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> What is consciousness? The firing of a gazillion synapses you will never fully understand. This doesn't fit with the other examples. Consciousness is not a

> What is consciousness? The firing of a gazillion synapses you will never fully understand. This doesn't fit with the other examples. Consciousness is not a problem of scale, but a problem of kind. We can see from simple models how you might make things more complex until they become something like GPT 4. So too with human cells, we can see analogous engineering feats that make it possible to imagine that there could be a way to have a system that can produce a human from small beginnings. Again, simple systems show us how the complex might be possible. But there are no simple building blocks that we can point to and say "yes, I can see how more of these would produce consciousness".

fouronnes3 3y ago
We've cut open brains and it's synapses all the way down. Of course we don't understand it but there's nothing else. A problem of kind is just a large enough problem of scale.
- tuyiown 3y ago
  You missed the crucial part, it's not about the synapses, but the organisation they have that brings out consciousness. At the moment we have absolutely no idea of what basic organisation (of synapses) it stems from, something we could build upon, nor any idea of the general organisation of the whole system that make the consciousness an emergent property
  - Gare 3y ago
    Could we also not try to reach that organization via evolution (once we have enough compute)? Starting with a worm-like AI...
    - tempaway74641 3y ago
      I know a good Greg Egan story about that https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html “What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked. “Evolution.” “Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.” Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?” “Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking. “With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.” “On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.” “Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?” “Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.” “Minimise it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?” Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.” “I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.”
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    This actually creates a good argument for considering current LLMs and other generative AI as steps in the right direction. Specifically, while we have "no idea of what basic organisation (of synapses) it stems from", we do know a few things about this organization which creates consciousness - such as: - It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution; - It scales well, conferring survival benefits from the start, and at every point of the way, from the first neuron, up to the human brain; With those in mind, it absolutely makes sense for us to find a relatively simple compute/organizational system and scale it all the way to consciousness (or a set of those that scale together) - because that's exactly how evolution must have done it, since it's structurally the only thing it can do.
    - GTP 3y ago
      > It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution; I'm not an expert in this field, but from what I heard brute-force natural selection is the naive explanation we're given in school. There are many more factors at play other than random chance: e.g. there is also sexsual selection. Sexual selection selects some characteristic that isn't necessarily an advantage in the current environment, but it is somehow preferred by the opposed sex. According to some research, the reason why we lost the bone that other primates have in their penis is due to sexual selection.
      - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
        One intuition that helps is to see evolution as a random search through solution space. Another thing to realize is that -in evolutionary algorithms- the distribution of random trials will be strongly biased around existing solutions. It helps to understand that in some situations, a search algorithm with some level of randomness can arrive at a solution faster than a systematic/random approach, on average. In other situations, a search with added randomization might be slower, but its ability to escape local optimae (to some degree) means that it is much more likely to find the global optimum (or at least a better local optimum :-P ). Compare also: Monte-Carlo methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
  - achileas 3y ago
    It’s also very much not just about the neuronal synapses.
- Winsaucerer 3y ago
  I agree with you that the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup (whether that's synapses or more). But that's not the point of contention -- the point of contention is whether those synapses are enough to explain (or explain away) consciousness. And to me it is plainly obvious that physical stuff (synapses or whatever) can never explain (or explain away) consciousness. (side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states)
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states It's not plain correlation. It's long been experimentally demonstrated that you can circuit-bend[0] an animal or a human live, by poking in their brain[1]. If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. If it existed, it's demonstrably overridable by purely physical interventions, which implies you could just make a physical-stuff consciousness, at which point why postulate a non-material one? -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending [1] - Then there's obviously alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, that have a slower onset.
    - vonjuice 3y ago
      You can give alcohol to a driver and it will affect their driving. However, if you're an alien and you don't know the exact workings, you might conclude that alcohol affects cars.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Hence my point about circuit bending. We're at the stage equivalent to that alien a) being able to electroshock the driver, and b) observe them getting out of car and functioning independently, therefore c) conclude that the driver is the thing controlling the car.
- achileas 3y ago
  That’s not true at all. The most interesting research into components of consciousness involve astrocytes, glia, and formerly assumed “helper cells” throughout the brain. It isn’t “all synapses.” Source: neuroscience MS (dropped out after defending to become a software engineer)
- ogurechny 3y ago
