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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 univ
by 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 agoRephrasing this: What would it take for something not categorized under animal to be considered conscious in your book?
- nathan_compton 3y agoI'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 ago1 is circular. 2 invites our prejudice for how we think conscious could work.
- nathan_compton 3y agoIt is spiral shaped, sure, like basically all scientific inquiry.
- nathan_compton 3y agoI 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 agoHardly. Christof Koch wrote a whole book about it.
- fooker 3y agoThis guy? :) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8