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How about starting with a decent objective definition? So far, there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans, don't include ChatGPT, and of

How about starting with a decent objective definition? So far, there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans, don't include ChatGPT, and offer clear boundaries on which animals, insects, and bacteria experience "consciousness".

deleted 2y ago
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ruthmarx 2y ago
Well, that's because consciousness is an overloaded general term, we just need to use more specifics words. For example: > there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans, Self-awareness with a theory of mind. The opening paragraph on the wiki page for self-awareness is pretty much perfect. > don't include ChatGPT, LLMs are not aware in any sense, just intelligent in the same way a slime mold or plant can be. > and offer clear boundaries on which animals, insects, and bacteria experience "consciousness". Bacteria are likely just cellular automata, but animals (which includes insects btw) are all sentient due to having the ability to sense, due to having at a minimum body self-awareness.
- bccdee 2y ago
  "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. What people mean when they say "consciousness" has more to do with a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia. If you limit your definition to "self-awareness with a theory of mind," I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    > "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, Sure it does. "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" has sentience, i.e. the ability to process external stimuli via senses, as a base prerequisite. > which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. I've never understood why some people think so. I think it's the least interesting. It's basic biological machinery. The only difference between how you, a worm, and in the not too distant future a successor to the robot that implements the 300 neuron connectome of that same worm experience qualia, is that you have self-awareness. You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. That's what's special and interesting IMO. > a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia. I don't think it's tied to qualia at all. I think it's basically irrelevant aside from sentience being a necessary prerequisite. The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am". > I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. One of the problems in discussing this stuff is agreeing on terms so everyone can be sure to understand everyone else's point, but personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all.
    - bccdee 2y ago
      > the ability to process external stimuli via senses A camera does this. > You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. So does a camera pointed at a mirror. It captures sensory data about its own activity and then processes that data. Big whoop. Simply processing data related to your own experiences is completely mundane. Any program which ingests its own logs is, by your logic, conscious. > [Qualia are] basic biological machinery. You may have misunderstood qualia. When you see a red object, the sensory data reflecting the colour of the object is not a quale. The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale. The "inverted qualia" thought experiment can help make this distinction clear: Imagine a person who sees every red object as green and every green object as red. Their behaviour is still the exact same as it would otherwise be—to them, green means stop and red means go. They respond identically to the same wavelength, yet something is different. That something, as the thought experiment goes, is their qualia. Strictly speaking, I don't think qualia exist, but it certainly feels as if they do. That extra layer of perceived experience—the feeling that I exist in a world of vivid reds and greens and warmths and chills and touch and emotion and all these feelings that feel discrete, feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia. > The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am". The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. In fact, though they process sensory data, they can hardly be said to feel at all. I'd argue that qualia are what distinguishes mere sensing from feeling, at least on an intuitive level. Consciousness is a deeply intuitive notion, after all. > personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? I don't think "hard-problem"-style consciousness is really an extant phenomenon, but we certainly feel as if it is on a deep intuitive level. That's significant. The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place.
      - ruthmarx 2y ago
        > A camera does this. No, it doesn't. > So does a camera pointed at a mirror. No, there is no 'reflecting' going on here. > You may have misunderstood qualia. Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now. > The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale. You're assuming there is a 'redness' to feel at all. What yo describe is only possible with self-awareness. Otherwise, it's just sensory data. > feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia. I think it's the opposite. Qualia as you describe it is only possible as a result of self-awareness, not as a building block for it. > The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. That and other reasons is why it's a poor analogy. The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. Processing data is not reflecting. > If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? It's a particular theory/view of conciseness that not everyone adapts. It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea. > The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place. I maintain qualia isn't at all important here. The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness, then qualia. Basic sentience is a solved problem, and the more insight to qualia that you want will become clear once we have more insight into self-awareness.
- jfoster 2y ago
  From Wikipedia's 1st paragraph: "While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness." From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness. I would completely agree that current LLMs are not conscious, but it seems problematic to defining consciousness that (unless trained not to, as public facing ones have been) they will tell you all about how they are. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/15/24101088/anthropic-claude-opus-openai-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-google-consciousness https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/15/24101088/anthro...
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    > From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness. The problem is consciousness being an overloaded term. In this case it means base awareness, i.e. sentience, as opposed to higher level consciousness, such as what humans have.
bccdee 2y ago
It's remarkable how far consciousness discourse can progress without a substantive definition. The closest we can really get to an objective definition is to point at a certain set of feelings relating to the perceived "realness" of our sensations. "Consciousness is what makes red objects be red to me, rather than my eyes simply informing my brain that they emit a certain wavelength of light. But by putting it so plainly, we raise a much more urgent question: Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real. So I can't help but roll my eyes when I see an article arguing that "maybe quantum effects in neuronal microtubules do it." Do what? Give you a feeling? You don't need quantum anything for that.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real. That you wrote this comment is ample evidence it is real, unless you are using a very non-standard definition of consciousness.
  - bccdee 2y ago
    By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not. When I ask, "is consciousness real," I'm asking whether these feelings and intuitions represent some actual metaphysical reality about the human mind, or whether they are simply an artifact of how we perceive the world that manifests itself in the beliefs we espouse about ourselves. I certainly don't think that the existence of those feelings means anything about how our minds actually function. No belief or impression is, in and of itself, proof of anything when we might be naturally programmed to believe it.
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      > By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not. Sure. And you have that sense of here-ness and me-ness because you have self-awareness. You're able to reflect and ponder on your thoughts and experiences, as opposed to just somewhat blindly reacting to them. This is the difference between you and the robot you speak of. You can do that because you have self-awareness and meta-cognition, the same things required for you to write these replies that you have been writing. So I think my point stands, that the fact that you can write these messages and engage in these conversations should be more than sufficient proof that you are conscious and that consciousness is real.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ruthmarx 2y ago

