5 ms·

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, b

• 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.
      • naasking 3y ago
        > You don't have any experiences? I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. > mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be conscious because of their materialistic commitments. Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality.
        • goatlover 3y ago
          > I have "experiences", they just don't really have the properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data would entail. You don't think your experiences have sensations? > Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some kind of direct observation of fundamental reality. I never said anything about fundamental reality. I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. You have to explain away your sensations, dreams, inner dialog etc., by appealing to some theoretical commitment. I'm not claiming what consciousness is, only that we have it.
          • naasking 3y ago
            > You don't think your experiences have sensations? I don't think sensations are what they appear to be either. Eliminative materialism is very misunderstood. > I never said anything about fundamental reality But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The only reason you think you have consciousness is an alleged direct perception of subjective qualities. There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with some form of scientifically sound materialism: panspychism, where subjective qualities permeate all of reality and we are perceiving some of them, or concluding that our perceptions are flawed and untrustworthy and so the subjective qualities we think we're perceiving are not real/illusory (eliminative materialism). Given the demonstrable flaws in all other perceptions, the most parsimonious position seems clear. Of course, you could try to resurrect idealism, but idealism is very problematic. > I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies. P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye to me.
  • mannykannot 3y ago
    A p-zombie is, by definition, physically identical to and physically indistinguishable from another individual who has conscious experiences, yet does not itself have those experiences. It's not clear to me that this makes more sense to physics, particularly when one considers the p-zombie and its conscious twin both being asked the same questions about their conscious experiences.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• kaashif 3y ago
  Is there any way you could have a being like a human, who when asked would say they're not conscious? Is a definition of consciousness allowing that possible? I'm not talking about whether they are or aren't, but surely all intelligent beings would say and think they're conscious?
  • glenstein 3y ago
    I mean you certainly could, in the sense that you could get it to tell you the sky is green, and that it's the spirit of Rodney Dangerfield. To your point though, so far as I can tell it could not answer that question as a product by actively engaging conscious introspection to discover its own absence of consciousness, which I take to be your point. So if its way of answering involves dipping into its own active "theater" of consciousness it likely could not, at least given our usual understanding. However I do wonder if its something where that could actually be complicated to answer, and where, like illness, as we grow in understanding, it breaks out into all kinds of unexpected subclasses. I can, for instance, know, in a sense, that I can't see UV rays. But I am not so sure if consciousness writ large could every be tested for, via conscious introspection, and come out in the negative, even if we allow for the idea that it will explode into all kinds of nuances and subclasses with future research.
• Retric 3y ago
  Having a purely representative model of the world is less useful than having a sandbox for modeling choices and outcomes. Do I need to duck before entering that doorway? That introspective analysis is consciousness. Humans have just improved the same mechanism allowing for more abstract analysis.
  • mewpmewp2 3y ago
    But GPT-4 can also take the decision to duck. For instance, here I have GPT-4 with a system message: "You are an AI human agent in a video game performing actions.". And I give it the following information as current environment: Current environment: 1. Your goal is to get out of the current room. 2. You are moving in direction of North at 4km/h. 3. There's a door 3m in the North. 4. The door height is 150cm. 5. Your height is 180cm. What is the sequence of actions that you plan to perform? Its response: --- 1. Slow down as I approach the door to avoid collision. 2. Inspect the door for any lock or handle. 3. If a handle or a means to open the door is present, try to open the door. 4. If the door is locked, search for a key or any other opening mechanism within the immediate surrounding area. 5. If the door isn't lock or after opening it, crouch down slightly to accommodate my height which is more than the height of the door to avoid my head hitting the door frame. 6. Proceed through the door and stand tall again after passing through. 7. Continue moving North after exiting the room. --- So here I did hint quite a bit by giving this specific environmental data, I could add more noise, and unnecessary information, but even then I think it can do it based on my experience. I had temperature of 1 for the above, which I think why it made some odd word choices, but I also decided for example to change the info where the door is to "South", and this is how it responded: 1. Stop moving in the North direction. 2. Turn around 180 degrees to face the South direction. 3. Start moving towards the door in the South direction at a moderate pace. 4. Upon reaching the door, duck down slightly to accommodate the difference in height between myself and the door. 5. Proceed through the door to exit the room." ------- So I guess, what I would like to see as an example. Assuming GPT-4 is not conscious, what is something that an average conscious human can do, thanks to presumed consciousness, that a GPT-4 couldn't do and why is consciousness required for that?
    • bumby 3y ago
• jvanderbot 3y ago
  I think most of our world model is actually a human model. Our social relationships are more important than we give credit for. So there's an arms race. The more brains you have the more you can model your tribe to know how to help or succeed. AND the bigger everyone's brain is the harder they are to model simply. In this model consciousness is the "self model" or "self-consciousness" that allows you to model others opinion of yourself by having such an opinion yourself. And adjust their opinion by providing a narrative about yourself which you first have to craft, .... nd on and on with higher levels of abstractions.
