We Are Beast Machines • Hacker News Board

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#101

Post by joeberon » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

ganzuul wrote: post #98

joeberon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't experienced that the teachings need to change personally, but yes the emphasis needs to. Unfortunately westerners are being fed teachings that are more like "this meditation will make you experience a sober LSD trip" and "this one will cure your depression" and "this will give you insight into the nature of reality", because that's what westerners want. But what they actually need is teachings on compassion…

AFAIK the ads don't really correspond to the content. Regardless if you are looking for weight loss, business success, or liberation, you come into contact with the same teachings because it does all of the above. It brings people in with concepts they are familiar with.

Yeah I think you have to misrepresent to get people in, but personally I don't like that. I would rather we don't lie about it and Buddhism (for example) dies than we misrepresent it.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#102

Post by mopierotti » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 4:46 PM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #78

the8472 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find the classical argument with color qualia very convincing (in fact, I thought about it before even knowing what qualia were...). Nothing you can find out about wavelengths, cones, rods, neurons and so on will tell you why you see red the specific way you do, and whether my perception of red corresponds to yours or my "red" is actually your "green". Red being green makes no sense. Let's simplify a bit and say…

Suppose that I see red the way you see green. Then, when I see a stop sign or a fire extinguisher, I'm seeing the color that you would call "green". But of course, I have been told since birth that fire extinguishers, stop signs, etc. are red, so I would naturally call that color red. And in the same way, if I see green the way you see red, when I look at grass I would be perceiving the same color that you see when y…

By that sense, if qualia have no discernible impact on any part of the system, in what sense do they exist?

One can take this thought further. Red vs green light have real physical properties that affect one's subjective experience of them. For example different colors' physical properties change the way that they are perceived in low light conditions, the way they are perceived when placed next to other colors, etc. So at the end of the day even if hypothetically one person's qualia for red is swapped for green, you end up with a green that acts an awful lot like a red for all intents and purposes in the brain.

Edit: So my personal hunch is that qualia can't be meaningfully said to exist.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#103

Post by suzzer99 » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

NoGravitas wrote: post #58

nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I agree about the best parties. But what about the idea that consciousness exists on a continuum — that everything that processes information has a scope of consciousness that corresponds to the complexity of what it processes? A block of steel doesn't really process any information, but a thermostat does, and so does a paramecium. I'm happy to grant qualia to a paramecium, even if I don't think those qualia are very…

I agree with this. IMO any theory wrt to consciousness has to first and foremost consider that no hard line can be drawn along the continuum from human beings to elephants to ants to yeast cells.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#104

Post by mr_overalls » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #6

joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

7) A purely phenomenological viewpoint (such as the one held by some schools of Mahayana Buddhism) would claim that the only reality is one's own mind. The steel block along with all other aspects of perceived reality, are akin to a magical illusion or dream.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#105

Post by lovecg » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

slfnflctd wrote: post #70

joeberon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think most people who argue consciousness is an emergent property of complicated physical systems would believe that the machine would still be conscious after replacing every neuron with a chip

Given a sufficiently advanced chip which included all chemical interactions (or effective simulations), why wouldn't they be? If after the transition is complete we determine/decide they aren't conscious, then we have to argue about at what point the 'hybrid' brain ceases to manifest consciousness, and why. Maybe the organic parts would start to change their prior functionality in response to the synthesized parts...…

On the topic of simulating neurons, we might be able to simulate the _static_ structure but neurons also move around and make new connections. This video opened my eyes on how far we really are from a realistic simulation: https://youtu.be/CJ3d1FgbmFg

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#106

Post by munificent » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

nickelpro wrote: post #6

joeberon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far the only answer I've seen people give to the question is "what problem? There's no problem". Basically, there are many people who don't (or also have convinced themselves that they don't) perceive an incongruity between their personal subjective experience and the idea that consciousness is just an emergent phenomena of a physical system. I haven't found a good way to explain it, I just know that there's somet…

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

I think a variation of the Sorites paradox [1] should be sufficient to argue that 4) is closest and that there is a continuum of consciousness:

You and I are (I presume) conscious and have a meaningful sensation of qualia. If you were to take a high powered laser and destroy exactly one neuron, we still would be. Given how many people survive and do relatively fine after traumatic brain injuries, you can probably extend that to some number of fried neurons while still preserving consciousness.

