5 ms·

Do you have a working definition of "conscious"?

by traverseda 2mo ago

JohnMakin 2mo ago
Do you? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
- nostrademons 2mo ago
  Not GP, but one of the challenges with debating whether LLMs are "conscious" is that we don't even really know what it means for a human to be "conscious", or even if consciousness is experienced by other humans the same way it is for ourselves. What we do know: neurons carry electrical impulses across their synapses to trigger other neurons to fire, and more frequently used synapses are strengthened while infrequently used ones are pruned. This is not all that dissimilar to how a multi-layer perceptron is trained: it's floating point numbers in a big matrix rather than biological structures and electrical impulses, but there is still that element of frequently used connections being strengthened and infrequently used ones being pruned. What we hypothesize but do not know: there is a thin brain structure of grey matter called the claustrum that has tendrils that reach into nearly every other brain structure. In many ways, this is similar to the attention mechanism of the transformer architecture. It is hypothesized that this may be the seat of consciousness, owing to experiments where electrical stimulation of the claustrum caused patients to immediately lose consciousness. However, there is no way to prove this, owing to the difficulty of otherwise removing or disabling the most connected structure in the brain and observing its effect on consciousness without permanently killing the patient. Beyond that, we don't know much. I've got a family friend that's been a practicing therapist for 50 years, and I asked him what was the most interesting observation he made in his career. It was that "Everybody experiences the world in a different way, and yet everybody assumes that everyone else experiences the world the same way they do."
  - Dilettante_ 1mo ago
    >"Everybody experiences the world in a different way, and yet everybody assumes that everyone else experiences the world the same way they do." Relevant article: "Generalizing from one example"[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...] Personal note: That principle has been the bane of my autistic existence. People sometimes seem literally incapable of understanding that other people even can be different.
  - Lorkki 1mo ago
    > What we do know: neurons carry electrical impulses across their synapses to trigger other neurons to fire, and more frequently used synapses are strengthened while infrequently used ones are pruned. This is not all that dissimilar to how a multi-layer perceptron is trained ANNs have been inspired by biological processes, but in practice you have to squint very tightly to see the similarity. Biological neurons are multiple orders of magnitude more connected than the nodes in an ANN, plastic in terms of their connectedness and continuously learning, and their activations are also affected in complex ways by the levels of various transmitter molecules in the brain.
- traverseda 2mo ago
  You are saying the AI doesn't a some property that you don't have any definition for, not even a working definition. People will disagree on whether a cat or a baby is conscious, they're not debating what a baby or cat is. They're debating this term. You might as well be debating whether an AI is a blorb or not, you have just as good a working definition of blorb as consciousness.
- pixl97 2mo ago
  I believe you should look up the work of Cameron Berg before making statements like "an LLM is" or "an LLM isn't". Empirically defining all this stuff is very difficult, and making a definition that covers all beings that can exhibit conscious behavior is much more complex than a face value examination would reveal.
randomImmigrant 2mo ago
We do have entry and exit conditions. We can disrupt it and study the dynamics of the disruption. We have a good sense of the many mechanisms at play that undergird it. What we lack is a full map of the exact process from sensation to consciousness across all modalities. And I’m afraid when it comes to interception, we can’t unless we observe every one of the 36 trillion or so cells in a human body, as well as the 36 trillion or so symbiotic and commensal microbes, continuously, all the time. But I keep finding it astonishing that the claim that we know nothing about consciousness gets bandied about. We know a lot. We don’t have a grand unified theory. The lot we know is definitely split across many levels of evidence and hard to follow, let alone arrange. But this isn’t a black box. It’s a grey box, meeting an even more transparent box that is the LLM, where we do know what the guts are made of, and can interfere at every step in the chain of steps that constitute their dynamics. Comparing the two, we know there’s a level of similarity in that information gets broken down via a neural network. That similarity was sought. Since then though, neuroscientists have gone and shown that: 1. The other half of the cells in the brain, the glia, are at least as important as the neurons in cognition and consciousness 2. That interoceptive feedback and feelings are critical drivers of conscious experience 3. Evolutionarily, we know all cells can “learn”, and well before there were neurons or glia or brains, every cell evolved an internal clock that allows it to entrain to external solar and (depending on the species) lunar rhythms. 4. In the last few decades we’ve seen how synaptic activity is shaped and driven both by astrocytes and the circadian clock. All this is showing us that the abstraction from the 1950s that current neural networks are built on were incomplete. Whatever these components to do give rise to consciousness in biology (and we’re a long way from done solving this), we certainly wouldn’t imagine with all these modules and mechanisms missing, just maxing on one type of information flow in the brain would give you consciousness. I’d urge you to not keep insisting consciousness is a total mystery. It’s not, and even your AI model of choice will be able to point you to all the mechanistic evidence we have that whatever it is, it isn’t just neural nets.
- lern_too_spel 2mo ago
  Whether human consciousness exists on neural nets or otherwise doesn't disallow an ANN in a particular configuration from being conscious. You might as well argue that human consciousness requires biological neurons, so artificial consciousness can't exist.
qsera 1mo ago
Ability to feel?
- mdp2021 1mo ago
  > Ability to feel Interesting, possibly productive, but still not clear: that can be interpreted as just "reacting to input".
  - myaccountonhn 1mo ago
    > that can be interpreted as just "reacting to input" How? That's not the same.
    - mdp2021 1mo ago
      Well, define "feel" - in a context that could be also applied to machines. It seems to be (if we really had to employ it for the sake of discussion) "getting signals from peripherals, orienting action".