  This is unacceptable level of reasoning about such a topic, almost comically illiterate. The moment you've used the term “brain”, you'd already detached that thing from the rest of the body (without which it can't function — just like a spherical cow can't really live in a vacuum), drawn its borders, set limits to its functions, and so on. The same with “synapses”. So by stating that those mental objects are “real”, you've simply found that X equals X, that those things are exactly the same as they are defined. Their evident presence here is no different from the evident presence of demons inside the possessed people in the past.
- splitstud 3y ago
  [dead]
codeulike 3y ago
But unless you're a dualist, you have to admit that our biological brain is a massive bundle of cells from which consciousness somehow arises. It must be those mushy tangled cells, there's nothing else there. It probably is a problem of scale along with a philosophical problem around consciousness likely not quite being what we intuitively imagine it to be. (e.g. visual consciousness seems continuous but we know from saccades that it can't be)
- cnity 3y ago
  Consciousness is unique, because it gives rise to the problems of qualia. None of the other examples face this issue. A.k.a. "Why is there a "likeness" of subjective experience?" and "why am I me and not somebody else?". Saying that consciousness is merely a side effect of neurons kicks this proverbial can down the road.
  - tempaway74641 3y ago
    True. But still, dualism is the only other way out of that conundrum edit: ok you're quite right there are other ways out of the conundrum like idealism
    - Winsaucerer 3y ago
      It's not the only one. Naturalism/physicalism, a monist view, claims there is nothing else except for natural entities or causes. Dualism claims there is nothing else except for natural and mental entities or causes. There is another monist view though, one that sometimes gets called idealism, that says there is nothing else except for mental entities or causes. I lean towards this view. The challenge for naturalism is to explain (or explain away) consciousness (the mental). We call this challenge 'the hard problem of consciousness'. The challenge for idealism is to explain (or explain away) the physical. However, there is no analogous 'hard problem of non-consciousness' (but the explanation of this would take an unreasonable amount of words that I cannot fit here).
      - 3y ago
adrianN 3y ago
We currently don't have a definition of consciousness on which people agree and which allows you to determine whether something is conscious or not. It is therefore not surprising that you don't believe that scaling simple systems produces "consciousness", but unless you think that consciousness is some kind of magic that does not follow from the laws of physics, there must be some kind of reductionist thinking can explain the phenomenon, given sufficient computational power to do the math.
- vonjuice 3y ago
  The laws of physics are a mental model created by consciousness to understand the world experienced as beings separate from it. To subjugate the creator to that which it created is a bit funny.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    The laws of physics are measurable constants that if the measurement is executed anywhere in the universe [1] will yield the same results[2]. [1] that's in the same phase state as us, inside a black hole or microseconds after the big bang may derive a different answer. [2] up to the uncertainty limit
    - andoando 3y ago
      Measured by conscious observers, and results perceived by conscious observers. There is no way around it. The laws of physics are “universally” agreed truths about certain mental phenomena experienced by the conscious observers that conscious observers have so far interacted with.
      - pixl97 3y ago
        So two hydrogen atoms bonding with an oxygen and forming a water molecule and releasing 'heat' only happens when a conscious observer is around? Interesting universe you live in. I, personally, enjoy a universe independant of the whims of observers.
myrmidon 3y ago
> But there are no simple building blocks that we can point to and say "yes, I can see how more of these would produce consciousness". If you are open to have your view on this changed, I urge you to read "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg (1986).
pawelmurias 3y ago
Before we had LLM it wasn't at all obvious that the simple ones we had would work as well as those do. It's not clear what you define consciousness to be but for general intelligence it's easy to imagine how something would would with enough resources. We can imagine how animals could evolve to be smarter and smarter over time. A old school symbolic AI with near infinite power could create and sci-fi tyle old school AI. We can imagine a super advanced LLM mixed in with logic reasoning.
- Winsaucerer 3y ago
  My own view is probably atypical among dualists and idealists, and hard to explain. I'll just state what I think is true, without justifying why I think these things are true or compatible with each other. I think: - Most or all of what makes us human, like love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, find almost all of their explanation in the physical. I include even things like thinking, reasoning, beliefs, and so on, as finding almost all their explanation in the brain. - The experiential/phenomenological side of these things (love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, etc) are non-physical mental/consciousness things. Everything else besides the phenomenology finds its explanation in our brains (or some wider physical states than just the brain). - I am not surprised that LLM's could be as powerful as they are today (though I am surprised that I was alive to see that), and I can see them getting better. - The foundation of reality is ultimately mental/consciousness and not physical, and the physical (to use a philosophical term) supervenes on the mental. Regarding definition of consciousness: I'm not so bothered with how we define words. I think a lot of philosophy is pointless arguing that amounts to no more than people disagreeing about how we should define a word. I see no point in that. Instead, let's just stipulate what we mean by a word, and get on with the meat of the discussion. In this particular instance, when I talk about consciousness, I'm talking about the thing that the 'hard problem of consciousness' is talking about. I'm not talking about, e.g., consciousness in the sense of wakefulness (where being asleep or under a general anaesthetic would count as unconscious).
- vonjuice 3y ago
  Before planes people imagined machines that would flap their wings like birds.
hiddencost 3y ago
It's very possible you're wrong.
grantcas 3y ago
[dead]

fouronnes3 3y ago

We've cut open brains and it's synapses all the way down. Of course we don't understand it but there's nothing else. A problem of kind is just a large enough problem of scale.

