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Author here: I'm grateful for the comments; thanks especially for interesting references. Context for the article: I'm working on an ambitious long-term projec

Author here: I'm grateful for the comments; thanks especially for interesting references. Context for the article: I'm working on an ambitious long-term project to write a book about consciousness from a scientific and analytic (versus, say, a meditation-oriented) perspective. I didn't write this fact in the article, but what I'd love to happen is that I meet people with a similar optimistic perspective, and to learn and improve my communication skills via follow-up conversations. If anyone is interested in chatting more about the topic of the article, please do email me. My email is in my HN profile. Thanks!

Animats 2y ago
> a book about consciousness Too many people have written books about consciousness. There's much tail-chasing in that space, all the way back to Aristotle. Write one about common sense. Current AI sucks at common sense. We can't even achieve the level of common sense of a squirrel yet. Working definition of common sense: getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup.
- cornholio 2y ago
  That's not a working definition of common sense. You've pulled as dependencies the entirety of human reasoning and self-reflection, a theory of mind for all sentient creatures you encounter and a gargantuan amount of context sensitive socio-cultural learning, to name but a few.
- ben_w 2y ago
  For most of my life, people use "common sense" as an insult, "XYZ has no common sense" or similar — therefore I think it is, in practice, the overton window of the person saying it. Others define it as "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument", which LLMs absolutely do demonstrate. What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Same could be said for a driver less train I suppose or the auto-pilot on a 747.
    - creer 2y ago
      I think you can go to a CNC machine, or a rock.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot. That speaks well of the Waymo autopilot, which does considerably better than that. Tesla "self driving", not so much.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      The Waymo percentage was calculated based on the disengagement rate and a guess at the average speed. Tesla may be the same or not, but they aren't publishing current numbers where I could find them, only really old numbers. Not that the exact value matters, because so far as I can tell the only autopilot worse than your threshold was the Uber one that crashed into a pedestrian pushing a bike. Even Tesla's 2016 version beat that.
- tgaj 2y ago
  "Common sense" is just knowledge about society and our environment. It's not some kind of magic.
FrancisMoodie 2y ago
Gödel, Escher, Bach - An eternal Braid is a great book about consciousness from a logical standpoint. Is this a work you're familiar with?
- Vecr 2y ago
  Eternal Golden Braid, that is. Quite a bit of it's outdated at this point, but the explanation of uncomputability is probably still the best.
freilanzer 2y ago
"The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality" could be interesting to you. The framework it presents tries to explain attention and world models, and does so quite convincingly in my opinion.
- tylerneylon 2y ago
  Thanks!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- transpute 2y ago
  "Design for a brain" by W. Ross Ashby (1953) is also worth a look, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986 > In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".
mensetmanusman 2y ago
Ones own consciousness is actually one of the few things you can’t apply the scientific method to. It will be a good practice to see how deeply terms can be applied in order to combat this gap.
- n4r9 2y ago
  How do you mean? I can conceive of scientific experiments involving consciousness. For example: Hypothesis: Consuming LSD gives me a hallucinatory experience. Method: Randomized, blind trial. Every Saturday morning I consume one tab of either LSD or water, sit in a blank white room with a sitter (who does nothing), and record my experience. Results: Every time after consuming water, I have no visual hallucinations and get bored. Every time after consuming LSD, I see shifting colour patterns, imagine music playing on the walls, and feel at one with the world. Conclusion: Results strongly support hypothesis.
  - falcor84 2y ago
    If I recall correctly, a true hallucination is one that the person cannot distinguish from reality, so at best you'd measure "pseudohallucinations". But even then, your approach would suffer from all the limitations of phenomenology.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      I see what you mean about "hallucination"; I guess I was using the looser definition as per Wikipedia of a perception that "has the compelling sense of reality". I'd be keen to understand those limitations of phenomenonology and how they apply to this specific experiment, if you have an opportunity to expand.
      - falcor84 2y ago
        I'm not that knowledgeable about this particular area. My familiarity in this area is mostly around confabulations[0] and false memories[1] such as those studied by Elizabeth Loftus[2]. I'm not sure if that would apply directly to your proposed experiment, but my concern is that what we experience as memories can sometimes apparently be generated on the fly rather than accessing something that was there before. In general, these kind of phenomenological studies suffer from subjectivity, and are very difficult to connect to explanatory mechanisms, without additional objective evidence. One relevant approach to deal with this is Dennett's Heterophenomenology[3], which seeks to combine the subject's own impressions with other external evidence - so in your case, instead of having the sitter do nothing, you may want to pay them to gather additional objective evidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology
lukasb 2y ago
Minksy's The Society of Mind is a must-read
rerdavies 2y ago
Also a must read: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker. Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in. Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.
jcynix 2y ago
Dennett has walked that path before. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. [...] Quoted from rom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... Regarding the multiple layers: the most interesting thoughts I read about theories of a mind, are the books by Marvin Minsky, namely: The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine which should be more widely known. More on Minsky's ideas on “Matter, Mind, and Models” are mentioned in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i
ypeterholmes 2y ago
Not seeing your email, so I'll post here. I wrote up a similar theory of consciousness here: https://peterholmes.medium.com/the-conscious-computer-af5037439175 https://peterholmes.medium.com/the-conscious-computer-af5037... In particular, I think there's a nice overlap between my description of self-awareness and yours. You mention a model capable of seeing its own output, but I take it a step further and indicate model capable of generating its own simulated actions and results. Curious what you think, thanks!

