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The Cognitive Short-Circuit of 'Artificial Consciousness'

26 points by tomhoward 11y ago

danans 11y ago
tl;dr + opinion: The usual metaphysically couched argument that consciousness is a primary substance and matter is secondary, ergo scientists/engineers pursuing a materialist explanation/synthesis of consciousness are fools barking up the wrong tree, all topped off with this <sarcasm>gem of a</sarcasm> conclusion: "The computer engineer’s dream of birthing a conscious child into the world without the messiness and fragility of life is an infantile delusion; a confused, partial, distorted projection of archetypal images and drives. It is the expression of the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation."
- dasil003 11y ago
  Yeah that's a pretty painful conclusion. It may well be the case that the materialists are wrong, and artificial intelligence in silicon can never achieve consciousness—I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way—but the minute you start broadly ascribing motivations to an entire field based on very specific social hot button issues you lose all intellectual credibility regardless of whether you are coming from the scientific or philosophical perspective.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    Its also wildly sexist. There are plenty of female AI researchers.
  - upquark 11y ago
    > I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way > ...you start broadly ascribing motivations to an entire field... Do you see a contradiction? You're broadly calling a bunch of people "arrogant", who may have a very well informed and valid opinion on a topic.
    - dasil003 11y ago
      Uh, I'm saying it's arrogant to be self-assured about the nature of consciousness, I'm directly addressing a specific line of thinking. That is very different from ascribing psychological motivations to a swath of people who almost certainly have a wide variety of motivations.
      - upquark 11y ago
        You're making a broad statement about a bunch of people without knowing what they know or don't, and one might say that statement is insulting. Right after that, you're criticizing a guy for making blanket statements about a bunch of people. Saying "I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way" about any statement A is itself a pretty arrogant thing to say (you are making a statement about the collective knowledge of everyone else on the topic of A not being too far from yours).
        dasil003 11y ago
        I'm not saying anything about a group of people, I'm saying something about a specific belief. For those two things to be equivalent, there needs to be a layer of indirection, eg. if I were to say: "people who claim to know the nature of consciousness are doing so because they aren't comfortable with the idea of not knowing something"—that would be an equivalently arrogant statement. As it is, my statement is definitely not in that league. Do you not see the difference?
        upquark 11y ago
        Hmm, let me see how I can explain this more clearly. "I'm not arrogant enough to do X" implies "Those who do X are sufficiently arrogant". Do you follow this far? Here's an example relating to your experience. I could claim: "I'm not arrogant enough to use RoR for serious web development". On the surface, I'm making a claim about myself / my beliefs. You shouldn't feel upset over my statement, it's not about you or any other people...
dvanduzer 11y ago
The author lays out a case that consciousness can't emerge from mere matter. The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe (like Spinoza's God), and humans obtain a portion of it... somehow. Characterizing Turing's argument this way misses the mark: "We can test whether a machine is intelligent or not purely by observing its behavior in the environment." Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm
- s_baby 11y ago
  >Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm True but for the same reason, models of consciousness dissolve into circular ontologies of subject and object. I agree with you on Spinoza. Seeing consciousness as a qualitative property of the universe avoids this problem and ties up alot of loose ends. That doesn't imply artificial consciousness is impossible. It implies on some level artificial consciousness will always be a blackbox system to us. One we can maybe replicate and improve on but still beyond full logical comprehension.
- upquark 11y ago
  > The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe... What is love? How can an uncaring chunk of bones and flesh feel love? But we do fall in love, so it must exist in some form. Hence, love is the universe itself. Checkmate
  - fsargent 11y ago
    Baby don't hurt me, Don't hurt me, No more.
    - upquark 11y ago
kwhitefoot 11y ago
The foreword is by Deepak Chopra.
im3w1l 11y ago
>For all practical purposes, dissociation is metabolism; there is no reason to believe it is anything else. We have very little in the way of evidence on the question of consciousness, so we can only really conjecture very simple ideas. The idea that everything is consciousness is a simple idea. Metabolism is not. What is even meant by metabolism? Creating the magic ATP spirit molecule?
- Procrastes 11y ago
  This makes me want to write a glossy trade paper "self-help book" about "Your Spiritual ATP Cycle" But I just can't bring myself to be that cruel.
- kahoon 11y ago
  To be honest, it simply seems like the author took one arbitrary aspect of living beings (metabolism) and somehow made it responsible for conscioussness.
sixQuarks 11y ago
