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> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.

> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. How can you have a subjective experience without a body? That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self aware of what's happening. How can you be self aware without feeling? And how do you feel, without a body?

Tadpole9181 4mo ago
You need to draw that thinking out to it's natural conclusion, though. If I cut out your brain and stopped you from hearing or seeing or feeling - you would still be a conscious human being capable of thinking and awareness. If I hooked up electrodes to the hearing centers of your brain and force fed you dialog you perceive as speech (but is really a great deceiver), then responded in what you thought was speech (but are really just probes I use to convert your thoughts to text), that wouldn't suddenly be less real to you. It wouldn't devalue your sapience.
- goatlover 4mo ago
  How do you know the brain separated from the rest of the nervous system and body would still be sapient, capable of thinking and awareness? There's an assumption you're making that the brain is all that's needed, but the nervous system extends throughout the body. One can argue sensory organ are part of the nervous system. Embodied cognition rejects this assumption. We didn't evolve as brains that were then put in bodies, we evolved as bodies with nervous systems.
  - gpderetta 4mo ago
    While dreaming, the brain synthetizes sensory experience while cutting down (or greatly suppressing) most of external stimuli. Yet it is still conscious.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
- felipeerias 4mo ago
  Mind-body dualism is not real. Even in your example, you would be building upon a minimal part of a person's body.
martin1975 4mo ago
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world? Fun stuff eh?
- thinkling 4mo ago
  A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.
margalabargala 4mo ago
Your point generalizes to, your emotional state is a reflection of the state of your physical medium. Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI? I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".
- felipeerias 4mo ago
  What are you, ultimately, if not your body?
  - margalabargala 4mo ago
    I don't know. I also don't see how that changes the question. What is an AI, ultimately, without its computer hardware?
    - felipeerias 4mo ago
      Hardware is fungible. Each LLM response in a conversation could be served from a different machine. Would you be "you" in a different body?
      - margalabargala 4mo ago
        Human bodies are fungible. I think I would be "me" in a different body, yes. So is anybody. To claim otherwise would mean anyone who's gotten a transplant or amputation is no longer themselves.
        maxerickson 4mo ago
        Of course they are themselves. The question is whether they are a different self.
        4mo ago
grumbel 4mo ago
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body. An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself. The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.
- felipeerias 4mo ago
  Your brain is part of your body, that's the point. There isn't a "you" separate from your actual, physical existence. Mind-body dualism is not real.
  - solomonb 4mo ago
    Its amazing that after years of advocating for a materialist view of the mind, the tech bros are flipping to mind-body dualism now that they need to believe a concious mind can exist no body at all.
    - Planktonne 4mo ago
      It's worse than that; it's mind-body dualism when arguing that an AI can be conscious, but still materialist when arguing that humans are simply more complex neural nets. It's not a coherent viewpoint.
  - grumbel 4mo ago
    The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important. If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets. Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.
pizzly 4mo ago
How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Some anecdotal data. Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling but there is no body at all. Also I have other dreams where there is no body that I am aware of but not going there in public. There is no body sensation in these dreams. But dreaming is very much being consciousness as well as feeling emotions. So answering your question its possible to have a subjective experience without a body but whether you needed the body to learn to have that sensation without a body in the first place is unanswered. I suspect sensory inputs are more important than a body. If that is the case then eyes can be replaced with cameras, ears with microphones etc. Text input is just another sensory input.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- confidantlake 4mo ago
  What was the thing that was dreaming? The brain. Your brain is part of your body.
  - pizzly 4mo ago
    can't you say the same for transistors representing a neural network? Could that be considered a brain of sorts and thus part of a body? If it cannot be considered the same, what makes it different. Is it because a brain is made from organic material and transistors are not? Or something else? Would like to understand where you are comming from.
lupire 4mo ago
Every computer/program I have ever used has a body and sensors (afferent)and actuators (efferent). So I have no idea what distinction Ted Chiang is trying to draw
JoshTriplett 4mo ago
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- sfn42 4mo ago
  Citation needed. Also that's impossible. It is impossible to simulate reality exactly using digital computers. The best we can do is approximate. Doesn't matter how powerful it gets, it'll always just be an approximation.
  - JoshTriplett 4mo ago
    Assuming you don't believe humans have any metaphysical component, then the only remaining question is whether there's some essential component to being human that depends on impossible-to-precisely-simulate portions of reality. Nothing we currently know of biology suggests that that would be true, as much as it continues being pursued by people who need there to be something mysterious about consciousness or brains. In any case, a closely-but-not-perfectly-accurate simulation of a real human brain is still going to be human, unless you believe that someone becomes less human when they're experiencing some kind of cognitive decline, or a stroke, or other biological malfunctions. The point is, there is nothing essential to the having of a physical brain that creates the concept of consciousness or sense-of-self.
    - sfn42 4mo ago
      How can a simulation be human when it isn't human? It's a simulation. A human is a human, a simulation is not. Anything that is not a human, is not a human and can never be a human. And there absolutely is something essential to the concept of being human that we are entirely incapable of replicating artificially. In fact as far as I know we are incapable of synthesizing any kind of life whatsoever. We can't even create the simplest type of living cell imaginable. So to claim that we could just create consciousness, a fundamental property of this "life" thing that we don't properly understand, within a piece of rock is beyond naive. We don't even know what it is or how it is.

