attempts at defining intelligence. And I have no qualms saying they are intelligent. Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent thing that can be at most used to compare some things in some scenarios.
  - beambot 3y ago
    A bimetallic strip is intelligent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip Thermal expansion is clearly a physical reaction; if arranged in an intelligent way, it's able to achieve some human-relevant objective... but if we're going to say that two pieces of bulk metal hooked together is intelligent, then the term "intelligence" is so broad as to be roughly meaningless.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      A bimetallic strip is only intelligent when placed in the context of a thermostat system. Similarly, your brain isn't intelligent when removed from your body and placed on a table. Brains are only intelligent when they're in conjunction with living bodies.
      - aydyn 3y ago
        A brain is intelligent regardless of where it is, so long as it's "powered" so to speak.
        3y ago
bookofjoe 3y ago
What we call consciousness may have same relationship to what creates it as Plato's cave shadows to what generates them.
stcredzero 3y ago
Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events. I've occasionally run into science podcasts, going back almost a decade, where some researcher talks about the computational power of cell membranes, and how the synapses evolved from these mechanisms. Amoebas and paramecia navigate their environments, sense, and react through their cell membranes. Apparently, synapses evolved from these mechanisms. The upshot of this for AI, is that the neural network model may be drastically incomplete, with far more computation actually happening inside actual individual neurons.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  Nobody is attempting to have one-to-one correspondence between neurons and artificial "neurons", the fact that a single biological does much more doesn't imply some limitation or incompleteness (as long as the same computations can be implemented simply by having more of them, and as far as we understand, that seems to be the case) - the choice is primary because due to how our hardware parallelization works, we'd prefer to implement the exact same behavior with 1000 structurally identical simple "neurons" rather than have a single more complex "emulated neuron" that requires more complicated logic that can't be straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication.
  - stcredzero 3y ago
    that requires more complicated logic that can't be straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication What are the rationale for thinking it doesn't matter? Or is it the case that researchers think a larger number of simpler neurons could be equivalent to a smaller number of "complex emulated neurons?"
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      Yes, computation as such is sufficiently universal that it's very reasonable to assume that a larger number of simpler neurons would be equivalent to a smaller number of "complex emulated neurons".
deleted 3y ago
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bcherny 3y ago

This is one of Hofstadter’s big ideas that he explored in his main work: GEB, Mind’s I, and I am a Strange Loop. The latter is a good intro to his work.

jebarker 3y ago

I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness different to just having a model of the world and self within it? Consciousness is the lived experience. The world model and feeling of self appear in consciousness. I think a complex system could plausibly be conscious without having a belief of a self within it. Not sure if consciousness is possible without any world model though. My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam Harris's Waking Up book and app.

teekert 3y ago
I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model? I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw. Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.
- krzat 3y ago
  Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
  - teekert 3y ago
    I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences. I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable. It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
    - krzat 3y ago
      Perhaps, that's the question. What is required for the simplest possible consciousness?
      - pegasus 3y ago
        Good question, being investigated in the field of consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8 https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
  - quonn 3y ago
tsimionescu 3y ago
One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our world model has ideas like "the rock wants to fall down", it's possible that our self-model does too. We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness. So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively. Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.
- jebarker 3y ago
  It definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience having a continual visual view of the world through our eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is actually happening physically. Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That implies some observer that the self-model is explaining things to.
  - evv555 3y ago
    Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.

moffkalast 3y ago

> A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future events from Something something LLMs can only predict the next word. I hate to spin up this trendy debate again, but it's always funny to me to see the dissonance when talking about the exact same things in biological and mathematical cases.

zer00eyz 3y ago
> predict This the right term to use here. > Something something If human brains have a model, then is language the transport layer on top of that? Is trying to get to intelligence via language no better than trying to get to "google" by modeling its TCP/IP traffic?
crowbahr 3y ago
LLMs don't even come close to the complexity of the human mind though. They're a pastiche of human language, a fuzzy jpeg of the Internet. The human mind is _so much more_ than a prediction machine, and incredibly complex... All that's before you get into the way the endocrine system interacts with your mind. A single neuron has an average of 250000 connections in some parts of the brain. The speed at which neuronal signals travel varies neuron to neuron from 2.5m/s to 200m/s. Human minds are more than just prediction. The anterior lateral prefrontal cortex has the sole responsibility of prediction (not that nothing else does, just that the ALPC seems solely dedicated to that task) and is extremely good at it. Prediction can influence all sorts of mental processes such as most all forms of perception... But it is _not_ the same as _being_ all forms of perception. If something unpredictable enough happens in front of you: you'll still see it. Sure there are limits to that: when focused on a task the predictive parts of sight tend to filter out visual data that doesn't match the signal you're looking for (see: basketball players passing the ball and a moon walking man in an ape suit) but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see the O's. So sure: LLMs do a good job at basic prediction but they're nowhere near the complexity of the human mind, of which prediction is only a small piece. (And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on 20W of power)
- moffkalast 3y ago

rolisz 3y ago

Joscha Bach also talks about this a lot. He calls the consciousness the monkey with a stick controlling the elephant. For a starting point, listen to his Lex Fridman interviews.