IF there is a true physical reality and the universe is not only in our mind, then artificial consciousness is a foregone conclusion. Not only that, artificial consciousness will be many orders of magnitude more complex and rich than anything we experience today. This is because biological consciousness has emerged through randomness. Imagine when consciousness can be evolved through technological means. It will be the difference between the flight of a bird, and a SpaceX rocket.
- pointernil 11y ago
  Hmm, imagine nature evolving "non-technological" creatures capable of space-flight... but I better leave the reasons for and implications of such developments to ppl. like N. Stephenson ;)
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  Do birds have a ground control crew? Maybe I need to go outside and see. Edit: I apologize for implying the natural world is superior. Hurrah for infrastructure, bureaucracy, and humanism!
jjaredsimpson 11y ago
Truly, a piece of writing with zero value or insight.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
  Oh, it wasn't that bad; just very self-conscious.
nemo1618 11y ago
I don't see how the author can reconcile his (implied) belief that consciousness cannot be created with the entirely reasonable assertion that some beings are inherently more conscious than others. A fertilized egg, for example, contains little to no consciousness, but over time it develops a "full" human-level consciousness. Where does this additional consciousness spring from? Surely, if a being can become more conscious, then it stands to reason that there is some as-yet-unknown physical property or process that we can associate with consciousness. And once it has been identified, it can be replicated artificially.
- andybak 11y ago
  The correlation of consciousness in with certain physical structures doesn't necessarily mean it's created or even caused by them. This is where the distinction between 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' becomes crucial. The more we study the brain, the more we can identify things that are obviously the result of physical processes and the less remains to be explained by 'consciousness'. However the question becomes 'once thinking and intelligence is fully understood, does anything else remain?' This is why thought experiments about zombies and chinese rooms are interesting. It's about exploring what would be left out (if anything) once a full physical explanation had been achieved.
Animats 11y ago
Oh, "consciousness" again. Here's an new counter-argument: self driving cars are conscious. They're aware of their surroundings, in considerable detail and with useful understanding. They're not passive, waiting for questions; they have an ongoing stream of intellectual activity, so they have an "inner life". They learn from experience. They have goals, some of which are more important than others. They try to predict the future ("will that car ahead try to make a left turn?"). They interact with others (lane merging requires this.) It's not human-level consciousness, but it's consciousness. So there.
- sumitviii 11y ago
  We should generalize this for all things. If something behaves as if it has consciousness, then we should not worry if it actually has consciousness.
- s_baby 11y ago
  This isn't really a counter argument. The article is pretty weak but it does differentiate between consciousness and intelligence. Everything you describe is intelligence.
  - superqd 11y ago
    Actually, that was my biggest problem with the entire article. It's a false dichotomy to assume that consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing, if one cannot meaningfully articulate how they differ. If the inner machinations of an entity's intelligence are indistinguishable from an "inner life", then it is reasonable to conclude that such machinations are an inner subjective life. I.e., being intelligent is itself an experiential subjective inner life. Therefore, intelligent beings, however that intelligence operates, are experiencing their external environment (which is the same as saying they have an "inner life"). The author seems to assume that experiencing the world is somehow separate from the mechanisms of that experience. Just because he feels like a little homunculus doesn't mean he is. If we had nerve endings in our brains allowing us to feel the thoughts we were having separate from thinking, then I don't believe this artificial distinction would be as prevalent.
rybosome 11y ago
The author's dismissal of the "emergent property" argument on the grounds that it is a convenient explanation without proof is intellectually dishonest. We have no universally accepted, measurable definition of consciousness - how can this solution be dismissed for simplicity? I think about a hard drive with a fresh version of Ubuntu installed to it. If an alien civilization found the hard drive, perhaps they'd be able to measure all of the physical properties of it. But they'd have no idea that an operating system was an emergent property of the drive because they didn't have an understanding of, at minimum, the following: - Binary representation - Processor architecture (including the specific processor for which this was compiled) - Big-endian / little-endian representation - Disk formats - File systems (hell, the concept of files in general) It's entirely possible that we could observe and measure consciousness if we knew what to look for.
- tomhoward 11y ago
