2 ms·

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions

by lrvick 2mo ago

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do! The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other humans actually experience it the same way we do, so confident statements about consciousness being unable to emerge from simple weighted functions is baseless projection, wishing ourselves more special than an emergent property of the bag of weighted functions in our heads.

rlpb 2mo ago
> but we know we have it Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- goatlover 2mo ago
  I don't need to believe I have consciousness, I am conscious. I'm experiencing colors, sounds, vibrations, an itch that wants to be scratched and a need to stretch my legs. Also slight irritation that people pretend this is something you need to believe in when you just have it. It's the basis of your entire waking experience. There's nothing to believe in, you just are conscious. Now what that means for other people, animals, AIs, aliens, nation states or electrons is a matter for dispute. And what ontological conclusions you do or don't draw for it are matters of belief based on what philosophical arguments sound convincing to you. But believing you have experiences is a very weird thing to say. I'd think Wittgenstein would have something to say about such a hinge proposition. You can't really doubt it without invoking radical skepticism that undermines your ability to know anything.
SwellJoe 2mo ago
"our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions" Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic. You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.
- lrvick 2mo ago
  Cortical labs has harnessed human brain cells and trained the neurons to control basic video games. We are fundamentally just a -lot- of those cells trained to do a lot more things with a lot more sensors, which is sobering. We might actually not be as special as we always believed ourselves to be. I think it is more comforting to believe our sense of self built on a big bag of those cells is something that cannot evolve on human made synthetic substrate from simple statistical functions and weights stacked very densely. But we simply lack the evidence to confidently say so one way or the other.

by lrvick 2mo ago

rlpb 2mo ago

> but we know we have it Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.

deleted 2mo ago
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goatlover 2mo ago
I don't need to believe I have consciousness, I am conscious. I'm experiencing colors, sounds, vibrations, an itch that wants to be scratched and a need to stretch my legs. Also slight irritation that people pretend this is something you need to believe in when you just have it. It's the basis of your entire waking experience. There's nothing to believe in, you just are conscious. Now what that means for other people, animals, AIs, aliens, nation states or electrons is a matter for dispute. And what ontological conclusions you do or don't draw for it are matters of belief based on what philosophical arguments sound convincing to you. But believing you have experiences is a very weird thing to say. I'd think Wittgenstein would have something to say about such a hinge proposition. You can't really doubt it without invoking radical skepticism that undermines your ability to know anything.

SwellJoe 2mo ago

"our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions" Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic. You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.

lrvick 2mo ago
Cortical labs has harnessed human brain cells and trained the neurons to control basic video games. We are fundamentally just a -lot- of those cells trained to do a lot more things with a lot more sensors, which is sobering. We might actually not be as special as we always believed ourselves to be. I think it is more comforting to believe our sense of self built on a big bag of those cells is something that cannot evolve on human made synthetic substrate from simple statistical functions and weights stacked very densely. But we simply lack the evidence to confidently say so one way or the other.