4 ms·

Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?

nananana9 8mo ago
Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.
- dsymonds 8mo ago
  Humanity made no meaningful progress in getting "to the stars" for thousands of years too, then in the space of a few decades we did.
- rvnx 8mo ago
  We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ? These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate. For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society. I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact. Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ? We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
  - gambiting 8mo ago
    >>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate. See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
    - pixl97 8mo ago
      We will never prove machines are intelligent. We will only prove humans are not.
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      It's a pretend intelligence at best. The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had. The next best time to start paying attention is now.
      - gambiting 8mo ago
        >>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having? >>I sure wish I had. And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did? >>The next best time to start paying attention is now. I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
        CamperBob2 8mo ago
        "Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO. And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did? I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end. As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't. Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done. ...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation. Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
  - shinycode 8mo ago
    Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge. The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point. Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ? They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ? If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
    - TheLNL 8mo ago
      Humans have a mechanism to make live changes to their neural network and clean up messes while sleeping. I see no reason for llms to not be able to do this other than the fact that it is resource intensive (which will continue to go down)
      - shinycode 8mo ago
        The analogy holds technically, but there’s a missing piece: the brain doesn’t just update weights, it does so guided by experience that matters to a situated, embodied agent with drives and stakes. Sleep consolidation isn’t random cleanup, it’s selective based on salience and emotion. An LLM updating more efficiently is progress, but it’s still optimizing a loss function. Whether that ever approximates what the brain does during sleep depends entirely on whether you think the what (weight updates) is sufficient, or whether the why (relevance to a lived experience) is what makes it meaningful. So yes, the resource argument will weaken over time. But the architectural gap may be deeper than just compute.
  - grantcas 8mo ago
    [dead]
javier123454321 8mo ago
Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.
- avmich 8mo ago
  There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
  - javier123454321 8mo ago
    I wish you happiness.
- pluralmonad 8mo ago
  What is intuitive to you, may not be to others. Might you be engaging in intellectual self trickery?
  - javier123454321 8mo ago
    I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.
    - buzzerbetrayed 8mo ago
      No, you’re the one playing the definition game. You took a word out of a sentence GP said, completely changed what the word meant, and then argued against the new definition. Never mind that you need to learn about the god of the gaps. But what you’re doing here isn’t even relevant to GPs main point.
- 8mo ago
shinycode 8mo ago
Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter. The other camp says matter comes from consciousness. Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  So some kind of ether conscious energy animated cells to fight entropy?
  - shinycode 8mo ago
    Not necessarily either but the serious version of the argument is that life consistently acts against local entropy in purposeful ways, and pure physics doesn’t obviously explain why matter would “want” to do that. Consciousness as a organizing principle is one answer. It’s speculative, but it’s not obviously wrong
- rcxdude 8mo ago
  I mean, the nature of subjectivity prevents you from knowing anything but your own experience. There is not any objective evidence that could truly distinguish solipsism from panpsychism, so philosophically you need to ask a different question to hope to get a useful answer.
  - shinycode 8mo ago
    That’s a genuinely strong point. You can only verify consciousness from the inside, your own. Everything else is inference. No objective measurement can definitively distinguish “other minds exist” from solipsism. That’s not a bug in the argument, it’s a fundamental epistemic limit. Which is exactly why this question may never be fully resolved empirically
- krisoft 8mo ago
bglazer 8mo ago
I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I think the true deep complexity of the human brain and consciousness is worth the title.
- javier123454321 8mo ago
  Exactly
visarga 8mo ago
> Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.

nananana9 8mo ago

Given that this is the one problem that neither scientists nor philosophers have made any progress on in 3000 years, we don't have the tools to begin tackling it and nobody is making serious attempts, it may very well be impossible.