  An operating system isn't an emergent property of a hard drive. An operating system emerges out of the minds of the many programmers who work on it, out of the interactions these programmers have with each other and with their users, and out of the society in which they live. It then gets installed on a hard drive by a human, after which it can function by interacting with the computer's hardware. This is really the point the author is making. There is no reason to be certain that consciousness (the reflective, emotional, inner experience that is distinct from logical intelligence) emerges out of the hardware of human (and other animal) bodies and brains, as no empirical evidence for such a process has yet been found, after several decades and vast sums of money invested looking for it. Just as an operating system is a separate entity that needs to be installed onto the computer for it to be able to work, it (in the view of the author) is plausible that consciousness is something distinct from the physical matter of the body and brain. It's entirely possible that we could observe and measure consciousness if we knew what to look for. Well yes, exactly, and Kastrup's point is that the conventional fixation on matter (which to date has proven fruitless) is a distraction from other possible answers.
  - rybosome 11y ago
    > An operating system isn't an emergent property of a hard drive. An operating system emerges out of the minds of the many programmers who work on it, out of the interactions these programmers have with each other and with their users, and out of the society in which they live. It then gets installed on a hard drive by a human, after which it can function by interacting with the computer's hardware. Perhaps I am using the term "emergent property" incorrectly, but your argument does not seem to contradict my point. That the operating system exists because many programmers intentionally developed it while interacting with one another and society at large, and that the OS only functions when the drive is connected to a functioning computer is immaterial. Intelligent consciousness was crafted by evolution rather than human hands, and it requires the hardware of a human body to function (as far as we know) rather than a computer, but the result is the same, is it not? That is, under the right conditions, a unique property appears that was not readily apparent from the existing components. Incidentally: I should have said, "...an emergent property of the particular arrangement of bits on a hard drive" to be more precise, but I think you knew what I meant. > Just as an operating system is a separate entity that needs to be installed onto the computer for it to be able to work, it (in the view of the author) is plausible that consciousness is something distinct from the physical matter of the body and brain. Ok, consider the example of just the core components of a computer; CPU and RAM, and the hardware for them to communicate. This can be thought of as a very complex circuit from which the emergent property of computation arises when interpreted correctly. Without an understanding of clock timing, the CPU's instruction set architecture, binary and many other concepts, the ability to measure the voltages of various components does not make the large operation or organization apparent. Ultimately my point was that the author was incorrect in stating, "We can deduce the characteristics of all known emergent properties by examining their constituent elements", and I wanted to give an example of a system for which we would likely not understand the emergent property had we not built it ourselves. Although I agree with the author's point that we cannot be certain of the origin of consciousness, I disagree strongly with his certainty that it is not an emergent property.
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ChuckMcM 11y ago
Sigh, the writing style is off putting but there are some interesting conjectures in there. One of the more interesting papers I read on this topic involved neural nets with a set of neurons associated with 'pleasure' and 'pain' such that firing a neuron in either the 'pleasure' or 'pain' group would externally activate a strong enhancement signal for learning and bind in a positive or negative association. So that future things which triggered values in that learned net would then get modified by the enhancement signal in proportion to how strongly they correlated with the net. The math was very obtuse but as far as I could tell it boiled down to creating an out of band signal from the activation of specific neurons within the matrix which could influence the weights of future associations.
- danans 11y ago
  The out of band pleasure/pain signal is a super interesting idea, but it's still fundamentally materialist, which is in direct contradiction with from the author's (IMO silly) central claim that consciousness is a phenomenon based in some non-physical medium.
  - ChuckMcM 11y ago
    I believe it depends on how you articulate it. The author is taking the traditional 'inner life' definition of consciousness, which is to say that entirely internal thinking is occurring, and arguing that AI based on external stimuli will never include that. The pleasure/pain internal path is basically adding additional stimuli sources within the network itself. So you can modify the training just by re-running the previous training. A made up example of how that might work is lets say you had a 'funny' neuron. Basically anytime its weight was adjusted by the network you got an immediate feedback on that association as 'funny'. Now you re-run a previous association that shares weights with the one that was tagged as 'funny' and that weight back propagates through the network giving a previously 'not associated with funny' association a proportional association. What I got out of the paper was building neural networks that were pre-disposed, though an internally hard wired linkage of some neurons, to learning a particular form of association. The idea that an identical set of training values would train differently on nets based on this sort of internally forced messaging for some neurons, is the closest thing I've seen to the 'inner life' notion of consciousness.