Well, that's because consciousness is an overloaded general term, we just need to use more specifics words. For example: > there doesn't seem to be any good definitions that include humans, Self-awareness with a theory of mind. The opening paragraph on the wiki page for self-awareness is pretty much perfect. > don't include ChatGPT, LLMs are not aware in any sense, just intelligent in the same way a slime mold or plant can be. > and offer clear boundaries on which animals, insects, and bacteria experience "consciousness". Bacteria are likely just cellular automata, but animals (which includes insects btw) are all sentient due to having the ability to sense, due to having at a minimum body self-awareness.

bccdee 2y ago
"Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. What people mean when they say "consciousness" has more to do with a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia. If you limit your definition to "self-awareness with a theory of mind," I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" doesn't account for qualia, Sure it does. "Self-awareness with a theory of mind" has sentience, i.e. the ability to process external stimuli via senses, as a base prerequisite. > which IMO are the most important part of consciousness discourse. I've never understood why some people think so. I think it's the least interesting. It's basic biological machinery. The only difference between how you, a worm, and in the not too distant future a successor to the robot that implements the 300 neuron connectome of that same worm experience qualia, is that you have self-awareness. You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. That's what's special and interesting IMO. > a certain ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness that I think is closely tied with qualia. I don't think it's tied to qualia at all. I think it's basically irrelevant aside from sentience being a necessary prerequisite. The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am". > I think you're going to mostly talk past people who are trying to engage with the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. One of the problems in discussing this stuff is agreeing on terms so everyone can be sure to understand everyone else's point, but personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all.
  - bccdee 2y ago
    > the ability to process external stimuli via senses A camera does this. > You have the ability to reflect on your experiences. So does a camera pointed at a mirror. It captures sensory data about its own activity and then processes that data. Big whoop. Simply processing data related to your own experiences is completely mundane. Any program which ingests its own logs is, by your logic, conscious. > [Qualia are] basic biological machinery. You may have misunderstood qualia. When you see a red object, the sensory data reflecting the colour of the object is not a quale. The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale. The "inverted qualia" thought experiment can help make this distinction clear: Imagine a person who sees every red object as green and every green object as red. Their behaviour is still the exact same as it would otherwise be—to them, green means stop and red means go. They respond identically to the same wavelength, yet something is different. That something, as the thought experiment goes, is their qualia. Strictly speaking, I don't think qualia exist, but it certainly feels as if they do. That extra layer of perceived experience—the feeling that I exist in a world of vivid reds and greens and warmths and chills and touch and emotion and all these feelings that feel discrete, feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia. > The here-ness and me-ness you refer to is a function of self-awareness, not qualia. "I think, therefore I am". The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. In fact, though they process sensory data, they can hardly be said to feel at all. I'd argue that qualia are what distinguishes mere sensing from feeling, at least on an intuitive level. Consciousness is a deeply intuitive notion, after all. > personally I don't think the so called "hard problem" of consciousness is the hard problem at all If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? I don't think "hard-problem"-style consciousness is really an extant phenomenon, but we certainly feel as if it is on a deep intuitive level. That's significant. The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place.