  • jvanderbot 3y ago
    The reason I like this theory is that it provides the groundwork for and over eagar agency-modeller that explains a lot of human quirks like belief in gods, seeking root causes, modelling etc
  • thechao 3y ago
    I like this model because consciousness just becomes another function, and it lets us explain some of the weirder modalities; for instance, being able to predict free-will choices way ahead of time in human subjects. Also, SMBC had a funny comic about this (funny comics always making science true!): https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3
  • throwuwu 3y ago
    I’d argue that there is no default model. The model you have is just whatever you’ve spent time interacting with. If yours is mostly social then that perhaps plays a big role in your life. I would say mine is more heavily spatial and oriented around things and their interactions. Supporting evidence for this are feral children who could never learn to integrate into society. They didn’t have built in models of social interaction.
    • jvanderbot 3y ago
      feral children never develop what I would call the higher thinking. They still have mobility, spatial, etc. But "consciousness" is probably not something they really put together. This is just my opinion. I think it took most of your brain to formulate that rebuttal, not concurrently, but as a deep and rich model of how readers might respond to a given argument, and weighing in a narrative sense your remembered experience vs what you "heard" me say in your head when you looked at these squiggly lines. Probably you even had a nascent image of me that was an amalgamation of your past experiences with internet idiots (fairly!) etc. That's a lot, lot more than what a bug does when it finds its way past a complex maze, and probably something feral children lack. I think all our higher level "reasoning" is a cooption of these systems. There's a point in infant development where speech and social skills are developed, after which they cannot be. I'd go so far as to argue you'll never make a mathematician or physicist out of a feral child. Something critical to our higher level thinking is formed then. If missed, it cannot be recovered. The flip side is I deeply believe if you can hold this conversation with me, then we both can be the best mathematicians there are, if only we took time to develop that language.
• glenstein 3y ago
  I think some problems are simple enough that they can be dealt with "blindly", but some problems turned out to be tricky in special ways that evolution was more able to solve via consciousness than blind information processing. And from there, we find ourselves, with that new capability in hand, able to repurpose consciousness to newer and newer things. Then retrospectively it can look like consciousness wasn't "needed" for certain problems. So I think even if you want to make the sense that consciousness solves a lot of problems it doesn't need to, it may have been a "real" solution to a "real" problem at some point in our history. And from that point on, it was no longer important whether it was the best solution. I do think it's fair to say that lots of remarkably complex informational problems are solved in a p-zombie way, which is to say, with every outward appearance of intelligence (slime molds solving mazes, collective behaviors of ants). So I do think evolution or nature writ large "agrees" with you that consciousness isn't strictly necessary.
  • calf 3y ago
    There's also the idea of the "hive mind" of ants and bees, so maybe quite literally our brains efficiently evolved as a meta-hive-mind internalized by our network of neurons.
    • glenstein 3y ago
      That's an incredible way of thinking about it. I would say that is the most creditable way of dealing with the question of consciousness as it would apply to collective behavior, which is to say, it is a clear way of stating the difference between what those behaviors are, and how far removed they are from actual consciousness, without dismissing the "interestingness" of the behavior. I would suspect though, that in our case it may have been something like centralized "nerve cluster" getting more and more complicated over time rather than anything that is in any sense a hive, although that is a very imaginative idea.
      • ChainOfFools 3y ago
        The intermediate Value Theorem, in existential form: A single one of my brain cells is not me, but all of my brain cells is me. Somewhere between these two endpoints there is a line where me has to begin, and not me ends.
• Symmetry 3y ago
  With a human brain you're got 1) A huge stream on sensory data only some of which gets promoted to conscious awareness. 2) Some of that raw data and other conscious outputs are persisted into working, short, and long term memory. 3) And your consciousness works recursively using (2) as well as (1) as inputs. All the stuff in GPT that gets called "memory" in machine learning seems much more like (1) and it lacks any ability to persist data outside its context window so we're still missing something.
• tired_star_nrg 3y ago
  There’s a really neat book (fiction) that touches on this concept. It’s called Blindsight by Peter Watts.
• mannykannot 3y ago
  Personally, I doubt that self-awareness can be achieved without some form of consciousness, and I feel that self-awareness is a key component of higher intelligence. If intelligence and/or consciousness arise as emergent properties in the right sort of complex system, they will disappear from view in a low-level analysis of the causal processes occurring in that system.
• coryfklein 3y ago
  > But still - why is consciousness required? Did someone say it is? Parent explicitly called it out as a by-product.
• tesdinger 3y ago
  Of course consciousness is required for intelligence - you need to model yourself as part of the world to have a complete model.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    Why does "modelling yourself as part of the world" require consciousness?