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nickbauman 11y ago
Simple rules yield complex and unpredictable interactions. This is the nature of emergent behavior. An apotheosis of this axiom would be the behavior of leaf cutter ants. Are they conscious? I believe the concept of consciousness is deeply intertwined with the concept of randomness / sport. A machine defies this notion.
Dylan16807 11y ago
Wow! If consciousness is as simple as using organic materials and having them metabolize then the problem of consciousness is a hundred times easier than the problem of intelligence! But the way the author describes consciousness it sounds like a bad thing. Like a shared delusion. Maybe the robots are better without it.
bakhy 11y ago
I guess his answer to that Zen koan - when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to here it, did it make a sound - is a simple no :D This started out interesting, then went absurdely tentative, and finally turned into Sokal affair material with the ending (the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation, lol).
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j_m_b 11y ago
>Consciousness – whatever it may intrinsically be – is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure. > If that is the case, there is absolutely no sense in talking about creating consciousness, since consciousness is already there from the start. It is what there is. It can’t be created for it is that within which all creations unfold. > If something is fundamentally beyond all forms of experience, direct or indirect, it might as well not exist. Because all knowledge resides in consciousness, we cannot know what is supposedly outside consciousness; Just because there are limitations on our own ability to perceive the physical world does not mean that there is a fundamental limit on what can be perceived. For example, the Hubble space telescope can perceive light that is beyond both the ability of us to observe inside of our atmosphere and the wavelengths which we can see with our own eyes. >According to my system, reality unfolds in one stream of subjectivity that I call ‘mind-at-large.’ >As such, what we call ‘conscious entities’ are merely dissociated alters of mind-at-large. An image of that dissociation is a human body. >Therefore, our feeble attempts to engineer an entity with a private, subjective inner life similar to our own aren’t really attempts to create consciousness. Instead, they are attempts to induce dissociation in mind-at-large, so to create alters analogous to ourselves. After creating a veil that is unpierceable by human cognition, the author conveniently hides his metaphysical "mind-at-large" creation behind it. It is as if some great mind is doling out consciousness to each animal according to its share. Because we are but fragments, mere images of this great mind we can never hope to be able to recreate anything more than cheap reproductions. Sound familiar? > Going further down the chain of biological complexity, it isn’t unreasonable to infer that metabolism itself – that process common to all life – is the most basic image of dissociative processes in mind-at-large. Engineers design chemical processes that harness chemical energy broken up into individual steps to produce some useful product, just like metabolism does. Indeed, chemical engineers use enzymes in some of their steps. In fact, there is even work on creating artificial metabolisms. We are better at replicating this mind-at-large better than the author is aware. >Based on this understanding, do we have any reason whatsoever to believe that the mere mimicking of the information flow in human brains, no matter how accurate, will ever lead to a new dissociation of mind-at-large? The answer to this question can only be ‘yes’ if you think the kidney simulation can make the computer urinate. False equivalence much? Creation of a physical substance from thin air is impossible. However, given the right inputs, the Cloaca machine can create poop from food by simulating the digestive process. *edit - formatting
ilaksh 11y ago
Fundamentally this is about your belief system. Many people hold a dualist core belief which precludes 'artificial consciousness'. This is mostly a holdover from a certain type of religion. I think there should be some variant of panpyschism that disguishes between the consciousness of a mammal and that of a rock.
andybak 11y ago
I think I've developed a foolproof method for detecting whether someone is a zombie - in the philosophical sense of the word. (Detecting whether they are a zombie in the '28 Days Later' sense is much simpler and consists of detecting whether the person simultaneously rotting and homicidal). My method consists of giving the person a basic education in a Artificial Intelligence or Philosophy of Mind and then asking them whether they believe that either consciousness can potentially be explained using concepts we already possess or that in fact it isn't even in need of an explanation. If they answer yes, then they are probably a zombie.
pointernil 11y ago
Way too late to the party, but this cries simply for it: How would this guys argue against this way of thinking about consciousness: Michael Graziano, evolution and non-magic description of consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE Ah! I guess he simply questions, right out denies materialism. This is borderline religious, right?

