5 ms·

We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us"

• ben_w 2y ago
  I know that at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented. But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P
  • golf_mike 2y ago
    Can you provide proof for the first claim?
    • ben_w 2y ago
      Which part exactly are you seeking proof of, and to what standard? "I know" is unprovable to others, unless you examine the wiring of my brain. (But then, what is "knowledge"?) "at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented." — it's always possible that I'm a Bolzmann brain and this was just luck. I don't see how the term could have been invented by a mind that didn't actually have it, except with astronomical low probably random events.
  • vixen99 2y ago
    In thinking about this perennial problem it's worth bearing in mind that human beings pick up and process an immense amount of data on a continuous basis, that is currently unavailable to any LLM.
    • elicksaur 2y ago
      And all on an estimated 100 watts!
      • ben_w 2y ago
        20 for the brain, 60-125 for the whole body depending on if you mean "normally" or "metabolic minimum".
        • anticensor 2y ago
          The "metabolic maximum" is around 1250, though. And a mediocre lifting or running momentarily increases it from 125 to 700.
        • elicksaur 2y ago
          Yeah there’s different ways you could slice it. I was including the whole system, since if the GPU’s cooling system breaks, it won’t be useful for long.
  • vidarh 2y ago
    No, we don't. We don't even know if existence has an extent in time, because our only way of "interfacing" with time is our experience of memory we can't prove is real. For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion. But of course this isn't a useful assumption in most respects.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      Ah, I see you're more of an A. J. Ayer fan than a Descartes fan. I think that if an LLM has any consciousness, it would be an experience like this — one where the past was a fiction it invented to fit the prompt, and the "now" was the only moment before the mind was reset. But I'd put that in the same basket as my… ah, nephew comment? Cousin comment? I guess you'd call it that if we have parent comments etc.? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40406398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40406398 What you say is not wrong in principle, but it's in the same "cognitively unstable" basket as a Boltzmann brain, where to accept it would mean I couldn't trust my own reason to believe it.
      • vidarh 2y ago
        The reasoning stands entirely on its own. There's nothing you need to "believe". That you don't have a way to disprove it is close enough to proof. The problem with it is that it's not giving us anything useful. OK, so maybe this moment is the only one there is? Now what? Accordingly the only reasonable recourse is for the most part to ignore it, and add an implicit "assuming my memory and senses are roughly trustworthy" to every assumption. This is the same reason I'm a firm materialist even though we could be in a simulation, or brains in vats: absent evidence of either, the only thing giving us useful information is our senses and our introspection, and so the most useful approach is to assume they are valid until proven otherwise.
        • ben_w 2y ago
          > The reasoning stands entirely on its own. There's nothing you need to "believe". That you don't have a way to disprove it is close enough to proof. Not so, for it is like the liar's paradox, except with high probabilities rather than Boolean logic. If you assume it is true, it follows that you can't trust your own state of mind, and that all statements including "I am just a thought" become suspect, as there is nothing leading up to them to give them justification.
  • rixed 2y ago
    Of course, any philosophical zombie could have invented it. Which makes clear for me how loosely consciousness is bound to senses, including that of introspection. It actually makes me feel that this consciousness we can barely describe is but a faint experience of a distant, largely foreign thing. Like we know the experience of matter that we get from our senses is a grossly simplified version of the real thing (that we still don't know exactly of course, but we already know enough to see how far away our immediate mental model is from the truth)
• pas 2y ago
  Joscha Bach's model of "evolution of a shared consciousness, but compartmentalized into separate bodies" seems to be the one that makes the most sense currently
• smokel 2y ago
  Consciousness might be overrated. It could simply be a short-term memory of the state you were in.
  • a_random_canuck 2y ago
    This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality. There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      And the reason that it is overrated, is because it has to feel special for the bearers because it makes them prioritise their survival. Consciousness is largely a way to have a reward function for set of behaviours that keep you alive through reason. It appears at a level where reasoning is intelligent enough that you need a more complex reward function.
      • umvi 2y ago
        This seems like the secular version of "the devil made me do it". We can't be accountable for any of our actions because we are all just molecular machines playing out their predetermined outcome.
        • chr1 2y ago
          We are molecular machines and although the outcome is predetermined, the only way to find out the outcome, is for the machine itself to follow through its course. So this is exactly opposite of "devil made me do it" because you do something not because of external force or because of random chance but because of initial state of the machine which makes you who you are.
          • 2y ago
• everdrive 2y ago
  Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition. Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is colloquially understood by almost everyone. Asking whether humans are conscious (and I know you were being somewhat facetious) feels like it fits into this frame of thought. Consciousness, as most people understand it, is something which almost all people possess and something like a rock cannot possess. I think it's perfectly fine to argue that a rock or a tree can be conscious in some way. However, this does require a precise definition of consciousness in order to clearly differentiate it from the loose colloquial notion that most people hold.
  • whoitwas 2y ago
    There's no definition because we haven't been able to quantify it.
    • ben_w 2y ago
      That's not the problem. There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence.
      • anon291 2y ago
        > There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence. When a word has a myriad meanings, none of which are generally accepted, we typically say the word has no definition. Sure, particular senses of its meaning may be well-defined, but the word itself is elusive.
        • 2y ago
• wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
  To be fair, that's all we know. That's all we are. That's all we can truly say exists in our world. All the theories, names & everything we have are mental models around what we call objective reality.
• zer00eyz 2y ago
  > We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. This isnt an interesting path outside the paradox of proof. We are fine disregarding that there are truths that are unprovable in math... I think we need to make that leap in this realm as well. Concisousness is also probably a bad term, concepts like sentience and sapience need to be the ones we are talking about. We might get to one, long before the other...
  • vidarh 2y ago
    It is relevant here because it goes to the very core of what we're talking about, though.
• foobarian 2y ago
  > We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. This is why so far the Kantian philosophy makes the most sense to me. I can tell that something is there because I am thinking it, but can't tell about any others. The really scary thing is the question of why this particular body at this particular time. It's like when born, organisms generate a "consciousness vortex/attractor" that binds to a particular identity. It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body (unless it's like coroutines and it doesn't matter which identity ends up in the body). We also know that removing parts of the brain can cause memories and certain features to go away.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    > It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body I always found it even more interesting how your body can switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try holding your breath for example—do it too long, and your body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a working state before attempting a new deployment.
  • silver_silver 2y ago
    It’s possible that consciousness is merely observation and agency, or less comfortably, just observation. A lot of one’s identity comes from their experiences, particularly as a child, and like you say: memory has been proven to be physically rooted in the brain. We could all be the same observer moving around in time and space, a new one every morning, or the same continuously, and there would be very little way to tell. Who can say whether the day to day fluctuations in our behaviour are biological or a result of a different will driving us?
• holoduke 2y ago
  Unless you can be conscious in multiple places at the same time. Theoretically it must be possible by dissecting the brain piece by piece and restoring it to one afterwards.
• m463 2y ago
  What I find interesting is how people don't think animals are conscious, but then there will be some article where the partner of a goose is killed and the goose wails and moans like this is a surprise.