41 ms·

Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond

56 points by benbreen 3y ago

smnplk 3y ago
For someone interested in deep questions about consciousness. [1] A 25 year wager between a Philosopher and Neuroscientist where Philosopher won (Chalmers vs Koch) [2] A nice debate between Kastrup and Koch, where it looks like Koch has abandoned his physicalist beliefs [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet-about-consciousness-has-finally-been-settled/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzwC7sXyhWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzwC7sXyhWQ
matt-attack 3y ago
> appear to Funny thing is you could absolutely say the same thing about every other human on the planet. There is just no way for you to confirm that I’m having a subjective experience. I might be acting like I am. And so might everyone else. The only one you can be absolutely sure of is yourself. We all just sort of assume that other people have consciousness but it’s impossible to know for sure.
passion__desire 3y ago
I have a tangential question about non-human consciousness. It is almost impossible for a human to perceive color red as colour blue. But this won't be a problem for a futuristic humanoid. It would just be some kind of relabelling or a latent space transformation. Now imagine a AI virus that causes such reassignment of distinct colour values say in self driving scenario causing traffic accidents. Have people thought about it ?
- GenerocUsername 3y ago
  Not really true. You are asking that humans perceived red as blue, but I can imagine red things as blue. But if you did not perceive things as red, how would you know to relabel them as blue. The robot in this case would undergo the same operation when relabeling. It first has to perceive red, relabel to blue. No major difference unless you swap at hardware level which would be analogous to genetically engineering our eye cones to fire at altered wavelengths
- esafak 3y ago
  Robots can operate at the level of spectra (spectrophotometry) rather than color (projections of spectra, colorimetry). The mapping from the spectral power distribution to color co-ordinates for a given species is well understood and not arbitrary. The mapping from those co-ordinates (colors) to their names is also not arbitrary. The only issue I can think of that would cause confusion, which has nothing to do with AI, is metamerism, which is when different spectra are perceived to be the same color, because information gets lost when the infinite-dimensional spectrum is projected down to three dimensional color. In practice it is not a problem; most people are not even aware of the phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)
- pixl97 3y ago
  >It is almost impossible for a human to perceive color red as colour blue. Eh, you mean like humans seeing the color green as the color red? Not sure why red/blue matters at all in this case as stoplights are red/green, one of the highest risk of human failure color combinations! Furthermore direct color encoding of safety controls tends to be coupled with shape or placement. Stop signs are octagons. Stop lights have a directional component. If you're worried about an AI virus, I'd be far more worried about it just directly crashing the car, then induced confusion crashing the car.
andsoitis 3y ago
> There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, Not just when it arises during development or when it gets reduced due to disorders and brain injury, but also at it fluctuates under a range of other known (and possibly unknown) states such as when you're under general anesthesia[1]. Besides the when, there's also kind/degree/nature, such as during meditation, sleep, influence under substances, etc. Exciting field. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6703193/# https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6703193/#
- TriNetra 3y ago
  At the core, we are pure awareness devoid of any object (thoughts). We can direct this awareness which we call the art of attention. We're pure awareness and we decide to attend something. However, to attend and receive information from the physical plane, we need appropriate instruments. Brains and its organs of senses are those instruments. If these instruments have fault, obviously we as awareness don't receive enough information and it seems our consciousness is reduced. In waking state, we receive info from physical senses. In dream state, these senses are in suspended mode but mind is active in imagining the experiences in a virtual world and hence awareness has an instrument. In deep sleep, even mind is in a state of rest and hence awareness has almost no active instrument. Still, we awareness does exist and thus we know that we had a good or bad sleep when we wake up.
  - placebo 3y ago
    I doubt the fact that we know we've had a good or bad sleep is related to the existence of awareness when in deep sleep. If someone remains indefinitely in deep sleep there will be no personal experience and therefore nothing to qualify as good or bad. When a sense of self returns with waking up then your body gives you the signals from the accumulated effects that you didn't sleep in a good position or whatever positive or negative aspect that has left a trace while you were out cold. I'm not negating the possibility that consciousness might be a primary aspect of existence - it's just that if that is the case then it is not something you have or can remember. It would be more accurate to say that it is something that has you, and as some spiritual masters would point out, it would be even more accurate not to say anything about it :)
ninetyninenine 3y ago
I personally think this is a loaded concept. This is what I think: For the technology we have now (LLM)s there does not and will not ever exist a test that can perfectly differentiate between an LLM and any human. We will always have LLMs that will pass the test and we will have humans that will fail. The reason for this is two fold and contradictory. The first reason is that consciousness is just a loaded concept. It's some arbitrary category with fuzzy boundaries. One persons definition of consciousness includes language another persons definition of consciousness includes logical thought. It's a made up collection of "features" that's it, no more or no less. It's a very arbitrary set of features too... mashed together for no rhyme or reason. The second reason is that LLMs already meet the criteria for what most people technically define as consciousness. The resistance we see nowadays is simply moving the goal posts. Five years ago people were in agreement that the turing test was a really good test. We've surpassed that and changed our definitions adding more stringent criteria for sentience. AI already meets the criteria for sentience the way we defined it from 1950-2020. Thus any test to measure sentience will always be a moving target.
- smnplk 3y ago