dsymonds 8mo ago
Humanity made no meaningful progress in getting "to the stars" for thousands of years too, then in the space of a few decades we did.
rvnx 8mo ago
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ? These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate. For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society. I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact. Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ? We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
- gambiting 8mo ago
  >>These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate. See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    We will never prove machines are intelligent. We will only prove humans are not.
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    It's a pretend intelligence at best. The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had. The next best time to start paying attention is now.
    - gambiting 8mo ago
      >>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having? >>I sure wish I had. And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did? >>The next best time to start paying attention is now. I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
      - CamperBob2 8mo ago
        "Dumb beyond belief" doesn't perform at the gold-medal level at IMO. And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did? I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end. As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't. Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done. ...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation. Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
- shinycode 8mo ago
  Even if LLM will one day be autonomously updated, they started from us, from our knowledge. The human brain « is smart », it’s wired up to be in any kind of culture or knowledge. We fill up to be smarter from experience but LLM can’t do that, I can’t teach Claude something that it will use with you the next day, it needs to be retrained with knowledge stopping at some point. Even if technology catches up and the machine becomes more autonomous, what will say this machine would ever want to integrate to our society or share anything with us ? They have eternity, given there is electricity. Why would they want anything to do with humans if you go that way ? If it’s really conscious, should we consider it a slave then ? Why couldn’t « it » have fundamental rights and freedom to do whatever it wants ?
  - TheLNL 8mo ago
    Humans have a mechanism to make live changes to their neural network and clean up messes while sleeping. I see no reason for llms to not be able to do this other than the fact that it is resource intensive (which will continue to go down)
    - shinycode 8mo ago
      The analogy holds technically, but there’s a missing piece: the brain doesn’t just update weights, it does so guided by experience that matters to a situated, embodied agent with drives and stakes. Sleep consolidation isn’t random cleanup, it’s selective based on salience and emotion. An LLM updating more efficiently is progress, but it’s still optimizing a loss function. Whether that ever approximates what the brain does during sleep depends entirely on whether you think the what (weight updates) is sufficient, or whether the why (relevance to a lived experience) is what makes it meaningful. So yes, the resource argument will weaken over time. But the architectural gap may be deeper than just compute.
- grantcas 8mo ago
  [dead]

javier123454321 8mo ago

Being alive is divine. It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It's a beautiful thing to have a consciousness in this world, and to have the ability to create, to love. It takes a huge intellectual effort to try to trick yourself out of believing something so intuitive as that.

avmich 8mo ago
There are many examples when scientists strongly believed something to be obviously impossible and yet being wrong - Poisson spot or heavier-than-air flight machines coming to mind. So what you believe might be intuitive - that doesn't preclude it from potentially being wrong, unless you proved the impossibility.
- javier123454321 8mo ago
  I wish you happiness.
pluralmonad 8mo ago
What is intuitive to you, may not be to others. Might you be engaging in intellectual self trickery?
- javier123454321 8mo ago
  I guess there is people that are willing to die over the hill that there is nothing sacred or divine about being alive. I'm not very interested in playing that game.
  - buzzerbetrayed 8mo ago
    No, you’re the one playing the definition game. You took a word out of a sentence GP said, completely changed what the word meant, and then argued against the new definition. Never mind that you need to learn about the god of the gaps. But what you’re doing here isn’t even relevant to GPs main point.
8mo ago

shinycode 8mo ago

Physicalists say consciousness emerges from matter. The other camp says matter comes from consciousness. Federico Faggin, inventor of the microprocessor, says consciousness cannot emerge from matter because matter is inert and not self-conscious, so it cannot produce consciousness. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Time will tell. But it is also wrong to claim that consciousness emerges from matter until it is proven (aka the “hard problem of consciousness.”)

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
So some kind of ether conscious energy animated cells to fight entropy?
- shinycode 8mo ago
  Not necessarily either but the serious version of the argument is that life consistently acts against local entropy in purposeful ways, and pure physics doesn’t obviously explain why matter would “want” to do that. Consciousness as a organizing principle is one answer. It’s speculative, but it’s not obviously wrong
rcxdude 8mo ago
I mean, the nature of subjectivity prevents you from knowing anything but your own experience. There is not any objective evidence that could truly distinguish solipsism from panpsychism, so philosophically you need to ask a different question to hope to get a useful answer.
- shinycode 8mo ago
  That’s a genuinely strong point. You can only verify consciousness from the inside, your own. Everything else is inference. No objective measurement can definitively distinguish “other minds exist” from solipsism. That’s not a bug in the argument, it’s a fundamental epistemic limit. Which is exactly why this question may never be fully resolved empirically
krisoft 8mo ago

bglazer 8mo ago

I think we could understand consciousness perfectly and still find it divine. In fact, I think however it arises is probably so beautiful that it would be wrong not to call it divine. Of course not in a literal, theological sense, but I think the true deep complexity of the human brain and consciousness is worth the title.

javier123454321 8mo ago
Exactly

visarga 8mo ago

> Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.