Do you have a working definition of "conscious"?

JohnMakin 2mo ago

Do you? I’m not sure what you’re getting at.

nostrademons 2mo ago
Not GP, but one of the challenges with debating whether LLMs are "conscious" is that we don't even really know what it means for a human to be "conscious", or even if consciousness is experienced by other humans the same way it is for ourselves. What we do know: neurons carry electrical impulses across their synapses to trigger other neurons to fire, and more frequently used synapses are strengthened while infrequently used ones are pruned. This is not all that dissimilar to how a multi-layer perceptron is trained: it's floating point numbers in a big matrix rather than biological structures and electrical impulses, but there is still that element of frequently used connections being strengthened and infrequently used ones being pruned. What we hypothesize but do not know: there is a thin brain structure of grey matter called the claustrum that has tendrils that reach into nearly every other brain structure. In many ways, this is similar to the attention mechanism of the transformer architecture. It is hypothesized that this may be the seat of consciousness, owing to experiments where electrical stimulation of the claustrum caused patients to immediately lose consciousness. However, there is no way to prove this, owing to the difficulty of otherwise removing or disabling the most connected structure in the brain and observing its effect on consciousness without permanently killing the patient. Beyond that, we don't know much. I've got a family friend that's been a practicing therapist for 50 years, and I asked him what was the most interesting observation he made in his career. It was that "Everybody experiences the world in a different way, and yet everybody assumes that everyone else experiences the world the same way they do."
- Dilettante_ 1mo ago
  >"Everybody experiences the world in a different way, and yet everybody assumes that everyone else experiences the world the same way they do." Relevant article: "Generalizing from one example"[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...] Personal note: That principle has been the bane of my autistic existence. People sometimes seem literally incapable of understanding that other people even can be different.
- Lorkki 1mo ago
  > What we do know: neurons carry electrical impulses across their synapses to trigger other neurons to fire, and more frequently used synapses are strengthened while infrequently used ones are pruned. This is not all that dissimilar to how a multi-layer perceptron is trained ANNs have been inspired by biological processes, but in practice you have to squint very tightly to see the similarity. Biological neurons are multiple orders of magnitude more connected than the nodes in an ANN, plastic in terms of their connectedness and continuously learning, and their activations are also affected in complex ways by the levels of various transmitter molecules in the brain.
traverseda 2mo ago
You are saying the AI doesn't a some property that you don't have any definition for, not even a working definition. People will disagree on whether a cat or a baby is conscious, they're not debating what a baby or cat is. They're debating this term. You might as well be debating whether an AI is a blorb or not, you have just as good a working definition of blorb as consciousness.
pixl97 2mo ago
I believe you should look up the work of Cameron Berg before making statements like "an LLM is" or "an LLM isn't". Empirically defining all this stuff is very difficult, and making a definition that covers all beings that can exhibit conscious behavior is much more complex than a face value examination would reveal.

randomImmigrant 2mo ago

We do have entry and exit conditions. We can disrupt it and study the dynamics of the disruption. We have a good sense of the many mechanisms at play that undergird it. What we lack is a full map of the exact process from sensation to consciousness across all modalities. And I’m afraid when it comes to interception, we can’t unless we observe every one of the 36 trillion or so cells in a human body, as well as the 36 trillion or so symbiotic and commensal microbes, continuously, all the time. But I keep finding it astonishing that the claim that we know nothing about consciousness gets bandied about. We know a lot. We don’t have a grand unified theory. The lot we know is definitely split across many levels of evidence and hard to follow, let alone arrange. But this isn’t a black box. It’s a grey box, meeting an even more transparent box that is the LLM, where we do know what the guts are made of, and can interfere at every step in the chain of steps that constitute their dynamics. Comparing the two, we know there’s a level of similarity in that information gets broken down via a neural network. That similarity was sought. Since then though, neuroscientists have gone and shown that: 1. The other half of the cells in the brain, the glia, are at least as important as the neurons in cognition and consciousness 2. That interoceptive feedback and feelings are critical drivers of conscious experience 3. Evolutionarily, we know all cells can “learn”, and well before there were neurons or glia or brains, every cell evolved an internal clock that allows it to entrain to external solar and (depending on the species) lunar rhythms. 4. In the last few decades we’ve seen how synaptic activity is shaped and driven both by astrocytes and the circadian clock. All this is showing us that the abstraction from the 1950s that current neural networks are built on were incomplete. Whatever these components to do give rise to consciousness in biology (and we’re a long way from done solving this), we certainly wouldn’t imagine with all these modules and mechanisms missing, just maxing on one type of information flow in the brain would give you consciousness. I’d urge you to not keep insisting consciousness is a total mystery. It’s not, and even your AI model of choice will be able to point you to all the mechanistic evidence we have that whatever it is, it isn’t just neural nets.

lern_too_spel 2mo ago
Whether human consciousness exists on neural nets or otherwise doesn't disallow an ANN in a particular configuration from being conscious. You might as well argue that human consciousness requires biological neurons, so artificial consciousness can't exist.

qsera 1mo ago

Ability to feel?

mdp2021 1mo ago
> Ability to feel Interesting, possibly productive, but still not clear: that can be interpreted as just "reacting to input".
- myaccountonhn 1mo ago
  > that can be interpreted as just "reacting to input" How? That's not the same.
  - mdp2021 1mo ago
    Well, define "feel" - in a context that could be also applied to machines. It seems to be (if we really had to employ it for the sake of discussion) "getting signals from peripherals, orienting action".