Animats 2y ago

> a book about consciousness Too many people have written books about consciousness. There's much tail-chasing in that space, all the way back to Aristotle. Write one about common sense. Current AI sucks at common sense. We can't even achieve the level of common sense of a squirrel yet. Working definition of common sense: getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup.

cornholio 2y ago
That's not a working definition of common sense. You've pulled as dependencies the entirety of human reasoning and self-reflection, a theory of mind for all sentient creatures you encounter and a gargantuan amount of context sensitive socio-cultural learning, to name but a few.
ben_w 2y ago
For most of my life, people use "common sense" as an insult, "XYZ has no common sense" or similar — therefore I think it is, in practice, the overton window of the person saying it. Others define it as "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument", which LLMs absolutely do demonstrate. What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Same could be said for a driver less train I suppose or the auto-pilot on a 747.
  - creer 2y ago
    I think you can go to a CNC machine, or a rock.
- Animats 2y ago
  > What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot. That speaks well of the Waymo autopilot, which does considerably better than that. Tesla "self driving", not so much.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The Waymo percentage was calculated based on the disengagement rate and a guess at the average speed. Tesla may be the same or not, but they aren't publishing current numbers where I could find them, only really old numbers. Not that the exact value matters, because so far as I can tell the only autopilot worse than your threshold was the Uber one that crashed into a pedestrian pushing a bike. Even Tesla's 2016 version beat that.
tgaj 2y ago
"Common sense" is just knowledge about society and our environment. It's not some kind of magic.

FrancisMoodie 2y ago

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An eternal Braid is a great book about consciousness from a logical standpoint. Is this a work you're familiar with?

Vecr 2y ago
Eternal Golden Braid, that is. Quite a bit of it's outdated at this point, but the explanation of uncomputability is probably still the best.

freilanzer 2y ago

"The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality" could be interesting to you. The framework it presents tries to explain attention and world models, and does so quite convincingly in my opinion.

tylerneylon 2y ago
Thanks!
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
transpute 2y ago
"Design for a brain" by W. Ross Ashby (1953) is also worth a look, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986 > In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".

mensetmanusman 2y ago

Ones own consciousness is actually one of the few things you can’t apply the scientific method to. It will be a good practice to see how deeply terms can be applied in order to combat this gap.

n4r9 2y ago
How do you mean? I can conceive of scientific experiments involving consciousness. For example: Hypothesis: Consuming LSD gives me a hallucinatory experience. Method: Randomized, blind trial. Every Saturday morning I consume one tab of either LSD or water, sit in a blank white room with a sitter (who does nothing), and record my experience. Results: Every time after consuming water, I have no visual hallucinations and get bored. Every time after consuming LSD, I see shifting colour patterns, imagine music playing on the walls, and feel at one with the world. Conclusion: Results strongly support hypothesis.
- falcor84 2y ago
  If I recall correctly, a true hallucination is one that the person cannot distinguish from reality, so at best you'd measure "pseudohallucinations". But even then, your approach would suffer from all the limitations of phenomenology.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    I see what you mean about "hallucination"; I guess I was using the looser definition as per Wikipedia of a perception that "has the compelling sense of reality". I'd be keen to understand those limitations of phenomenonology and how they apply to this specific experiment, if you have an opportunity to expand.
    - falcor84 2y ago
      I'm not that knowledgeable about this particular area. My familiarity in this area is mostly around confabulations[0] and false memories[1] such as those studied by Elizabeth Loftus[2]. I'm not sure if that would apply directly to your proposed experiment, but my concern is that what we experience as memories can sometimes apparently be generated on the fly rather than accessing something that was there before. In general, these kind of phenomenological studies suffer from subjectivity, and are very difficult to connect to explanatory mechanisms, without additional objective evidence. One relevant approach to deal with this is Dennett's Heterophenomenology[3], which seeks to combine the subject's own impressions with other external evidence - so in your case, instead of having the sitter do nothing, you may want to pay them to gather additional objective evidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Loftus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology

lukasb 2y ago

Minksy's The Society of Mind is a must-read

rerdavies 2y ago

Also a must read: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker. Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in. Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.

jcynix 2y ago

Dennett has walked that path before. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. [...] Quoted from rom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... Regarding the multiple layers: the most interesting thoughts I read about theories of a mind, are the books by Marvin Minsky, namely: The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine which should be more widely known. More on Minsky's ideas on “Matter, Mind, and Models” are mentioned in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i

ypeterholmes 2y ago

Not seeing your email, so I'll post here. I wrote up a similar theory of consciousness here: https://peterholmes.medium.com/the-conscious-computer-af5037439175 https://peterholmes.medium.com/the-conscious-computer-af5037... In particular, I think there's a nice overlap between my description of self-awareness and yours. You mention a model capable of seeing its own output, but I take it a step further and indicate model capable of generating its own simulated actions and results. Curious what you think, thanks!