71–80 of 179 posts
I think people just need to accept things as they are. People have thoughts and they happen to correspond to brain activity. So be it.
We need to accept gravity. Things fall down when we drop them. So be it.
I'm not going to waste my time expecting to find answers to such things on a message board for software engineers and money men. May as well be 4chan
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mys…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're asking the wrong question by excluding cognition and using a very ill-defined word ("consciousness"). "Consciousness" is not a thing. It's a collection of things, many of which are what we usually refer to as "cognition". People who like to talk about consciousness have a problem keeping the goalposts in place (and trying to exclude cognition from consciousness, presumably because "cognition" doesn't sound mys…
Consciousness is just your brain working. Everyone that tries to mystify or expand on it further is making shit up. The glasgow coma scale has existed for a long time in medicine. You literally lose parts of consciousness before the whole as various physiologic markers deteriorate. This isn’t even pessimistic. It’s just not an interesting explanation and people love to be led by novel ideas regardless of their basis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the (hard) problem of qualia. You can't say for sure that ChatGPT doesn't experience anything. And I can't say for sure that you do, either. It's trivial to dismiss it on the basis of "well obviously it's like that"—far more difficult is to say something about why it's not like that. I think consciousness has to be the product of an algorithmic process. I think this process can be summed up as "prediction". I…
>You can't say for sure that ChatGPT doesn't experience anything. And I can't say for sure that you do, either. The question rattling around in my brain tonight is - if some, many, people don't develop a theory of mind as young children, how many of the people around me are like this ? Is it just the philosophers? It seems of much more moment than the essence of ChatGPT.
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
Depending on what exactly you mean by “the nature of consciousness”, it’s fundamentally impossible to answer. The fact that we think we can observe and comprehend a mechanism doing the observation does not preclude things we cannot see. You might be able to pan a cctv camera and get some insight about the camera itself if you find a reflection, but you can’t pan it over to the linux driver. It is not a given that all…
Is there a book or resource that describes the state of the art in our knowledge and understanding about the nature of consciousness (Not cognition) and provides a survey of the popular and promising theories? Readable by someone who isn't in the field(s). Maybe even a good popsci book on the topic that is the neuroscience's equivalent of "Universe in a nutshell"
Cognition and consciousness are not easily separable. Some psychology and neuroscience publications that I found particularly good: Gibson (1950), Ittelson (1973), Kosslyn (2005), Northoff (2004) ("Mind–body problem"), Dewey, & Bentley (1949). Particularly the first and last should get you started. [1]: Gibson, J. J. (1950). The perception of the visual world. Boston: Houghton Mifflin [2]: Ittelson, W.H. (1973). Envi…
Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The mathematical structure is geometric in some way. The quantum domain acts as a sieve. Constructive and distinctive interference perturbs the quantum substrate, which is the existential universe itself. Consciousness is thus the universe peering back into itself, and living systems are the biotechnology which animate this phenomena. The unique properties of this are: Our “comp…
All you've said beeing a hypothesis. We have yet to see proof of any of it.
Your downvotes are your HYPOCRISY!
I have a whole long list of assertions you will fight me on for the love of your ignorance.
In this moment I cannot fully invest in exhaustive debate.
I will prattle on a little more in an unstructured form for the sake of intrigue.
There are several things going, one being this parallel discussion on quantum entanglement (and the parallel discussion for our minds being hackable for another time.)
I would like to describe to you the technology of consciousness in ways I have come to understand, yet I will expect to be scorned and badgered for the inherently abstract nature of our topic.
Neurons in isolation exhibit a telemetric awareness of one and other
The Cosmic Serpent was inspiring in my youth. The primitive ideas the author discusses relate.
Microtubul structures likely provide a substrate for our experiential being. Electrochemical processes flash these substrates, and then gently and delicately suss the state resolve as though a sieve + stack.
The sieve is the constructive /destructive aspect.
I say “stack” as resolve is apparently pushed and pulled or read/write like memories, yet I believe this is where our non-classical thought strategy arises. The outcome is more like a micro-inference rather than a faithful memory.
Constructive and destructive patterns form an analog isolated holographic “image” (though not merely a picture, in every shade and depth of every experience we are capable of having.)
Any information can be pushed into this stack, yet interference collapses to associations (or novelty) producing a primitive psycho-emotional echo, other parts of the brain process into higher level responses.
Consciousness is not intelligence. Consciousness coopts intelligence as a tool for perpetuation.
How does this not sound like consciousness: “consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of our existential being.”
Existential being is any matter, yet all cold matter is dormant without animation through life or other technology.
The potential is the hyper-dimensional capacity of the carefully arranged atoms in our neural substrate.
Inflection is any perturbation of the quantum dynamic (which is usually pure chaos.) it is the atom in the universe which exists, the living system is a technology which extends and allows the aggregate scope of potential awareness and feedback.
The quantum layer is like an echo chamber for your jelly bag brain. This echo chamber is the material universe (which you are) echoing experience upon its analog subjectively scoped potentials.
See the idea, not the comment quality.
Just putting this out there in case anyone has read this and would care to share an informed opinion with a layperson!
>In defining what it means for a mathematical structure to be of conscious experience, our proposal does not answer the question of what this mathematical structure is. Nothing is answered in this article. We simply don't know. This article is up here because nobody is sure whether or not chatGPT is in any way representative of an aspect of our conscious experience. Is chatGPT a mathematical model of consciousness? W…
> Is chatGPT a mathematical model of consciousness? Unless we reduce models of consciousness to purely stochastic processes, this is trivially false. And no one seriously reduces consciousness to probabilistic pattern recognition. > We know it doesn't represent the whole experience... It doesn't represent any experience. ChatGPT doesn't "experience" things as conscious things do. It's not even comparable to the exper…
Moreover, large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3, are designed to learn how to predict, and prediction is the dual of compression. As explained in this StackExchange post (https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/130655/is-prediction-...), prediction can be used to compress data, and compression can be used to make predictions. Given that LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data and can predict patterns within that data, I believe that they contain all the necessary components to be considered an intelligent system.
Therefore, I firmly believe that consciousness can indeed be reduced to probabilistic pattern recognition, and that LLMs provide a compelling example of this phenomenon in action.