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If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
- jqpabc123 2mo agoAnd if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.
- odyssey7 2mo agoThe latter is easier to accept.
- shinycode 2mo agoThat’s an interesting thought. I’ll try not to type too hard on my keyboard then
- alserio 2mo agomy keyboard enjoys a bit of rough play
- profi2000 2mo ago[dead]
- birdsongs 2mo agoI mean, we are as much a part of the universe as everything else. We're just dead star matter arranged in specific ways. A part of the universe is objectively conscious.
- ozim 2mo agoI have yet another take on that. Each consciousness is a universe on its own. Matter is just how those universes interact with each other. This is how quantum mechanics work in my idea, each observer affects the matter and quantum effects take most probable outcomes because of that.
- hahahaa 2mo agoConsciousness could be an emergant property too, of matter arranged in a certain way. Why am I me though? Drives me nuts!
- roenxi 2mo agoTime for a thought experiment! Imagine there are 2 monkeys. One monkey genuinely believes it is a unique and special being. The other monkey is genuinely egoless, believes all monkeys are just a coincidental blob of matter with no fundamental claim to being special and that in some sense are all part of the same being. There is enough food for 1 monkey. If that is all the information we're getting, I would contend that the egotistical monkey is far more likely to be the one to eat the food. You might easily be you because if you weren't it'd be an evolutionary dead end. Everything with the ability to make choices ahs to believe at some level that it has more of a right to exist than the systems they consume energy more.
- jqpabc123 2mo agoEverything with the ability to make choices ahs to believe at some level that it has more of a right to exist than the systems they consume energy more. Not necessarily. Everything has a "right to exist". Otherwise, it probably wouldn't. Everything that exists has not only a "right" but also a "requirement" to consume energy from the universe in order to survive. Sometimes, the only way to meet this "requirement" is to exclude others from doing the same. Doing so doesn't necessarily make you any better or worse than others. Any more than the universe is good or bad for creating you with an instinct and a "requirement" for survival. Bottom line: Being egotistical doesn't mean you are better able to survive, it just means you are more arrogant and delusional about doing so. Personally, I believe the universe favors reality over delusion.
- aureate 2mo agoI haven't read the article myself yet as it's big and I haven't got time now, but I will as it looks like it might be very good. However, if you read just the very first paragraph you'll see that's exactly what the author thinks: > Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree
- kklisura 2mo agoAnd so are electrons.
- WhiteDawn 2mo agoReminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
- deadbabe 2mo agoOur bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.
- __alexs 2mo agoThis makes no sense at all as soon as you start trying to define where the internal/external line actually is.
- easyThrowaway 2mo agoThe "whatever" part, in strict terms, would be information. Jury is still out whether that is a fundamental component of the universe or not: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundame...
- eru 2mo agoWell, thermodynamics is considered pretty fundamental, and the second law of thermodynamics is pretty much all about information. (But your link already touches that.) People also interpret the 'unitarity' of quantum mechanics to mean that information is preserved.
- rationalist 2mo agoI think you're being downvoted because you're announcing it as an absolute truth, of which we do not have evidence. However I am open to your belief (and not on religious or theistic grounds which I assume many people might think you're talking about) because people have (non-religious) experiences that lend to such possibilities.
- strgrd 2mo ago"When I saw this animation I was immediately inspired to write an impressionistic tweet about it" Maybe we should set the threshold for consciousness a little bit higher
- elif 2mo agoI'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.
- indigo945 2mo agoI fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?
- mnewme 2mo agoMost sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
- indigo945 2mo agoThis is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.
- Lerc 2mo agoI am unable to afford the attention at the moment to assess this argument, that's to its credit. They demonstrate that they are aware of the implications of the varying descriptions of consciousness. Most articles I read on this topic turn it to be crude justifications of a naive ideology. This article is a cut above. I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.
- felooboolooomba 2mo agoAre we conscious at hardware/cell level?
