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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#181

Post by WhompingWindows »

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have very serious personality deformation.

So no, I don't think it's possible to create a simulated brain that behaves similarly as a human, as the biological medium is in a constant state of dissolution, repair, evolution, and adaptation. This is how we learn, get stressed, get tired, get certain emotions...it's a whole new layer of programming you'd need to perfect beyond just replicating a brain at one moment in time.

A brain in silico would be apples:oranges different than a biological brain.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#182

Post by arnoooooo »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #157
arnoooooo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works if neurons do generate consciousness. The only thing we know is that their activity seems to correlate with consciousness. My guess is that you can't build a digital Neuron, at least not one that has consciousness properties. That's because I take neurons to be what consciousness looks like when viewed through our senses.

But what's special about neurons aside from the causal relationships it has with the rest of the system? If its utility to consciousness is nothing but its causal relationships then a digital replica will support consciousness just the same.

"nothing but causal relationships" is indeed all you'd need, provided they go the materialist way, i.e. that consciousness comes from specific arrangements of neurons. I don't think that makes sense, as nobody can give the slightest hint of a theory that would make that work. The reverse theory, that consciousness is primary, makes more sense to me. In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital replicas will not have consciousness, they will be a mirror of what consciousness looks like when seen through our senses.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#183

Post by rsiqueira »

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

> you start with a baby brain and let it grow up

You can grow biological brain structures from stem cell. It's called Brain Organoids and Neural Organoids, that may one day be used in machines and may one day have consciousness properties. Interview about this with Lex Fridman (MIT Artificial Intelligence teacher) and Paola Arlotta (Harvard brain neuroscientist): https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/

> We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does.

This is called "emergent property" (see "Emergence" in Wikipedia), that is a sub-area of Complex Systems theory. There's a theory that states it may be possible that consciousness may appear as an emergent property from a high complex, dynamical and evolutionary AI system.

> imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation

Some paradigms to approach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence / Superintelligence) are: 1. Simulate the brain in low level details; 2. Simulate the functioning of higher level structures of the brain (cortical columns, visual cortex, hippocampus...); 3. Create artificial neurons (that can be used to neural networks, deep learning, etc.); 4. Simulating simple brains and nervous systems (e.g jellyfish, insects, C.elegans connectome project, etc) to understand how intelligence works; 5. Simulating the behavior of the brain ("cognitive architectures"); 6. Creating en evolutionary system that could converge to brain-like funcionality.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#184

Post by kypro »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105
kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

Sorry, but this barely scratches the surface. The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all. Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step clos…

You don't have an experience. You might think you do, but I see no scientific reason to believe you.

What you might have is an algorithm in your brain telling you that there is a self experiencing the world. But in reality you're just a collection of sub atomic particles.

Edit: Why should I take your claim of conscious experience any more seriously than my computer's who's screen is currently reading: "I AM CONSCIOUS" from a notepad?

Is the only difference that I told the computer to say it, where as you are told by your genetics to say and think it?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#185

Post by arnoooooo »

jaldhar wrote: post #175
arnoooooo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

advaita vedanta as I understand it is the actual scientific approach to consciousness, as it focuses strictly on experience.

Advaita Vedanta accepts six pramanas (means of justified knowledge). Pratyaksha (sensory perception), anumana (inference), shabda (the words of the Vedas), upamana (comparison), arthapatti (presumption), and abhava (negation). Experience (anubhava) is NOT pramana.

I meant experience in the form of sensory perception, followed by inference and comparison. I suppose you mean experience that would be tinted by interpretation ?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#186

Post by david-gpu »

zyxzevn wrote: post #176
dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

Your computer simulation does not solve the "stopping problem". This means that the artificial brain does not know what is good or what is bad. It can not know everything about itself. So the brain will be completely unstable and fail after a while. On the other hand, if there is some guiding (like a programmer), the artificial brain can be functional. If the real brain would be guided by some kind of consciousness,…

Do you mean the halting problem in Turing machines?

Okay, we have a proof that a machine can't solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine, but we can build algorithms that solve it for some cases.

Now, can a human solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine? We obviously can't, either. Make the machine complex enough and we can't wrap our minds around it.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#187

Post by Analemma_ »

Here’s my problem with panpsychism: I don’t understand why it isn’t immediately self-refuting via Ockham’s razor.

What I mean is, my understanding is that panpsychism posits that all matter has some degree of consciousness somehow, i.e. even an atom has a little bit, humans just have a lot more. Fine. But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being. However this property agglutinates, it has to be something more than just “amount of matter”; it has to be some function of which matter and how it is arranged.

But that’s just the materialist position! “Matter can make conscious systems if and only if it’s arranged in a particular way (possibly, but not necessarily, meaning a way that involves simulating a Turing machine)” is materialism. At that point, the fundamental quanta of consciousness is an unnecessary addition to the theory that can be discarded with no difference.

I fully grant that I’m a programmer with very little philosophical background, but I just don’t get what the panpsychist hypothesis buys us that we didn’t already have.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#188

Post by DonaldFisk »

mannykannot wrote: post #117
adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious. Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game? This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even jus…

There are two distinct meanings of consciousness being used here: my own experience of consciousness in me (it's always first person), and the conclusions people make about consciousness in other people or animals - that they're conscious because they're like them in important ways. The Chinese Room argument is confusing because it conflates intelligence (understanding Chinese) with consciousness (knowing what it's like to understand Chinese).

So I simplified the problem, by replacing the ability to understand Chinese with the ability to see in colour: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html

While the simplified system is able to distinguish colours, how does it have the first person experience of seeing in colour?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#189

Post by shkkmo »

keiferski wrote: post #73

Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/ It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosoph…

> virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is.

Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious.

I think we tend to underestimate the link between our understanding of our experience of consciousness and how memory formation and recall works.

Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions as our experience of the world. When we consider and attempt to discuss our own experience of redness, we are generally left with only our memory of that experience which influenced be a great deal of post-processing, compression and abstraction. I believe the mental states in which you can actually experience pure redness is very different from the state in which you can attempt analyze and discuss that experience.

Thus I would posit that perhaps it is so much that the conscious experience of being a human and being a rock are different, but that they are processed, stored and understood differently.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#190

Post by n4r9 »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #181
dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have…

I'm get your point but I also think you've answered it yourself. You can give time and experience to a software mind by programming in that new layer...
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