6 ms·

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 pl

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.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > none of which are generally accepted It's not "none", though. A paramedic will absolutely know exactly what they mean when they're performing a test for consciousness, it's just that test isn't useful in this context. "Awareness of internal and external existence" is another, and I think Claude 3 demonstrates behaviour which fits this meaning of the term. Qualia is a huge open question because nobody knows what that one would mean or imply or how to test for it. And so on.
lumb63 2y ago
But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is, > Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you can fake intelligence. Basically consciousness might just be what we call the inner workings of the mind of a sufficiently advanced agent, one capable at least of meaningfully interacting with other agents around it. I'm not saying this is the correct theory, but it's a perfectly valid theory of consciousness, just like all the others.
  - dkz999 2y ago
    I really like equating faking intelligence to consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being intelligent'. In addition to having meaningful interactions with others, i would add consciousness also requires meaningful interaction with its-self. What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which, personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-typed. And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge you can get in on, real cheap...
  - Scarblac 2y ago
    Bit it's useless,its circular. The definition must have something to do with the experience of qualia, that's the hard to explain part.
goatlover 2y ago
It's well defined in the philosophical literature as the felt experience of colors, sounds, pains, etc which make up our subjective experiences of perception, imagination, dreams, etc, Qualia is the technical word, but it's also controversial, depending on the philosopher's position on the hard problem and their views on perception (they might replace qualia with representational or relational properties). Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number, composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains are properties of a perceiver.
- anon291 2y ago
  Well-defined in the philosophical sense, perhaps (though I think some would disagree). It is not well-defined in the scientific sense. There is no way to quantify or classify something as conscious.
unconsciousrais 2y ago
What if the distinction we are all groping for is immortality at the cost of determinism? A machine can be powered down and dismantled. A new machine can be built and fed the exact same training data, or run the same model, and presumably it would behave the exact same way. Any entity whose behaviors are that regeneratable and that replicable is perhaps less "conscious" than entities which are not.
telmo 2y ago
> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all! Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent. LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!
  - captainclam 2y ago
    Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality. The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted. I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle. I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.
coldtea 2y ago
>Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we need a good definition of to understand what we're talking about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion - it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things aren't, because it's directly experienced.

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.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > none of which are generally accepted It's not "none", though. A paramedic will absolutely know exactly what they mean when they're performing a test for consciousness, it's just that test isn't useful in this context. "Awareness of internal and external existence" is another, and I think Claude 3 demonstrates behaviour which fits this meaning of the term. Qualia is a huge open question because nobody knows what that one would mean or imply or how to test for it. And so on.

lumb63 2y ago

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

tsimionescu 2y ago
I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is, > Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you can fake intelligence. Basically consciousness might just be what we call the inner workings of the mind of a sufficiently advanced agent, one capable at least of meaningfully interacting with other agents around it. I'm not saying this is the correct theory, but it's a perfectly valid theory of consciousness, just like all the others.
- dkz999 2y ago
  I really like equating faking intelligence to consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being intelligent'. In addition to having meaningful interactions with others, i would add consciousness also requires meaningful interaction with its-self. What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which, personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-typed. And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge you can get in on, real cheap...
- Scarblac 2y ago
  Bit it's useless,its circular. The definition must have something to do with the experience of qualia, that's the hard to explain part.

goatlover 2y ago

It's well defined in the philosophical literature as the felt experience of colors, sounds, pains, etc which make up our subjective experiences of perception, imagination, dreams, etc, Qualia is the technical word, but it's also controversial, depending on the philosopher's position on the hard problem and their views on perception (they might replace qualia with representational or relational properties). Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number, composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains are properties of a perceiver.

anon291 2y ago
Well-defined in the philosophical sense, perhaps (though I think some would disagree). It is not well-defined in the scientific sense. There is no way to quantify or classify something as conscious.

unconsciousrais 2y ago

What if the distinction we are all groping for is immortality at the cost of determinism? A machine can be powered down and dismantled. A new machine can be built and fed the exact same training data, or run the same model, and presumably it would behave the exact same way. Any entity whose behaviors are that regeneratable and that replicable is perhaps less "conscious" than entities which are not.

telmo 2y ago

> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

Der_Einzige 2y ago
That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all! Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent. LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!
- captainclam 2y ago
  Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality. The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted. I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.
zero-sharp 2y ago
I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle. I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose the idea that in order to learn science I should have to spend time introspecting.

coldtea 2y ago

>Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we need a good definition of to understand what we're talking about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion - it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things aren't, because it's directly experienced.