  Because you say consciousness is a loaded concept I will try to give you a description of what it actually is. I do agree that many people think different things when they talk about consciousness. It's your inner experience. Oh well, you can probably read this in a philosophy textbook. But what I think it really is, can only be explained with a thought experiment. Lets say you go into a pitch black sensory deprivation tank with salt water, so you can float in the water. Doctors give you injection that makes you forget about who you are, what is your name. You also forget about how to talk, you know no concept of the languge. You simply temporarily forget about you and what makes you really YOU in this world. The cemical in your blood also deprives you of any physical feeling, you don't feel any water around you. All there is to do is to gaze into darkness. And still...you are conscious, you have the inner experience. There is something like to be you, even in that state.
  - Filligree 3y ago
    > And still...you are conscious, you have the inner experience. There is something like to be you, even in that state. I am honestly not convinced of this. I certainly can't imagine it.
yewenjie 3y ago
FWIW, Anil Seth from the list of authors has been a strong opponent of the Panpsychist view (consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, and everything is to some degree conscious) recently been popularized by David Chalmers et al.
- lolinder 3y ago
  I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Can you elaborate on why you felt this was important to point out?
witrak 3y ago
Relation between consciousness and intelligence seems to be a problem for everyone including the authors of the article. Hmm... Peter Watts, Blindsight. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology. [Wikipedia] Especially interesting, and contains a long list of literature.
- squigz 3y ago
  > Relation between consciousness and intelligence seems to be a problem for everyone including the authors of the article. Which parts of the paper gave you the impression the authors struggled with this?
htk 3y ago
If consciousness can't even be precisely defined, imagine devising a "test" for it. Laudable effort, but I don't see any progress resulting from it.
- sctb 3y ago
  The tests themselves are what bring precision to the notion of consciousness. Think of a medical example in which doctors are meant to determine whether or not a patient receives anaesthesia—surely a more effective empirical toolkit would be valuable in that situation, no? There seems to be a tendency with the discourse around consciousness to slip into vague philosophizing and thus run into the hard problem. I feel like if it doesn't make sense to think of it that way then don't think of it that way.
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
I find it amusing that they launch into a discussion of the "urgent need" for consciousness tests without ever stopping to define what they mean by consciousness! The word seems to be heavily overloaded and refer to a bunch of unrelated phenomena, with most people disagreeing over exactly what it means, or more often just breezing past any definition of what it means and proceeding to argue about it regardless.
- squigz 3y ago
  I find this comment amusing, as a core premise of the article is trying to figure out how to define and measure consciousness and the problems that entails
narrator 3y ago
Arguing that an AI chatbot is conscious is like ancient romans asking "Is a really big fire the same as lightning?" They both burn down big trees and can kill people. Thus, they must be the same! A time traveller would tell them they don't understand lightning and they won't for 2000 years and trying to understand it through philosophizing is only going to some sort of random conjectures like the best way to avoid lightning is to burn down all the nearby trees as big fires need wood to burn, therefore lightning needs trees to strike.
- grantcas 3y ago
  It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
rb-2 3y ago
I've noticed that conversations about "consciousness" tend to go in circles because the participants are using different definitions of the word without realizing it. Some people use the word "conscious" almost interchangeably with terms like "intelligent", "creative", or "responds to stimuli". Then people start saying things like LLMs are conscious because they pass the turing test. However, others (including the authors of this paper and myself) use the term "consciousness" to refer to something much more specific: the inner experience of perceiving the world. Here's a game you can play: describe the color red. You can give examples of things that are red (that other people will agree with). You can say that red is what happens when light of a certain wavelength enters your eyeball. You can even try saying things like "red is a warm color", grouping it with other colors and associating it with the sensation of temperature. But it is not possible to convey to another person how the color red appears to you. Red is completely internal experience. I can hook a light sensor up to an arduino and it can tell me that an apple is red and that grass is not red. But almost no one would conclude that the arduino is internally "experiencing" the color red like they themselves do. While the paper is using this more precise definition of consciousness, it seems to be trying to set up a framework for "detecting" consciousness by comparing external observations of the thing in question to external observations of adult human beings, who are widely considered by other adult human beings to be conscious entities [1]. I don't see how this approach could ever produce meaningful results because consciousness is entirely an internal experience. [1] There is a philosophical idea that a person can only ever be sure of their own consciousness; everyone else could be mindless machines and you have no way of knowing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism). Also related is the dead internet theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory).
- barrysteve 3y ago
  The solipisist can't find reason to form agreements with others. Others are mindless in his view. He can't define consciousness in terms of what we agree, there's nobody to agree with. So the game of describing the color red to others, cannot be played to any meaningful end. Red is red to the solipsist. Coming up with your own interpretation of consciousness is an ability truly conscious people have. It can never be completely agreed upon in a philosophical conversation without dogma or compromise. Both solipsism and total agreement, cannot be truthfully used as philosohical tools to contain consciousness.
shreezus 3y ago
Consciousness & intelligence are orthogonal. It’s highly plausible we achieve superintelligence before we have conscious machines. That said, understanding consciousness is not necessarily a prerequisite for engineering it. It may very much end up being an emergent phenomenon tied to sensory integration & processing, in which case it ends up self-assembling under the right circumstances. Exciting times…
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  So my thermostat is 'intelligent', just not 'conscious'?