If the laser destroyed all of our neurons and left our brains a smoking lump of cinder, we would not be conscious. If the laser destroyed all but one neuron, we probably still would not be conscious. That's probably equally true of five or ten neurons.

Now, it may be that if you extend those two scenarios then at some number of neurons, the two will meet and frying just one more neuron completely flips your brain from "as conscious as a fully functional human" to "as inert as a block of steel". But the existence of that magic number seems highly unlikely to me. It would require some explanation for what is special about that exact quantity of neurons that one more or less completely lacks.

It seems then that the most likely reality is that consciousness is a continuum where cognitive machines and living beings can have relatively more or less of it and any threshold that we define to mean "conscious" is mostly as arbitrary as the names of colors.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#107

Post by GonzaloRizzo » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

joeberon wrote: post #10

daseiner1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the question is when and from where does “experiencing things” (qualia) arise. When does calculation become sensation?

Those same people might say that it is just the experience of "being the computer" rather than seeing it from afar. But I don't know, because personally it isn't an argument I find convincing. As an aside, I think you have to be a bit arrogant or closed minded to assert that they actually can see the problem. I really don't think my wife is lying or being nefarious when she says she doesn't see a problem. I trust her…

So if there's such a thing as "being the computer" could we say that a computer experiences qualia and it is somewhat conscious?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#108

Post by lovecg » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

joeberon wrote: post #16

nickelpro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? A sufficiently advanced computer is a perfect P-zombie to me. This is the Chinese Room problem restated. A computer is capable of behaving as a conscious actor without any concept of knowledge or qualia as we would recognize it. But again this gets into a faith-based discussion. To me a sufficiently complex computer doesn't suddenly cross a "consciousness threshold" of complexity, but if to you it does there'…

A vast majority of people who believe that consciousness is an emergent property would also say that a sufficiently advanced computer is exactly as conscious as you or I. At least when I believed that human consciousness was an emergent property I believed that an advanced robot would be totally conscious.

In the original Chinese Room thought experiment it’s a human inside performing all the calculations by hand. To be consistent you would also believe that this room with a human in it has its own consciousness as a whole, correct? This just seems too weird to me.

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#109

Post by GonzaloRizzo » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #14

nickelpro wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how someone can not understand the problem. You and I have conscious experience, we have a meaningful sensation of qualia. A billet of 4140 steel does not, or so we assume. Both are governed by physical laws of the universe, so there must be some distinction beyond these physical laws that differentiate them. In this framing, there are typically four camps, three of them line up with your camps: 1)…

Blocks of steel don't have nervous systems of any kind, let alone complex brains. Hell, they aren't even alive at all: they lack the underlying physiology for a nervous system to sense and control in the first place. Seems like a bit of a hint for why we're conscious and they're not.

Why are you so sure about consciousness emerging from the brain?

Re: We Are Beast Machines

#110

Post by eli_gottlieb » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

adriand wrote: post #90

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To sum this up: consciousness, in this view, is not an emergent property of complex systems. Rather it is a fundamental property of animals. Or at the very least, it's a fundamental property of the particular kinds of physical systems that animals happen to be, and without understand what that is, we have no hope of replicating consciousness in any non-animal. This makes sense to me, because consciousness seems to b…

> a really great way to confuse yourself would be to abstract the entire question of consciousness away from the life sciences and then wonder why you're so confused Yes, exactly. Which is a direct challenge to transhumanism because it means that maybe it actually won't be possible to achieve immortality via brain upload, or build general AI (without first solving the life science "problem", i.e. building an artifici…

Sure, but was anyone really suggesting that we somehow create disembodied people? That seems to be the other side of the dialectical coin from immaterial souls, which are precisely what most Hard Problem disbelievers deny.