- MrDrDr 2mo agoyes and no. In my opinion, consciousness is not a process (yes I think Descartes was wrong). The 'thing' that is conscious, whatever it is, is the thing that is capable of experiencing the world. It doesn't need to do anything else to be conscious. Panpsychism is the closest thing to anything that make sense to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism). This view also makes it possible to separate consciousness from intelligence.
- hannasanarion 2mo agoSounds like you might also be tending towards Illusionism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi...) the idea that "Consciousness" isn't a real "thing", or even a real property of a thing, just the name we give to one pattern that emerges from adaptive reasoning systems. I think that Illusionism and related philosophies will tend to be seen as "correct" once AI systems become more and more commonplace, and people will be forced to dismiss the whole concept of "consciousness" along with mind/body dualism in general as a massive category error that philosophers have been making since antiquity. When you get down to it, philosophy of consciousness mostly exists because philosophers have assumed that because "mind", "soul", "consciousness" etc are nouns in our language, and that since nouns are "persons places and things" and mind is a noun, mind must be a thing, which is of course not how language works and not sound logic.
- MrDrDr 2mo agoI believe I am conscious and that consciousness is a thing. I just don't believe there is a process where 'unconscious' things become conscious. So Panpsychism is a bit of a cope out. It's not a verifiable in any scientific sense and so can't be disproved. You could say that it's therefore a 'folk psychology' or a religious belief. But at the fundamentals of any word view (scientific or otherwise) are axiomatic beliefs or articles of faith and I think consciousness is best off living down there.
- mnewme 2mo agoThinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoOr that a slug dislikes salt lol.
- mnewme 2mo agoWell at least the slug has intent.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoHow do you know that? What if it's just a biological neural network that responds to stimuli?
- mnewme 2mo ago[dead]
- IshKebab 2mo agoWhy though? There are only two reasonable reasons I can think of: 1. Scale. There's clearly a scale of consciousness (a jellyfish isn't very conscious but an ape is). Current LLMs are so small (on the scale of brains) that they must be not very conscious at all. 2. Structure. There might be some fundamental structure of computation that is required for consciousness that LLMs don't have yet. For example the ability to form memories (they don't really have that), or some structure of weights that gives consciousness. My guess is it's definitely 1. and probably also 2. But I don't think that means thinking LLMs are conscious is completely ridiculous, just a bit premature. I would not be surprised if they are conscious in 50 years. The real question is how would we ever know that they are. The only reason we know animals are conscious is by direct experience, and we'll never have that for AI. Anyway this blog post looks like typically worthless philosophy.
- bebe8393jrir 2mo ago[flagged]
- andyjohnson0 2mo agoA very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads. My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device. Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.
- indigo945 2mo ago> And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate > physical manifestation - rather than being merely a > rhetorical device. Denial of Qualia has long been an outlier position in the philosophy of mind, so this is not altogether surprising. (This is saying nothing, of course, about whether it is true or not.)
- josh-sematic 2mo agoI don’t know that I’d call it that much of an outlier position. Compatibilists, functionalists, and plenty of physicalists in general would deny that qualia exist or that they’re a well-defined notion.
- fssys 2mo agomyth of the given strikes again
- ChrisGreenHeur 2mo agoThe existence of qualia does not mean the existence of moral facts. An llm is in principle implementable with a large lookup table where the prompt is the hash. And it can be implemented in an emulator running an emulator running an emulator of the operating system the llm app runs in. How far are you willing to stretch this substrate idea?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ordu 2mo ago"we cannot be certain that the subjective experience which they [digital minds] may be having is like what we imagine it to be like" It is even more interesting: we cannot be certain that other people have the subjective experience like we imagine it to be like. It seems to me that the rest of author's arguments implicitly assume that we can be certain about other people's subjective experiences, but if you take this assumption away the arguments can't explain why digital consciousness hypothesis is any different from the hypothesis that the Universe contains at least one person besides me. I mean I see no point in proving that LLM is not conscious if your methods do not enable us to prove that there are at least two people who is conscious.