26 points by tomhoward 11y ago

tl;dr + opinion: The usual metaphysically couched argument that consciousness is a primary substance and matter is secondary, ergo scientists/engineers pursuing a materialist explanation/synthesis of consciousness are fools barking up the wrong tree, all topped off with this <sarcasm>gem of a</sarcasm> conclusion: "The computer engineer’s dream of birthing a conscious child into the world without the messiness and fragility of life is an infantile delusion; a confused, partial, distorted projection of archetypal images and drives. It is the expression of the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation."

dasil003 11y ago
Yeah that's a pretty painful conclusion. It may well be the case that the materialists are wrong, and artificial intelligence in silicon can never achieve consciousness—I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way—but the minute you start broadly ascribing motivations to an entire field based on very specific social hot button issues you lose all intellectual credibility regardless of whether you are coming from the scientific or philosophical perspective.
- XorNot 11y ago
  Its also wildly sexist. There are plenty of female AI researchers.
- upquark 11y ago
  > I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way > ...you start broadly ascribing motivations to an entire field... Do you see a contradiction? You're broadly calling a bunch of people "arrogant", who may have a very well informed and valid opinion on a topic.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Uh, I'm saying it's arrogant to be self-assured about the nature of consciousness, I'm directly addressing a specific line of thinking. That is very different from ascribing psychological motivations to a swath of people who almost certainly have a wide variety of motivations.
    - upquark 11y ago
      You're making a broad statement about a bunch of people without knowing what they know or don't, and one might say that statement is insulting. Right after that, you're criticizing a guy for making blanket statements about a bunch of people. Saying "I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way" about any statement A is itself a pretty arrogant thing to say (you are making a statement about the collective knowledge of everyone else on the topic of A not being too far from yours).
      - dasil003 11y ago
        I'm not saying anything about a group of people, I'm saying something about a specific belief. For those two things to be equivalent, there needs to be a layer of indirection, eg. if I were to say: "people who claim to know the nature of consciousness are doing so because they aren't comfortable with the idea of not knowing something"—that would be an equivalently arrogant statement. As it is, my statement is definitely not in that league. Do you not see the difference?
        upquark 11y ago
        Hmm, let me see how I can explain this more clearly. "I'm not arrogant enough to do X" implies "Those who do X are sufficiently arrogant". Do you follow this far? Here's an example relating to your experience. I could claim: "I'm not arrogant enough to use RoR for serious web development". On the surface, I'm making a claim about myself / my beliefs. You shouldn't feel upset over my statement, it's not about you or any other people...

dvanduzer 11y ago

The author lays out a case that consciousness can't emerge from mere matter. The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe (like Spinoza's God), and humans obtain a portion of it... somehow. Characterizing Turing's argument this way misses the mark: "We can test whether a machine is intelligent or not purely by observing its behavior in the environment." Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

s_baby 11y ago
>Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm True but for the same reason, models of consciousness dissolve into circular ontologies of subject and object. I agree with you on Spinoza. Seeing consciousness as a qualitative property of the universe avoids this problem and ties up alot of loose ends. That doesn't imply artificial consciousness is impossible. It implies on some level artificial consciousness will always be a blackbox system to us. One we can maybe replicate and improve on but still beyond full logical comprehension.
upquark 11y ago
> The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe... What is love? How can an uncaring chunk of bones and flesh feel love? But we do fall in love, so it must exist in some form. Hence, love is the universe itself. Checkmate
- fsargent 11y ago
  Baby don't hurt me, Don't hurt me, No more.
  - upquark 11y ago

kwhitefoot 11y ago

The foreword is by Deepak Chopra.

im3w1l 11y ago

>For all practical purposes, dissociation is metabolism; there is no reason to believe it is anything else. We have very little in the way of evidence on the question of consciousness, so we can only really conjecture very simple ideas. The idea that everything is consciousness is a simple idea. Metabolism is not. What is even meant by metabolism? Creating the magic ATP spirit molecule?