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      > A camera does this. No, it doesn't. > So does a camera pointed at a mirror. No, there is no 'reflecting' going on here. > You may have misunderstood qualia. Not at all. Been debating this stuff with vegans for years now. > The platonic thing, the redness that you feel on the level of conscious awareness, is a quale. You're assuming there is a 'redness' to feel at all. What yo describe is only possible with self-awareness. Otherwise, it's just sensory data. > feel like they're happening to me—that's what people mean when they talk about consciousness. I think that's all downstream from the illusion of qualia. I think it's the opposite. Qualia as you describe it is only possible as a result of self-awareness, not as a building block for it. > The camera or the log-ingesting program don't have any emotional sense of vivid lived experience, though. That and other reasons is why it's a poor analogy. The camera is not sensing, and is not reflecting on anything. Processing data is not reflecting. > If it isn't hard, then why do so many people struggle with it? It's a particular theory/view of conciseness that not everyone adapts. It's like asking why people struggle with any other philosophical idea. > The non-existence of "real" consciousness raises the question of why we believe we are conscious so strongly to begin with. I think if you slip away from the concept of qualia, you lose the ability to understand why we care so much about consciousness in the first place. I maintain qualia isn't at all important here. The hierarchy goes sensory data i.e. sentience, then self-awareness, then qualia. Basic sentience is a solved problem, and the more insight to qualia that you want will become clear once we have more insight into self-awareness.
jfoster 2y ago
From Wikipedia's 1st paragraph: "While consciousness is being aware of one's body and environment, self-awareness is the recognition of that consciousness." From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness. I would completely agree that current LLMs are not conscious, but it seems problematic to defining consciousness that (unless trained not to, as public facing ones have been) they will tell you all about how they are. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/15/24101088/anthropic-claude-opus-openai-chatgpt-artificial-intelligence-google-consciousness https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/3/15/24101088/anthro...
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > From that, I think it's clear that defining self-awareness relies on the definition of consciousness as opposed to the other way around. I don't think it moves us any closer to a definition of consciousness. The problem is consciousness being an overloaded term. In this case it means base awareness, i.e. sentience, as opposed to higher level consciousness, such as what humans have.

bccdee 2y ago

It's remarkable how far consciousness discourse can progress without a substantive definition. The closest we can really get to an objective definition is to point at a certain set of feelings relating to the perceived "realness" of our sensations. "Consciousness is what makes red objects be red to me, rather than my eyes simply informing my brain that they emit a certain wavelength of light. But by putting it so plainly, we raise a much more urgent question: Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real. So I can't help but roll my eyes when I see an article arguing that "maybe quantum effects in neuronal microtubules do it." Do what? Give you a feeling? You don't need quantum anything for that.

ruthmarx 2y ago
> Is consciousness even real, or is it just a feeling? And I've never heard a satisfactory argument that it is real. That you wrote this comment is ample evidence it is real, unless you are using a very non-standard definition of consciousness.
- bccdee 2y ago
  By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not. When I ask, "is consciousness real," I'm asking whether these feelings and intuitions represent some actual metaphysical reality about the human mind, or whether they are simply an artifact of how we perceive the world that manifests itself in the beliefs we espouse about ourselves. I certainly don't think that the existence of those feelings means anything about how our minds actually function. No belief or impression is, in and of itself, proof of anything when we might be naturally programmed to believe it.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    > By consciousness, I mean my ineffable sense of here-ness and me-ness; the feeling that all the subjective experiences of my senses, redness and coldness and pleasure and longing are all "real things" happening to a "real self" that exists to experience the world in a way that a mere robot with the same behaviour might not. Sure. And you have that sense of here-ness and me-ness because you have self-awareness. You're able to reflect and ponder on your thoughts and experiences, as opposed to just somewhat blindly reacting to them. This is the difference between you and the robot you speak of. You can do that because you have self-awareness and meta-cognition, the same things required for you to write these replies that you have been writing. So I think my point stands, that the fact that you can write these messages and engage in these conversations should be more than sufficient proof that you are conscious and that consciousness is real.