6 ms·
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pai
by barrkel 5mo ago
The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.
If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?
This isn't enough:
echo "I feel pain"
Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoI think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
- justonceokay 5mo agoOk pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”. Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
- daseiner1 5mo agoIsn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
- fragmede 5mo agoWhat's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
- daseiner1 5mo agobingo
- card_zero 5mo agoBingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
- daseiner1 5mo agoeven saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
- card_zero 5mo agoIs that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
- gilleain 5mo agoMore than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc. You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited? On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response. It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
- justonceokay 5mo agoI’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust. Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”. If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
- daseiner1 5mo agonicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
- justonceokay 5mo agoThanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me. My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
- card_zero 5mo agoHow does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
- kbrkbr 5mo agoBut does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view? If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter. If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.
- justonceokay 5mo agoI’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.
- fssys 5mo agoNo, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoNot fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness. Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoThis is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.
- fssys 5mo agoyou think qualia are the soul then!
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoI don't know what you mean by the word soul. I associate it with dualist religious thought. But maybe you mean something else?
- trick-or-treat 5mo agoExcept that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.
- fssys 5mo ago
- RealityVoid 5mo agoQualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.
- cgio 5mo agoThat’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).
- RealityVoid 5mo agoI really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)
- vkou 5mo agoWhat about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it. Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?
- altmanaltman 5mo agoBefore that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question
- raffael_de 5mo agoyou can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.
- grumbel 5mo agoPain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.
- card_zero 5mo agoPain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.
- kubanczyk 5mo agoLooking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine. Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.