Procrastes 11y ago
This makes me want to write a glossy trade paper "self-help book" about "Your Spiritual ATP Cycle" But I just can't bring myself to be that cruel.
kahoon 11y ago
To be honest, it simply seems like the author took one arbitrary aspect of living beings (metabolism) and somehow made it responsible for conscioussness.

sixQuarks 11y ago

IF there is a true physical reality and the universe is not only in our mind, then artificial consciousness is a foregone conclusion. Not only that, artificial consciousness will be many orders of magnitude more complex and rich than anything we experience today. This is because biological consciousness has emerged through randomness. Imagine when consciousness can be evolved through technological means. It will be the difference between the flight of a bird, and a SpaceX rocket.

pointernil 11y ago
Hmm, imagine nature evolving "non-technological" creatures capable of space-flight... but I better leave the reasons for and implications of such developments to ppl. like N. Stephenson ;)
0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Do birds have a ground control crew? Maybe I need to go outside and see. Edit: I apologize for implying the natural world is superior. Hurrah for infrastructure, bureaucracy, and humanism!

jjaredsimpson 11y ago

Truly, a piece of writing with zero value or insight.

0xdeadbeefbabe 11y ago
Oh, it wasn't that bad; just very self-conscious.

nemo1618 11y ago

I don't see how the author can reconcile his (implied) belief that consciousness cannot be created with the entirely reasonable assertion that some beings are inherently more conscious than others. A fertilized egg, for example, contains little to no consciousness, but over time it develops a "full" human-level consciousness. Where does this additional consciousness spring from? Surely, if a being can become more conscious, then it stands to reason that there is some as-yet-unknown physical property or process that we can associate with consciousness. And once it has been identified, it can be replicated artificially.

andybak 11y ago
The correlation of consciousness in with certain physical structures doesn't necessarily mean it's created or even caused by them. This is where the distinction between 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' becomes crucial. The more we study the brain, the more we can identify things that are obviously the result of physical processes and the less remains to be explained by 'consciousness'. However the question becomes 'once thinking and intelligence is fully understood, does anything else remain?' This is why thought experiments about zombies and chinese rooms are interesting. It's about exploring what would be left out (if anything) once a full physical explanation had been achieved.

Animats 11y ago

Oh, "consciousness" again. Here's an new counter-argument: self driving cars are conscious. They're aware of their surroundings, in considerable detail and with useful understanding. They're not passive, waiting for questions; they have an ongoing stream of intellectual activity, so they have an "inner life". They learn from experience. They have goals, some of which are more important than others. They try to predict the future ("will that car ahead try to make a left turn?"). They interact with others (lane merging requires this.) It's not human-level consciousness, but it's consciousness. So there.

sumitviii 11y ago
We should generalize this for all things. If something behaves as if it has consciousness, then we should not worry if it actually has consciousness.
s_baby 11y ago
This isn't really a counter argument. The article is pretty weak but it does differentiate between consciousness and intelligence. Everything you describe is intelligence.
- superqd 11y ago
  Actually, that was my biggest problem with the entire article. It's a false dichotomy to assume that consciousness and intelligence aren't the same thing, if one cannot meaningfully articulate how they differ. If the inner machinations of an entity's intelligence are indistinguishable from an "inner life", then it is reasonable to conclude that such machinations are an inner subjective life. I.e., being intelligent is itself an experiential subjective inner life. Therefore, intelligent beings, however that intelligence operates, are experiencing their external environment (which is the same as saying they have an "inner life"). The author seems to assume that experiencing the world is somehow separate from the mechanisms of that experience. Just because he feels like a little homunculus doesn't mean he is. If we had nerve endings in our brains allowing us to feel the thoughts we were having separate from thinking, then I don't believe this artificial distinction would be as prevalent.

rybosome 11y ago

The author's dismissal of the "emergent property" argument on the grounds that it is a convenient explanation without proof is intellectually dishonest. We have no universally accepted, measurable definition of consciousness - how can this solution be dismissed for simplicity? I think about a hard drive with a fresh version of Ubuntu installed to it. If an alien civilization found the hard drive, perhaps they'd be able to measure all of the physical properties of it. But they'd have no idea that an operating system was an emergent property of the drive because they didn't have an understanding of, at minimum, the following: - Binary representation - Processor architecture (including the specific processor for which this was compiled) - Big-endian / little-endian representation - Disk formats - File systems (hell, the concept of files in general) It's entirely possible that we could observe and measure consciousness if we knew what to look for.