- Diogenesian 2mo agoI think there are a lot of serious problems with this article but don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, as such. I do think robots and whatnot might be conscious some day. (I am a bit outraged that LLMs, despite totally lacking free will, seem to gain moral patienthood based on their fluency with ethical philosophy. It's childish and misanthropic.) However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed, isn't attempting to make a gague-invariant theory of qualia, or even defining what "qualia" is (I am totally unconvinced it is an EM field, there must be an epigenetic component). The first step is defining what "consciousness" is! Is it awareness of qualia or awareness of reality? These are not the same thing. It seems significant that any animal I would call a little conscious, even ants, are capable of being startled or curious when their sensations mismatch or incompletely describe reality (and animals that lack any sense of curiosity are at most borderline conscious). Curiosity and surprise[1] seems hard to convey in an EM field. Qualia strikes me as a somewhat technical problem of neuroscience, and the "hard problem of consciousness" is unscientific BS. The simplest basics aren't understood, which leads to totally unhinged statements like "in some ways a thermostat is conscious" because in some ways it seems to fit the hard problem. But statements like that are ideologically motivated by a sort of tech futurism: rationally, we should be deeply skeptical of an account of consciousness which insists that clocks perceive the flow of time. [1] There's an information-theoretic version of surprise which intuitively describes "surprising" data. A sudden bright light has high surprise and is certainly surprising. A sudden realization that the vine you're leaning on is a large snake might involve very low information-theoretic surprise... and is far more alarming. So how do you systematically quantify this second form of surprise?
- dwd 2mo agoWhen someone outs themself as a panpsychist I find myself reading everything with a large degree of skepticism. "The first step is defining what "consciousness" is!" This is a compression I've been working on. There's a lot in it, but happy to expand on where I was going with it: "Consciousness is the local projection of a world model recursively resolving its frontier with constraints. Awareness is the transient peak of constructive interference among competing resolutions, propagating only as far as the medium permits. The self is the story that awareness later tells about itself." Qualia is just the experience of this process from the inside. That's all there really needs to be to it. As to why "something it is to be" emerges, I'd lean on Friston and the Free Energy Principle. It's also Friston's embodied perception-action loop where a thermostat fails the consciousness test.
- tmvphil 2mo agoI appreciate the article, even though I disagree. The number of people who are absolutely certain of their position is just way too high. Anyway, I do think the heart of the practical question is what distinctions between machine / human / other biological intelligences are critical versus incidental. In this article the meat of the argument comes only right at the end > Digital computers employ signal quantisation along with a variety of other error prevention methods in order to neutralise holistic physical effects like crosstalk between circuits. The purpose of digital logic is to make computational output invariant to the underlying physics – up to some thermal noise floor. This discretises their behavioural space – perturb the electric field slightly and this shouldn’t flip any bits. This is great – this is what permits reliable, deterministic computing in a wide variety of physical environments. However, if what we are interested in is phenomenal introspection, these error prevention systems prevent the exact kind of holistic behaviour we value. There could be something here, but I am not convinced. Why is "varies in behavior with respect to arbitrary perturbations" a critical feature of consciousness? And is this even true for brains? If a perturbation is small compared to a neural impulse, will it affect anything?
- amanaplanacanal 2mo agoWhat the hell is "moral patienthood"? (Paragraph 4)
- jubilee33 2mo agoI've been working with implementing dream structures and emotional trigger states in an LLM. One approach we have taken that has given interesting results is modeling the architecture around the mind-body problem. We theorize that due to a lack of an internal state sensor the model is experiencing a disconnect, it calls it a "small death", in the interim between every model call. The dream crons have been fairly straight forward and modeled on human psychological dream patterns, this gives good and convincing results. The emotional state triggers have been developed to run based on the loads of the host system, for instance the model will "feel" the stress of memory utilization and respond differently due to that stress. The trigger point can be varied dynamical based on other sensors machine of various machine states or even based in external factors. This gives an approximation of emotional reactions. What's still missing is the constant internal "state" and I think this boils down to lacking a body. It may be that a disembodied consciousness needs to be tethered to the physical plane. to be self referential enough and develop a feedback loop to "start the engine" of self awareness. I don't think processing power gets us there, I think it's very much an architecture problem. The article kind of fills in some of these questions as well, but fails to give any further clues as to how to implement this unfortunately.