56 points by benbreen 3y ago

For someone interested in deep questions about consciousness. [1] A 25 year wager between a Philosopher and Neuroscientist where Philosopher won (Chalmers vs Koch) [2] A nice debate between Kastrup and Koch, where it looks like Koch has abandoned his physicalist beliefs [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet-about-consciousness-has-finally-been-settled/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzwC7sXyhWQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzwC7sXyhWQ

matt-attack 3y ago

> appear to Funny thing is you could absolutely say the same thing about every other human on the planet. There is just no way for you to confirm that I’m having a subjective experience. I might be acting like I am. And so might everyone else. The only one you can be absolutely sure of is yourself. We all just sort of assume that other people have consciousness but it’s impossible to know for sure.

passion__desire 3y ago

I have a tangential question about non-human consciousness. It is almost impossible for a human to perceive color red as colour blue. But this won't be a problem for a futuristic humanoid. It would just be some kind of relabelling or a latent space transformation. Now imagine a AI virus that causes such reassignment of distinct colour values say in self driving scenario causing traffic accidents. Have people thought about it ?

GenerocUsername 3y ago
Not really true. You are asking that humans perceived red as blue, but I can imagine red things as blue. But if you did not perceive things as red, how would you know to relabel them as blue. The robot in this case would undergo the same operation when relabeling. It first has to perceive red, relabel to blue. No major difference unless you swap at hardware level which would be analogous to genetically engineering our eye cones to fire at altered wavelengths
esafak 3y ago
Robots can operate at the level of spectra (spectrophotometry) rather than color (projections of spectra, colorimetry). The mapping from the spectral power distribution to color co-ordinates for a given species is well understood and not arbitrary. The mapping from those co-ordinates (colors) to their names is also not arbitrary. The only issue I can think of that would cause confusion, which has nothing to do with AI, is metamerism, which is when different spectra are perceived to be the same color, because information gets lost when the infinite-dimensional spectrum is projected down to three dimensional color. In practice it is not a problem; most people are not even aware of the phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)
pixl97 3y ago
>It is almost impossible for a human to perceive color red as colour blue. Eh, you mean like humans seeing the color green as the color red? Not sure why red/blue matters at all in this case as stoplights are red/green, one of the highest risk of human failure color combinations! Furthermore direct color encoding of safety controls tends to be coupled with shape or placement. Stop signs are octagons. Stop lights have a directional component. If you're worried about an AI virus, I'd be far more worried about it just directly crashing the car, then induced confusion crashing the car.