tomhoward 11y ago
An operating system isn't an emergent property of a hard drive. An operating system emerges out of the minds of the many programmers who work on it, out of the interactions these programmers have with each other and with their users, and out of the society in which they live. It then gets installed on a hard drive by a human, after which it can function by interacting with the computer's hardware. This is really the point the author is making. There is no reason to be certain that consciousness (the reflective, emotional, inner experience that is distinct from logical intelligence) emerges out of the hardware of human (and other animal) bodies and brains, as no empirical evidence for such a process has yet been found, after several decades and vast sums of money invested looking for it. Just as an operating system is a separate entity that needs to be installed onto the computer for it to be able to work, it (in the view of the author) is plausible that consciousness is something distinct from the physical matter of the body and brain. It's entirely possible that we could observe and measure consciousness if we knew what to look for. Well yes, exactly, and Kastrup's point is that the conventional fixation on matter (which to date has proven fruitless) is a distraction from other possible answers.
- rybosome 11y ago
  > An operating system isn't an emergent property of a hard drive. An operating system emerges out of the minds of the many programmers who work on it, out of the interactions these programmers have with each other and with their users, and out of the society in which they live. It then gets installed on a hard drive by a human, after which it can function by interacting with the computer's hardware. Perhaps I am using the term "emergent property" incorrectly, but your argument does not seem to contradict my point. That the operating system exists because many programmers intentionally developed it while interacting with one another and society at large, and that the OS only functions when the drive is connected to a functioning computer is immaterial. Intelligent consciousness was crafted by evolution rather than human hands, and it requires the hardware of a human body to function (as far as we know) rather than a computer, but the result is the same, is it not? That is, under the right conditions, a unique property appears that was not readily apparent from the existing components. Incidentally: I should have said, "...an emergent property of the particular arrangement of bits on a hard drive" to be more precise, but I think you knew what I meant. > Just as an operating system is a separate entity that needs to be installed onto the computer for it to be able to work, it (in the view of the author) is plausible that consciousness is something distinct from the physical matter of the body and brain. Ok, consider the example of just the core components of a computer; CPU and RAM, and the hardware for them to communicate. This can be thought of as a very complex circuit from which the emergent property of computation arises when interpreted correctly. Without an understanding of clock timing, the CPU's instruction set architecture, binary and many other concepts, the ability to measure the voltages of various components does not make the large operation or organization apparent. Ultimately my point was that the author was incorrect in stating, "We can deduce the characteristics of all known emergent properties by examining their constituent elements", and I wanted to give an example of a system for which we would likely not understand the emergent property had we not built it ourselves. Although I agree with the author's point that we cannot be certain of the origin of consciousness, I disagree strongly with his certainty that it is not an emergent property.

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ChuckMcM 11y ago

Sigh, the writing style is off putting but there are some interesting conjectures in there. One of the more interesting papers I read on this topic involved neural nets with a set of neurons associated with 'pleasure' and 'pain' such that firing a neuron in either the 'pleasure' or 'pain' group would externally activate a strong enhancement signal for learning and bind in a positive or negative association. So that future things which triggered values in that learned net would then get modified by the enhancement signal in proportion to how strongly they correlated with the net. The math was very obtuse but as far as I could tell it boiled down to creating an out of band signal from the activation of specific neurons within the matrix which could influence the weights of future associations.

danans 11y ago
The out of band pleasure/pain signal is a super interesting idea, but it's still fundamentally materialist, which is in direct contradiction with from the author's (IMO silly) central claim that consciousness is a phenomenon based in some non-physical medium.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  I believe it depends on how you articulate it. The author is taking the traditional 'inner life' definition of consciousness, which is to say that entirely internal thinking is occurring, and arguing that AI based on external stimuli will never include that. The pleasure/pain internal path is basically adding additional stimuli sources within the network itself. So you can modify the training just by re-running the previous training. A made up example of how that might work is lets say you had a 'funny' neuron. Basically anytime its weight was adjusted by the network you got an immediate feedback on that association as 'funny'. Now you re-run a previous association that shares weights with the one that was tagged as 'funny' and that weight back propagates through the network giving a previously 'not associated with funny' association a proportional association. What I got out of the paper was building neural networks that were pre-disposed, though an internally hard wired linkage of some neurons, to learning a particular form of association. The idea that an identical set of training values would train differently on nets based on this sort of internally forced messaging for some neurons, is the closest thing I've seen to the 'inner life' notion of consciousness.