tuyiown 3y ago
You missed the crucial part, it's not about the synapses, but the organisation they have that brings out consciousness. At the moment we have absolutely no idea of what basic organisation (of synapses) it stems from, something we could build upon, nor any idea of the general organisation of the whole system that make the consciousness an emergent property
- Gare 3y ago
  Could we also not try to reach that organization via evolution (once we have enough compute)? Starting with a worm-like AI...
  - tempaway74641 3y ago
    I know a good Greg Egan story about that https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html “What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked. “Evolution.” “Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.” Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?” “Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking. “With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.” “On the contrary,” Daniel assured her. “I’ve been planning this for twenty years.” “Evolution,” she said, “is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?” “Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering.” “Minimise it?” She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical concerns. “What right do we have to inflict it at all?” Daniel said, “You’re grateful to exist, aren’t you? Notwithstanding the tribulations of your ancestors.” “I’m grateful to exist,” she agreed, “but in the human case the suffering wasn’t deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don’t doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution.”
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  This actually creates a good argument for considering current LLMs and other generative AI as steps in the right direction. Specifically, while we have "no idea of what basic organisation (of synapses) it stems from", we do know a few things about this organization which creates consciousness - such as: - It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution; - It scales well, conferring survival benefits from the start, and at every point of the way, from the first neuron, up to the human brain; With those in mind, it absolutely makes sense for us to find a relatively simple compute/organizational system and scale it all the way to consciousness (or a set of those that scale together) - because that's exactly how evolution must have done it, since it's structurally the only thing it can do.
  - GTP 3y ago
    > It is simple enough to be reachable by a dumb, brute-force, random-walking, incremental process of evolution; I'm not an expert in this field, but from what I heard brute-force natural selection is the naive explanation we're given in school. There are many more factors at play other than random chance: e.g. there is also sexsual selection. Sexual selection selects some characteristic that isn't necessarily an advantage in the current environment, but it is somehow preferred by the opposed sex. According to some research, the reason why we lost the bone that other primates have in their penis is due to sexual selection.
    - Kim_Bruning 3y ago
      One intuition that helps is to see evolution as a random search through solution space. Another thing to realize is that -in evolutionary algorithms- the distribution of random trials will be strongly biased around existing solutions. It helps to understand that in some situations, a search algorithm with some level of randomness can arrive at a solution faster than a systematic/random approach, on average. In other situations, a search with added randomization might be slower, but its ability to escape local optimae (to some degree) means that it is much more likely to find the global optimum (or at least a better local optimum :-P ). Compare also: Monte-Carlo methods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
- achileas 3y ago
  It’s also very much not just about the neuronal synapses.
Winsaucerer 3y ago
I agree with you that the brain is nothing else but its physical makeup (whether that's synapses or more). But that's not the point of contention -- the point of contention is whether those synapses are enough to explain (or explain away) consciousness. And to me it is plainly obvious that physical stuff (synapses or whatever) can never explain (or explain away) consciousness. (side note: there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states)
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > there is absolutely, undeniably, a correlation between brain states and mental states -- but that does not entail that mental states reduce to or are explained entirely by brain states It's not plain correlation. It's long been experimentally demonstrated that you can circuit-bend[0] an animal or a human live, by poking in their brain[1]. If in those cases, altering brain state creates/affects behavior and mental states, then there isn't really a place for a non-physical-stuff consciousness. If it existed, it's demonstrably overridable by purely physical interventions, which implies you could just make a physical-stuff consciousness, at which point why postulate a non-material one? -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending [1] - Then there's obviously alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, that have a slower onset.
  - vonjuice 3y ago
    You can give alcohol to a driver and it will affect their driving. However, if you're an alien and you don't know the exact workings, you might conclude that alcohol affects cars.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Hence my point about circuit bending. We're at the stage equivalent to that alien a) being able to electroshock the driver, and b) observe them getting out of car and functioning independently, therefore c) conclude that the driver is the thing controlling the car.
achileas 3y ago
That’s not true at all. The most interesting research into components of consciousness involve astrocytes, glia, and formerly assumed “helper cells” throughout the brain. It isn’t “all synapses.” Source: neuroscience MS (dropped out after defending to become a software engineer)
ogurechny 3y ago
This is unacceptable level of reasoning about such a topic, almost comically illiterate. The moment you've used the term “brain”, you'd already detached that thing from the rest of the body (without which it can't function — just like a spherical cow can't really live in a vacuum), drawn its borders, set limits to its functions, and so on. The same with “synapses”. So by stating that those mental objects are “real”, you've simply found that X equals X, that those things are exactly the same as they are defined. Their evident presence here is no different from the evident presence of demons inside the possessed people in the past.
splitstud 3y ago
[dead]