andsoitis 3y ago

> There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, Not just when it arises during development or when it gets reduced due to disorders and brain injury, but also at it fluctuates under a range of other known (and possibly unknown) states such as when you're under general anesthesia[1]. Besides the when, there's also kind/degree/nature, such as during meditation, sleep, influence under substances, etc. Exciting field. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6703193/# https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6703193/#

TriNetra 3y ago
At the core, we are pure awareness devoid of any object (thoughts). We can direct this awareness which we call the art of attention. We're pure awareness and we decide to attend something. However, to attend and receive information from the physical plane, we need appropriate instruments. Brains and its organs of senses are those instruments. If these instruments have fault, obviously we as awareness don't receive enough information and it seems our consciousness is reduced. In waking state, we receive info from physical senses. In dream state, these senses are in suspended mode but mind is active in imagining the experiences in a virtual world and hence awareness has an instrument. In deep sleep, even mind is in a state of rest and hence awareness has almost no active instrument. Still, we awareness does exist and thus we know that we had a good or bad sleep when we wake up.
- placebo 3y ago
  I doubt the fact that we know we've had a good or bad sleep is related to the existence of awareness when in deep sleep. If someone remains indefinitely in deep sleep there will be no personal experience and therefore nothing to qualify as good or bad. When a sense of self returns with waking up then your body gives you the signals from the accumulated effects that you didn't sleep in a good position or whatever positive or negative aspect that has left a trace while you were out cold. I'm not negating the possibility that consciousness might be a primary aspect of existence - it's just that if that is the case then it is not something you have or can remember. It would be more accurate to say that it is something that has you, and as some spiritual masters would point out, it would be even more accurate not to say anything about it :)

ninetyninenine 3y ago

I personally think this is a loaded concept. This is what I think: For the technology we have now (LLM)s there does not and will not ever exist a test that can perfectly differentiate between an LLM and any human. We will always have LLMs that will pass the test and we will have humans that will fail. The reason for this is two fold and contradictory. The first reason is that consciousness is just a loaded concept. It's some arbitrary category with fuzzy boundaries. One persons definition of consciousness includes language another persons definition of consciousness includes logical thought. It's a made up collection of "features" that's it, no more or no less. It's a very arbitrary set of features too... mashed together for no rhyme or reason. The second reason is that LLMs already meet the criteria for what most people technically define as consciousness. The resistance we see nowadays is simply moving the goal posts. Five years ago people were in agreement that the turing test was a really good test. We've surpassed that and changed our definitions adding more stringent criteria for sentience. AI already meets the criteria for sentience the way we defined it from 1950-2020. Thus any test to measure sentience will always be a moving target.

smnplk 3y ago
Because you say consciousness is a loaded concept I will try to give you a description of what it actually is. I do agree that many people think different things when they talk about consciousness. It's your inner experience. Oh well, you can probably read this in a philosophy textbook. But what I think it really is, can only be explained with a thought experiment. Lets say you go into a pitch black sensory deprivation tank with salt water, so you can float in the water. Doctors give you injection that makes you forget about who you are, what is your name. You also forget about how to talk, you know no concept of the languge. You simply temporarily forget about you and what makes you really YOU in this world. The cemical in your blood also deprives you of any physical feeling, you don't feel any water around you. All there is to do is to gaze into darkness. And still...you are conscious, you have the inner experience. There is something like to be you, even in that state.
- Filligree 3y ago
  > And still...you are conscious, you have the inner experience. There is something like to be you, even in that state. I am honestly not convinced of this. I certainly can't imagine it.

yewenjie 3y ago

FWIW, Anil Seth from the list of authors has been a strong opponent of the Panpsychist view (consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, and everything is to some degree conscious) recently been popularized by David Chalmers et al.

