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Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we c
by eszed 4mo ago
Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis is correct, then we eventually will. I'm more scared than pleased by the prospect, but there you are.
- slopinthebag 4mo agoThis is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?
- therealdrag0 4mo agoThose are the questions and there’s stacks and stacks of philosophy pages written about it. Go have a whirl.
- pixl97 4mo agoIs a video game a physical property of a computer?
- slopinthebag 4mo agoYes
- pixl97 4mo agoSo then we can assume consciousness is a physical property of brains, as we can measure the electrical signals of consciousness versus when we are unconscious.
- bulbar 4mo agoWe have general purpose hardware and we have hardware that's hard wired for specific purposes like ASICs and we have everything in between. And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".
- doctoboggan 4mo ago> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above
- bulbar 4mo agoI think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoAnother alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoAren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here. Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.
- kelseyfrog 4mo agoI feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho
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- eszed 4mo agoNot a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities. Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.
- slopinthebag 4mo agoYeah, I guess what I'm trying to ask is that if it is an emergent property but not a physical part of the brain, doesn't that imply something metaphysical about consciousness? Almost as if it's a non-physical phenomenon? At least when I hear people talk about emergent behaviour I see it as a refutation of the spiritual, but to me it seems like it actually implies we have a "soul". Idk, it's really hard to articulate my thoughts here and yes it is pretty close to the conversations I had in college on various substances. Lol.
- eszed 4mo agoI don't know if it implies that. Someone up-thread mentioned temperature as an emergent property: individual atoms don't have it, but a sufficiently large group of them do. That would, I guess, make temperature meta-physical in the most literal possible sense. That's not how we typically think of that term as applied to consciousness or soul or whatever, but I'd agree it fits, without implying any kind of specialness beyond that.
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoOur machines won't have biological systems driving their needs which in turn fuel behaviors like desire and planning for the future. They may imitate them but it won't be innate.
- lotyrin 4mo agoI think those are things human consciousness has, not is.
- trick-or-treat 4mo agoFor an LLM, "innate" means "in their training data". So yeah, those things are pretty much innate.
- ludwik 4mo agoAnd also "instilled during their reinforcement training", and we are currently pushing planning hard there, for autonomous agents.
- trick-or-treat 4mo agoNo I think reinforcement training would be an example of not innate. Don't you? That's like potty training.
- ludwik 4mo agoIs it? Both supervised learning and reinforcement learning are ways of training the model, and the difference between them is not that big. I would say that innate means "in the weights", while non-innate means things the model learned during inference, during its "lifetime".
- trick-or-treat 4mo agoMaybe you're right. In the weights might be the right way to frame that. What do you mean by "during its lifetime"? Do you mean things like system prompts or things in Claude.md? It sounds like you're framing a session as a "lifetime". Whch might be right, I haven't thought of it like that before though. So when I /compact my session what's that even the equivalent of I wonder.
- bulbar 4mo agoJust to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons. What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty. I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.
- vkazanov 4mo agoYes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoAgree and add, don't confuse the substrate for the computation. Of course it's also clear that we don't quite have a full and definite picture of what the computation consists of in the case of a biological brain as evidenced by our continued failure to accurately simulate even the simplest of organisms.
- bux93 4mo agoOnly if you ignore almost every input and output that neurons have. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-and-thats-ok-20250430/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/ This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).
- vkazanov 4mo agoI don't ignore anything. I just refuse to accept the magical thinking around biological machines that are our brains/bodies. There are inputs, there are outputs, there is hidden function. And it seems that, given enough input/outputs/compute, it is possible to train the necessary function. Details of how the building bricks look like (matmul, electromagnetism or quantum effects) are not that relevant in the broader picture. What is missing right now, is the fact that the function in question changes over time in biomachines, while our LLMs are static at inference time.
- ProllyInfamous 4mo ago>consciousness is an emergent property You would really like Michael Pollan's latest book [1], entirely devoted to his exploration of consciousness researchers' POVs on this exact topic. My favorite quote is that ~"perhaps Descartes was only half-wrong when suggesting I think, therefore I am; it seems rather closer to I FEEL, therefore I am."~ [1] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousness/dp/198488199X/ https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...> ---- I've grown thousands of plants; I've read two of the author's other books devoted to plants; in this book Pollan makes compelling arguments for plant sentience (over a much-longer timeframe). Sure, perhaps plant consciousness is a bit of a stretch, but they're certainly intelligent and curious creatures. He makes both arguments supporting plant volition. ---- If you haven't seen My Octopus Teacher (Netflix), do. I'm a bald 275lb bluecollarguy... and I wept/awed (both). So beautiful, we bundled neurons. ---- Bonus quote ~"color is where reality and magic appear as-if together"~ [color isn't real, but is perceived]. We most-often see what's most-predictable, not necessarily what we actually detected [in the case of color: nothing but nanometers].
- clort 4mo agoSurely the number of neurons is not the whole story. Human brains have approximately 86 billion and are almost definitely conscious, but there are many other animals with a lot fewer (gorilla: 34 billion, dog: 2-3 billion, guinea pig: 240 million) which appear to be conscious also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
- ffwd 4mo agoPersonally I'm not a fan of the emergence story, for a number of reasons. First is, it doesn't really make sense for consciousness to have emerged gradually through natural selection. When we and animals are conscious, the whole brain is coordinated and works to for example turn off consciousness when we sleep. And as someone else mentioned, animals with much fewer numbers seem to have a similar consciousness to us. If consciousness really evolved gradually, you would expect to see for example dogs or gorillas having less of it, but if they has less of it, why does it function the same way? Like for example animals can be scared, happy, anxious etc, they can experience the full range of emotions and thoughts, so their conscious experience seems just as rich as ours. What I mean by this is, if you can be "less conscious", then what does that mean _exactly_? Is it that you have less content in consciousness, or is it that you feel more like you are asleep? Or something else? We don't have any examples in animals of "less conscious", I would argue. This makes me think that rather than having emerged gradually, evolution found a mechanism by which consciousness exists, and then some animals have that mechanism and others don't. I think that if it is a mechanism, then this mechanism is located in one part of the brain, not many parts functioning together (though one possibility is that this mechanism coordinates brain activity in such a way to enable consciousness).
- eszed 4mo agoI proposed in another comment that consciousness and self-awareness are at least close cousins, and perhaps the same phenomenon. If that's true, then that's an axis upon which you might create comparative measures. Yes, hamsters are conscious, but they don't have a sense of self to the same degree that gorillas do. If you posit capacity for language as another emergent property of sufficiently-complex networks, then you have another measure. LLMs, then, are particularly unintuitive to us, because they've got to the language part first, long before they've reached even hamster-level self-awareness. They're not, however, biological networks, so there's no reason these properties need arise in the same order, or indeed in the same ways. I'm not entirely convinced by that second paragraph, but I think the logic holds together.
- ffwd 4mo agoI'm not sure consciousness and self-awareness are the same thing. First is we can be conscious when we sleep/during REM sleep, where it's arguable we are not self-aware. And if not that, we can even do it when awake, for example when we think about a movie, or a philosophical problem, we can have conscious thoughts that are not related to the self. This leads me to believe consciousness is separate from self-awareness. Self-awareness is _one thing_, among many, that the brain can think about and be conscious of.