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nickbauman 11y ago

Simple rules yield complex and unpredictable interactions. This is the nature of emergent behavior. An apotheosis of this axiom would be the behavior of leaf cutter ants. Are they conscious? I believe the concept of consciousness is deeply intertwined with the concept of randomness / sport. A machine defies this notion.

Dylan16807 11y ago

Wow! If consciousness is as simple as using organic materials and having them metabolize then the problem of consciousness is a hundred times easier than the problem of intelligence! But the way the author describes consciousness it sounds like a bad thing. Like a shared delusion. Maybe the robots are better without it.

bakhy 11y ago

I guess his answer to that Zen koan - when a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to here it, did it make a sound - is a simple no :D This started out interesting, then went absurdely tentative, and finally turned into Sokal affair material with the ending (the male’s hidden aspiration for the female’s divine power of creation, lol).

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j_m_b 11y ago

>Consciousness – whatever it may intrinsically be – is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure. > If that is the case, there is absolutely no sense in talking about creating consciousness, since consciousness is already there from the start. It is what there is. It can’t be created for it is that within which all creations unfold. > If something is fundamentally beyond all forms of experience, direct or indirect, it might as well not exist. Because all knowledge resides in consciousness, we cannot know what is supposedly outside consciousness; Just because there are limitations on our own ability to perceive the physical world does not mean that there is a fundamental limit on what can be perceived. For example, the Hubble space telescope can perceive light that is beyond both the ability of us to observe inside of our atmosphere and the wavelengths which we can see with our own eyes. >According to my system, reality unfolds in one stream of subjectivity that I call ‘mind-at-large.’ >As such, what we call ‘conscious entities’ are merely dissociated alters of mind-at-large. An image of that dissociation is a human body. >Therefore, our feeble attempts to engineer an entity with a private, subjective inner life similar to our own aren’t really attempts to create consciousness. Instead, they are attempts to induce dissociation in mind-at-large, so to create alters analogous to ourselves. After creating a veil that is unpierceable by human cognition, the author conveniently hides his metaphysical "mind-at-large" creation behind it. It is as if some great mind is doling out consciousness to each animal according to its share. Because we are but fragments, mere images of this great mind we can never hope to be able to recreate anything more than cheap reproductions. Sound familiar? > Going further down the chain of biological complexity, it isn’t unreasonable to infer that metabolism itself – that process common to all life – is the most basic image of dissociative processes in mind-at-large. Engineers design chemical processes that harness chemical energy broken up into individual steps to produce some useful product, just like metabolism does. Indeed, chemical engineers use enzymes in some of their steps. In fact, there is even work on creating artificial metabolisms. We are better at replicating this mind-at-large better than the author is aware. >Based on this understanding, do we have any reason whatsoever to believe that the mere mimicking of the information flow in human brains, no matter how accurate, will ever lead to a new dissociation of mind-at-large? The answer to this question can only be ‘yes’ if you think the kidney simulation can make the computer urinate. False equivalence much? Creation of a physical substance from thin air is impossible. However, given the right inputs, the Cloaca machine can create poop from food by simulating the digestive process. *edit - formatting

ilaksh 11y ago

Fundamentally this is about your belief system. Many people hold a dualist core belief which precludes 'artificial consciousness'. This is mostly a holdover from a certain type of religion. I think there should be some variant of panpyschism that disguishes between the consciousness of a mammal and that of a rock.

andybak 11y ago

I think I've developed a foolproof method for detecting whether someone is a zombie - in the philosophical sense of the word. (Detecting whether they are a zombie in the '28 Days Later' sense is much simpler and consists of detecting whether the person simultaneously rotting and homicidal). My method consists of giving the person a basic education in a Artificial Intelligence or Philosophy of Mind and then asking them whether they believe that either consciousness can potentially be explained using concepts we already possess or that in fact it isn't even in need of an explanation. If they answer yes, then they are probably a zombie.

pointernil 11y ago

Way too late to the party, but this cries simply for it: How would this guys argue against this way of thinking about consciousness: Michael Graziano, evolution and non-magic description of consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peHcu8LEgEE Ah! I guess he simply questions, right out denies materialism. This is borderline religious, right?