Tadpole9181 4mo ago

You need to draw that thinking out to it's natural conclusion, though. If I cut out your brain and stopped you from hearing or seeing or feeling - you would still be a conscious human being capable of thinking and awareness. If I hooked up electrodes to the hearing centers of your brain and force fed you dialog you perceive as speech (but is really a great deceiver), then responded in what you thought was speech (but are really just probes I use to convert your thoughts to text), that wouldn't suddenly be less real to you. It wouldn't devalue your sapience.

goatlover 4mo ago
How do you know the brain separated from the rest of the nervous system and body would still be sapient, capable of thinking and awareness? There's an assumption you're making that the brain is all that's needed, but the nervous system extends throughout the body. One can argue sensory organ are part of the nervous system. Embodied cognition rejects this assumption. We didn't evolve as brains that were then put in bodies, we evolved as bodies with nervous systems.
- gpderetta 4mo ago
  While dreaming, the brain synthetizes sensory experience while cutting down (or greatly suppressing) most of external stimuli. Yet it is still conscious.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
felipeerias 4mo ago
Mind-body dualism is not real. Even in your example, you would be building upon a minimal part of a person's body.

martin1975 4mo ago

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world? Fun stuff eh?

thinkling 4mo ago
A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.

margalabargala 4mo ago

Your point generalizes to, your emotional state is a reflection of the state of your physical medium. Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI? I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".

felipeerias 4mo ago
What are you, ultimately, if not your body?
- margalabargala 4mo ago
  I don't know. I also don't see how that changes the question. What is an AI, ultimately, without its computer hardware?
  - felipeerias 4mo ago
    Hardware is fungible. Each LLM response in a conversation could be served from a different machine. Would you be "you" in a different body?
    - margalabargala 4mo ago
      Human bodies are fungible. I think I would be "me" in a different body, yes. So is anybody. To claim otherwise would mean anyone who's gotten a transplant or amputation is no longer themselves.
      - maxerickson 4mo ago
        Of course they are themselves. The question is whether they are a different self.
        4mo ago

grumbel 4mo ago

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body. An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself. The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.

felipeerias 4mo ago
Your brain is part of your body, that's the point. There isn't a "you" separate from your actual, physical existence. Mind-body dualism is not real.
- solomonb 4mo ago
  Its amazing that after years of advocating for a materialist view of the mind, the tech bros are flipping to mind-body dualism now that they need to believe a concious mind can exist no body at all.
  - Planktonne 4mo ago
    It's worse than that; it's mind-body dualism when arguing that an AI can be conscious, but still materialist when arguing that humans are simply more complex neural nets. It's not a coherent viewpoint.
- grumbel 4mo ago
  The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important. If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets. Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.

pizzly 4mo ago

How can you have a subjective experience without a body? Some anecdotal data. Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling but there is no body at all. Also I have other dreams where there is no body that I am aware of but not going there in public. There is no body sensation in these dreams. But dreaming is very much being consciousness as well as feeling emotions. So answering your question its possible to have a subjective experience without a body but whether you needed the body to learn to have that sensation without a body in the first place is unanswered. I suspect sensory inputs are more important than a body. If that is the case then eyes can be replaced with cameras, ears with microphones etc. Text input is just another sensory input.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
confidantlake 4mo ago
What was the thing that was dreaming? The brain. Your brain is part of your body.
- pizzly 4mo ago
  can't you say the same for transistors representing a neural network? Could that be considered a brain of sorts and thus part of a body? If it cannot be considered the same, what makes it different. Is it because a brain is made from organic material and transistors are not? Or something else? Would like to understand where you are comming from.

lupire 4mo ago

Every computer/program I have ever used has a body and sensors (afferent)and actuators (efferent). So I have no idea what distinction Ted Chiang is trying to draw

JoshTriplett 4mo ago

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body? If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
sfn42 4mo ago
Citation needed. Also that's impossible. It is impossible to simulate reality exactly using digital computers. The best we can do is approximate. Doesn't matter how powerful it gets, it'll always just be an approximation.
- JoshTriplett 4mo ago
  Assuming you don't believe humans have any metaphysical component, then the only remaining question is whether there's some essential component to being human that depends on impossible-to-precisely-simulate portions of reality. Nothing we currently know of biology suggests that that would be true, as much as it continues being pursued by people who need there to be something mysterious about consciousness or brains. In any case, a closely-but-not-perfectly-accurate simulation of a real human brain is still going to be human, unless you believe that someone becomes less human when they're experiencing some kind of cognitive decline, or a stroke, or other biological malfunctions. The point is, there is nothing essential to the having of a physical brain that creates the concept of consciousness or sense-of-self.
  - sfn42 4mo ago
    How can a simulation be human when it isn't human? It's a simulation. A human is a human, a simulation is not. Anything that is not a human, is not a human and can never be a human. And there absolutely is something essential to the concept of being human that we are entirely incapable of replicating artificially. In fact as far as I know we are incapable of synthesizing any kind of life whatsoever. We can't even create the simplest type of living cell imaginable. So to claim that we could just create consciousness, a fundamental property of this "life" thing that we don't properly understand, within a piece of rock is beyond naive. We don't even know what it is or how it is.