indigochill 3y ago

> Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events. I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU). In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the value stored in a register).

samus 3y ago
CPUs are anticipating all the time how the future will evolve. They have caches (to be specific, expiration strategies), branch predictors, and speculative execution. Albeit for a very different purpose: to enhance processing speed, not to react to external events.
DougBTX 3y ago
> not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired What if it is wired to think?
aaaaaaaaaajioad 3y ago
> not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ― Edsger W. Dijkstra If we are talking about which kind of complex systems (our brain, a cell, a computer, an LLM, a beehive, etc.) think and how we should note that there is nothing magical[0] in our brain that makes our thinking special and so other blobs of atoms that are not our brain can likely do things analogous to what our brain does. This to say that explaining in reductionist terms how supposedly something thinks is not a proof that it is not really thinking. Otherwise a sufficiently intelligent alien could prove that you are not really thinking (just a bunch of ions dancing) [0] and if there is something magical then we do understand how it works and where else it is magicing stuff.

lkadjal 3y ago

> In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced. You can generate all kind of sentences like this all day you want in your consciousness. That does not make it any true. There is zero evidence for existence of physical matter/materialism. The only thing we know for sure that exists is consciousness. And you suggest the complete opposite with zero evidence.

FeepingCreature 3y ago
There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness aside one's own. This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince?
- lkadjal 3y ago
  > There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness aside one's own. Yes. That is correct. > This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince? Ego dissolution/self realiszation takes time. It's my goal in life. But haven't achieved yet. But your comment do point that I should not waste time on engaging in things like this which builds up the ego more.
tambourine_man 3y ago
You may want to read on Descartes critiques from last century. Not even your own consciousness is a given.
- lkadjal 3y ago
  Obviously there is no you. Just the experience. I thought that was pretty obvious.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

As another cocktail philosopher. I think everyone should ponder this, when thinking about how they think, like as if they are the one thinking at all. "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

mensetmanusman 3y ago
Just tried will willing ... success!
- haswell 3y ago
  And yet, whatever it is that you willed is inexplicable. Why didn’t you will something else?
  - svieira 3y ago
    Ah - dare I say, "free"?

mewpmewp2 3y ago

But still - why is consciousness required? Because a model of the World could be held even without it, in my view. E.g., I wouldn't think GPT-4 is conscious, but I'm pretty sure there's a representation of abstract World and relationships within it following the neurons and weights. Otherwise it wouldn't be able to do much of it, that it is. Also I think model of the World is just that - which can be represented as relationships between neurons, symbolising that model of the World. And I think you can have a complex and a perfect set of neurons and their connections to represent everything in the most efficient manner for that size of parameters (neurons and connections together). There probably is the perfect configuration, but it couldn't even be achieved using training or evolutionary methods. And none of it requires consciousness in my view.

Avicebron 3y ago
I highly recommend reading "Blindsight" by Watts it touches on that.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
It's true, p-zombies make more sense to physics, yet here we are.
- naasking 3y ago
  Indeed, here we are, literal p-zombies.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    p-zombies don't require an illusion of free will for the universe's entertainment.
  - goatlover 3y ago
    You don't have any experiences? Weird, I see a colored-in world, enjoy the aroma of fresh coffee, don't enjoy the wet cold in winter, don't like being awakened up from an engaging dream, and feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments.

harha_ 3y ago

You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've emerged. But I cannot fathom how material interacting with other material and forces gives arise to subjective experience. It simply makes no sense to me. If I create a copy of my brain, it would be conscious, but with its own unique subjective experience. This makes sense so far, but what exactly is this subjective experience and how can "mere" mechanical matter create such an entity. So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

visarga 3y ago
It only makes sense if - you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal - the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Experience isn’t the right way to put it. The system you describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it can understand and act upon its environment. What is unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the surrounding world from me what I’m left with is a pure awareness that groups of neurons simply can’t explain. Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton? Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I, and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.
  - visarga 3y ago
    You can never remove internal body sensations even in meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this inner space, an element referenced in most situations, but not all, such as when listening to great music we can forget about ourselves. So my idea was - we have an actual system for representing sensations, a system for imagination and a system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it, and we train our consciousness hardware on environment data. If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.

