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In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness, though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of variation in this among neuroscie

In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness, though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of variation in this among neuroscientists, who I would expect to answer yes only to humans and animals. Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious more or less unambiguously, at the very least. Consequently, it can be studied at least at that level of specificity. From that point of view we have very strong evidence that consciousness is very tightly correlated with ongoing neural activity in certain architectures. From there I think we can begin to reasonably put pretty solid answers to the above list, particularly if you allow levels of consciousness to come into it. My major point is that people love to cavalierly assert "we know nothing about consciousness whatsoever, anything goes, frankly" but I think that pretty radically oversimplifies and undersells what we do understand.

fooker 3y ago
Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious. I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.
- fooker 3y ago
  Rephrasing this: What would it take for something not categorized under animal to be considered conscious in your book?
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    I'd sort of say its two fold: 1. the object in question would need to behave in a conscious way 2. I'd have to look in the guts of the object and see evidence of some kind that the processes I was observing were inherent in the design of the thing. To clarify a bit about the second point: I can talk to a phone with a person on the other end of it and it can demonstrate some properties of consciousness. If I didn't know what phones were I'd be tempted to identify this behavior with consciousness if not for the second criteria. In the case of a phone, if we take it apart and see how it works we can see that it is fit to transmit a voice from somewhere else, but not to generate the complex responses I was observing in the conversation. Obviously the case of a language model, for instance, is significantly more complicated, since it does have some of the behaviors of a consciousness and some of the structures, but my hunch is that it doesn't really have enough of either to count. Definitely not discounting the possibility that we'll have artificial consciousnesses some day, I'm just skeptical language models are it.
    - fooker 3y ago
      1 is circular. 2 invites our prejudice for how we think conscious could work.
      - nathan_compton 3y ago
        It is spiral shaped, sure, like basically all scientific inquiry.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite their sophistication, language models aren't conscious because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and language models don't need most of the circuitry that underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be wrong about this. I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
  - fooker 3y ago
    >decades of neuroscience research Could you point to some credible neuroscience research that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI is in in machine learning research papers.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      Hardly. Christof Koch wrote a whole book about it.
      - fooker 3y ago
        This guy? :) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness - gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness. You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  Yes, I too went to high school. If you think "what if philosophical zombies!?" is the extent of the philosophy and science of consciousness, well, I don't know what to tell you.
  - CuriouslyC 3y ago
    Yet you don't understand the difference between fMRI neural correlates and "understanding how consciousness is created"

fooker 3y ago

Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious. I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.

fooker 3y ago
Rephrasing this: What would it take for something not categorized under animal to be considered conscious in your book?
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  I'd sort of say its two fold: 1. the object in question would need to behave in a conscious way 2. I'd have to look in the guts of the object and see evidence of some kind that the processes I was observing were inherent in the design of the thing. To clarify a bit about the second point: I can talk to a phone with a person on the other end of it and it can demonstrate some properties of consciousness. If I didn't know what phones were I'd be tempted to identify this behavior with consciousness if not for the second criteria. In the case of a phone, if we take it apart and see how it works we can see that it is fit to transmit a voice from somewhere else, but not to generate the complex responses I was observing in the conversation. Obviously the case of a language model, for instance, is significantly more complicated, since it does have some of the behaviors of a consciousness and some of the structures, but my hunch is that it doesn't really have enough of either to count. Definitely not discounting the possibility that we'll have artificial consciousnesses some day, I'm just skeptical language models are it.
  - fooker 3y ago
    1 is circular. 2 invites our prejudice for how we think conscious could work.
    - nathan_compton 3y ago
      It is spiral shaped, sure, like basically all scientific inquiry.
nathan_compton 3y ago
I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite their sophistication, language models aren't conscious because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and language models don't need most of the circuitry that underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be wrong about this. I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.
- fooker 3y ago
  >decades of neuroscience research Could you point to some credible neuroscience research that mentions consciousness? My impression was the word consciousness is a taboo in those circles, much like AGI is in in machine learning research papers.
  - nathan_compton 3y ago
    Hardly. Christof Koch wrote a whole book about it.
    - fooker 3y ago
      This guy? :) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Consciousness is observable huh? By rights you are a philosophical zombie, and only your passing resemblance to me - who I know from first principles possesses consciousness - gives even an inkling that you possess actual consciousness. You are suffering from the a little knowledge is a dangerous thing trap. This rabbit hole goes much deeper than you think, you just haven't developed awareness to recognize that yet.

nathan_compton 3y ago
Yes, I too went to high school. If you think "what if philosophical zombies!?" is the extent of the philosophy and science of consciousness, well, I don't know what to tell you.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Yet you don't understand the difference between fMRI neural correlates and "understanding how consciousness is created"