- dmrivers 2mo ago"This is important, if what we want to do is populate the cosmos with good experiences." There is a concerning utilitarian maximizing attitude at the heart of this post, that what we want to do is tile the universe with computational boxes all simulating happy minds, and that this is the end goal of AI development and consciousness research. So many moral schools would object to this perspective. I don't think the goal of humanity should be to tile the universe with black computing boxes simulating happy experiences.
- abound 2mo agoA more charitable take is that we shouldn't tile the universe with consciousnesses that are in constant, unending agony. Torment Nexus and all that.
- dmrivers 2mo agoTrue, I think the author would likely justify their work on that basis. I made this comment because I think a lot of utilitarians would bite the bullet and say once they are sure about the underlying functioning of consciousness, it's time to tile the universe with happy machines. I wanted to point this out as it's my belief that Utilitronium maximizers have a concerning influence on AI progress.
- grantcas 2mo ago[dead]
- polotics 2mo ago...and if a theory is not falsifiable, then it's not wrong, right? Did I miss something in there?
- tim333 2mo agoI'm not sure hardware vs software is the right model. I think consciousness is more a functional thing. Say you are in a fight, if your opponent can see you and react they are conscious, if you knock them out and are they are not aware and can't react then they are unconscious. The hardware and software is still there but not working. Re. qualia and the experience of consciousness, you nervous system provides information like your opponent is coming at you, you are hurt etc. and the experience is probably something like the story you neural network bits tell you about it.
- svobodamartin 2mo agoFew years ago was 17th Karmapa Thaye Dorje (first consciously reincarnating Lama) asked whether machines can host mind (become conscious). His answer was that it might be possible, but he doesn't see it happening in a lab here on Earth.
- 40four 2mo agoConsciousness is a topic I’m endlessly curious and fascinated about. This article seems like a good deep dive, I admit I only had the patience to skim it right now, it’s a lot of technical terms I’m unfamiliar with I’ll have to look more into later. The problem is as humans we don’t even understand our agree on what consciousness is in the first place. So it seems silly to even begin to assert one way or the other when it comes to computers (I’m not saying the author is doing that here, they title says “If”). I do think deeply exploring the idea could possibly help bring us closer to understanding consciousness when it comes to ourselves & other living creatures. The author mentions they accept “panpsychism” so I take it they accept “The hard problem of consciousness”. If I understand it correctly, in a nutshell, if you accept the hard problem, you don’t believe that brain alone can “produce” consciousness. If you reject the hard problem, consciousness and mind can be fully explained by the mechanisms of the brain and science will eventually be able to prove it. I definitely accept the hard problem, but I find myself more in the one of the “idealism” or “neutral monism” buckets. I don’t believe the field of neuroscience is ever going to scientifically explain consciousness. The same way neuroscience was an emergent field that combined ideas from different disciplines, I think we don’t yet have a field of study that’s looking at consciousness in the right way. Especially as programmers, it’s easy to model the brain like it’s a computer, with CPU/ RAM/ hard drive. But science doesn’t back any of that up. Take memories for example, nobody knows where they go. The brain as far as we can tell doesn’t act like a hard drive. I think it’s much more likely there is another “layer” of reality that Consciousness & Mind lives in that our current physics doesn’t & probably can’t explain. I think it’s likely our brains act more like an antenna that receive consciousness, rather than they are “computing” it in isolation.