lolinder 3y ago
I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Can you elaborate on why you felt this was important to point out?

witrak 3y ago

Relation between consciousness and intelligence seems to be a problem for everyone including the authors of the article. Hmm... Peter Watts, Blindsight. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology. [Wikipedia] Especially interesting, and contains a long list of literature.

squigz 3y ago
> Relation between consciousness and intelligence seems to be a problem for everyone including the authors of the article. Which parts of the paper gave you the impression the authors struggled with this?

htk 3y ago

If consciousness can't even be precisely defined, imagine devising a "test" for it. Laudable effort, but I don't see any progress resulting from it.

sctb 3y ago
The tests themselves are what bring precision to the notion of consciousness. Think of a medical example in which doctors are meant to determine whether or not a patient receives anaesthesia—surely a more effective empirical toolkit would be valuable in that situation, no? There seems to be a tendency with the discourse around consciousness to slip into vague philosophizing and thus run into the hard problem. I feel like if it doesn't make sense to think of it that way then don't think of it that way.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

I find it amusing that they launch into a discussion of the "urgent need" for consciousness tests without ever stopping to define what they mean by consciousness! The word seems to be heavily overloaded and refer to a bunch of unrelated phenomena, with most people disagreeing over exactly what it means, or more often just breezing past any definition of what it means and proceeding to argue about it regardless.

squigz 3y ago
I find this comment amusing, as a core premise of the article is trying to figure out how to define and measure consciousness and the problems that entails

narrator 3y ago

Arguing that an AI chatbot is conscious is like ancient romans asking "Is a really big fire the same as lightning?" They both burn down big trees and can kill people. Thus, they must be the same! A time traveller would tell them they don't understand lightning and they won't for 2000 years and trying to understand it through philosophizing is only going to some sort of random conjectures like the best way to avoid lightning is to burn down all the nearby trees as big fires need wood to burn, therefore lightning needs trees to strike.

grantcas 3y ago
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

rb-2 3y ago

I've noticed that conversations about "consciousness" tend to go in circles because the participants are using different definitions of the word without realizing it. Some people use the word "conscious" almost interchangeably with terms like "intelligent", "creative", or "responds to stimuli". Then people start saying things like LLMs are conscious because they pass the turing test. However, others (including the authors of this paper and myself) use the term "consciousness" to refer to something much more specific: the inner experience of perceiving the world. Here's a game you can play: describe the color red. You can give examples of things that are red (that other people will agree with). You can say that red is what happens when light of a certain wavelength enters your eyeball. You can even try saying things like "red is a warm color", grouping it with other colors and associating it with the sensation of temperature. But it is not possible to convey to another person how the color red appears to you. Red is completely internal experience. I can hook a light sensor up to an arduino and it can tell me that an apple is red and that grass is not red. But almost no one would conclude that the arduino is internally "experiencing" the color red like they themselves do. While the paper is using this more precise definition of consciousness, it seems to be trying to set up a framework for "detecting" consciousness by comparing external observations of the thing in question to external observations of adult human beings, who are widely considered by other adult human beings to be conscious entities [1]. I don't see how this approach could ever produce meaningful results because consciousness is entirely an internal experience. [1] There is a philosophical idea that a person can only ever be sure of their own consciousness; everyone else could be mindless machines and you have no way of knowing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism). Also related is the dead internet theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory).

barrysteve 3y ago
The solipisist can't find reason to form agreements with others. Others are mindless in his view. He can't define consciousness in terms of what we agree, there's nobody to agree with. So the game of describing the color red to others, cannot be played to any meaningful end. Red is red to the solipsist. Coming up with your own interpretation of consciousness is an ability truly conscious people have. It can never be completely agreed upon in a philosophical conversation without dogma or compromise. Both solipsism and total agreement, cannot be truthfully used as philosohical tools to contain consciousness.

shreezus 3y ago

Consciousness & intelligence are orthogonal. It’s highly plausible we achieve superintelligence before we have conscious machines. That said, understanding consciousness is not necessarily a prerequisite for engineering it. It may very much end up being an emergent phenomenon tied to sensory integration & processing, in which case it ends up self-assembling under the right circumstances. Exciting times…

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
So my thermostat is 'intelligent', just not 'conscious'?