codeulike 3y ago

But unless you're a dualist, you have to admit that our biological brain is a massive bundle of cells from which consciousness somehow arises. It must be those mushy tangled cells, there's nothing else there. It probably is a problem of scale along with a philosophical problem around consciousness likely not quite being what we intuitively imagine it to be. (e.g. visual consciousness seems continuous but we know from saccades that it can't be)

cnity 3y ago
Consciousness is unique, because it gives rise to the problems of qualia. None of the other examples face this issue. A.k.a. "Why is there a "likeness" of subjective experience?" and "why am I me and not somebody else?". Saying that consciousness is merely a side effect of neurons kicks this proverbial can down the road.
- tempaway74641 3y ago
  True. But still, dualism is the only other way out of that conundrum edit: ok you're quite right there are other ways out of the conundrum like idealism
  - Winsaucerer 3y ago
    It's not the only one. Naturalism/physicalism, a monist view, claims there is nothing else except for natural entities or causes. Dualism claims there is nothing else except for natural and mental entities or causes. There is another monist view though, one that sometimes gets called idealism, that says there is nothing else except for mental entities or causes. I lean towards this view. The challenge for naturalism is to explain (or explain away) consciousness (the mental). We call this challenge 'the hard problem of consciousness'. The challenge for idealism is to explain (or explain away) the physical. However, there is no analogous 'hard problem of non-consciousness' (but the explanation of this would take an unreasonable amount of words that I cannot fit here).
    - 3y ago

adrianN 3y ago

We currently don't have a definition of consciousness on which people agree and which allows you to determine whether something is conscious or not. It is therefore not surprising that you don't believe that scaling simple systems produces "consciousness", but unless you think that consciousness is some kind of magic that does not follow from the laws of physics, there must be some kind of reductionist thinking can explain the phenomenon, given sufficient computational power to do the math.

vonjuice 3y ago
The laws of physics are a mental model created by consciousness to understand the world experienced as beings separate from it. To subjugate the creator to that which it created is a bit funny.
- pixl97 3y ago
  The laws of physics are measurable constants that if the measurement is executed anywhere in the universe [1] will yield the same results[2]. [1] that's in the same phase state as us, inside a black hole or microseconds after the big bang may derive a different answer. [2] up to the uncertainty limit
  - andoando 3y ago
    Measured by conscious observers, and results perceived by conscious observers. There is no way around it. The laws of physics are “universally” agreed truths about certain mental phenomena experienced by the conscious observers that conscious observers have so far interacted with.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      So two hydrogen atoms bonding with an oxygen and forming a water molecule and releasing 'heat' only happens when a conscious observer is around? Interesting universe you live in. I, personally, enjoy a universe independant of the whims of observers.

myrmidon 3y ago

> But there are no simple building blocks that we can point to and say "yes, I can see how more of these would produce consciousness". If you are open to have your view on this changed, I urge you to read "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by Valentino Braitenberg (1986).

pawelmurias 3y ago

Before we had LLM it wasn't at all obvious that the simple ones we had would work as well as those do. It's not clear what you define consciousness to be but for general intelligence it's easy to imagine how something would would with enough resources. We can imagine how animals could evolve to be smarter and smarter over time. A old school symbolic AI with near infinite power could create and sci-fi tyle old school AI. We can imagine a super advanced LLM mixed in with logic reasoning.

Winsaucerer 3y ago
My own view is probably atypical among dualists and idealists, and hard to explain. I'll just state what I think is true, without justifying why I think these things are true or compatible with each other. I think: - Most or all of what makes us human, like love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, find almost all of their explanation in the physical. I include even things like thinking, reasoning, beliefs, and so on, as finding almost all their explanation in the brain. - The experiential/phenomenological side of these things (love, pain, sense of belonging, seeing, hearing, etc) are non-physical mental/consciousness things. Everything else besides the phenomenology finds its explanation in our brains (or some wider physical states than just the brain). - I am not surprised that LLM's could be as powerful as they are today (though I am surprised that I was alive to see that), and I can see them getting better. - The foundation of reality is ultimately mental/consciousness and not physical, and the physical (to use a philosophical term) supervenes on the mental. Regarding definition of consciousness: I'm not so bothered with how we define words. I think a lot of philosophy is pointless arguing that amounts to no more than people disagreeing about how we should define a word. I see no point in that. Instead, let's just stipulate what we mean by a word, and get on with the meat of the discussion. In this particular instance, when I talk about consciousness, I'm talking about the thing that the 'hard problem of consciousness' is talking about. I'm not talking about, e.g., consciousness in the sense of wakefulness (where being asleep or under a general anaesthetic would count as unconscious).
vonjuice 3y ago
Before planes people imagined machines that would flap their wings like birds.

hiddencost 3y ago

It's very possible you're wrong.

grantcas 3y ago

[dead]