Etheryte 3y ago

Not everyone is a philosopher with a cocktail, but surely we're all cocktail philosophers.

wouldbecouldbe 3y ago

We have a deep-founded believe that the atom is the core of reality. And everything emerges from there. This materialism stems from René Descartes and his fellow philosophers. And in the West it's often subconsciously combined it with evolutional theory. consciousness developed because it was useful somehow. However that's a very big leap to make. Both theories have good arguments going for them but are very theoretical and need a lot more proof. Yet they form the basis for pretty much all Western thought From a scientific perspective we have no idea how to create new consciousness or what it is. From a human's experience it's more the other way around, reality is an emerging property of consciousness. At the same time we also learned that matter & time is not as solid as we thought a few centuries ago.

tracerbulletx 3y ago
In the brain there is an emergent reflection of a material reality happening where the brain is creating a fully constructed model of the world with its own independent existence, our day to day experience is a dream that's cohering to sense input. Whether or not that is what consciousness or our apparent point of view lives I don't know because I don't see how to logically prove it either way, but experimentally it seems like it does because our experiences align, and because you can alter people's state of consciousness through chemical and physical means.
- wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
  What you're saying is the brain creates the illusion of a consciousness, that's something you would need more proof for now you're just assuming it because it's the dominant view based op on our materialistic culture. If anything you are arguing the world is an illusion, not consciousness. You can change what inputs a being get visually & other stimuli. But you don't the change consciousness itself. The pictures & emotions change, but the experiencer doesn't. Same with dementia, the body & connection to the world changes, the inner consciousness & it's ability to experience doesn't. The irony is that we believe the world is real because our brain/conciousness does a really good job. Take for instance the simple fact that certain cultures can't distuingish green from blue. Or certain animals almost live based on feel of audio. Which experience of reality is the "real" world? Materialism feels natural because our world feels real. But what we think is real and solid is what our brain has created for us, in reality both us and the world is very intertwined and hard to separate experience & experiencer.

wrycoder 3y ago

The particular podcast didn’t come across with that link. Can you provide the title or number? I’d like to listen to it! I reviewed a fair amount the podcast list, but didn’t find a match to your description.

teekert 3y ago
The title of the podcast series is: "Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas".
- wrycoder 3y ago
  Thanks. My problem is finding the specific podcast!

beambot 3y ago

A thermostat is a system that can hold an internal state (nominally, temperature) that represents the world around them. You can also build a thermostat with a switch and a bimetallic strip with differing rates of thermal expansion -- a device that is clearly not intelligent. I'm not sure I can subscribe to this definition...

jampekka 3y ago
In lectures I thermostats as an example of an intelligent system that matches most attempts at defining intelligence. And I have no qualms saying they are intelligent. Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent thing that can be at most used to compare some things in some scenarios.
- beambot 3y ago
  A bimetallic strip is intelligent? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip Thermal expansion is clearly a physical reaction; if arranged in an intelligent way, it's able to achieve some human-relevant objective... but if we're going to say that two pieces of bulk metal hooked together is intelligent, then the term "intelligence" is so broad as to be roughly meaningless.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    A bimetallic strip is only intelligent when placed in the context of a thermostat system. Similarly, your brain isn't intelligent when removed from your body and placed on a table. Brains are only intelligent when they're in conjunction with living bodies.
    - aydyn 3y ago
      A brain is intelligent regardless of where it is, so long as it's "powered" so to speak.
      - 3y ago

bookofjoe 3y ago

What we call consciousness may have same relationship to what creates it as Plato's cave shadows to what generates them.

stcredzero 3y ago

Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events. I've occasionally run into science podcasts, going back almost a decade, where some researcher talks about the computational power of cell membranes, and how the synapses evolved from these mechanisms. Amoebas and paramecia navigate their environments, sense, and react through their cell membranes. Apparently, synapses evolved from these mechanisms. The upshot of this for AI, is that the neural network model may be drastically incomplete, with far more computation actually happening inside actual individual neurons.

PeterisP 3y ago
Nobody is attempting to have one-to-one correspondence between neurons and artificial "neurons", the fact that a single biological does much more doesn't imply some limitation or incompleteness (as long as the same computations can be implemented simply by having more of them, and as far as we understand, that seems to be the case) - the choice is primary because due to how our hardware parallelization works, we'd prefer to implement the exact same behavior with 1000 structurally identical simple "neurons" rather than have a single more complex "emulated neuron" that requires more complicated logic that can't be straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication.
- stcredzero 3y ago
  that requires more complicated logic that can't be straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication What are the rationale for thinking it doesn't matter? Or is it the case that researchers think a larger number of simpler neurons could be equivalent to a smaller number of "complex emulated neurons?"
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    Yes, computation as such is sufficiently universal that it's very reasonable to assume that a larger number of simpler neurons would be equivalent to a smaller number of "complex emulated neurons".

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