Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 179 posts

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#101

Post by mistermann »

mahathu wrote: post #76
didericis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. It's like trying to describe a house that you can't leave.

Psychedelics, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, meditation and other techniques are reasonably valid examples of leaving I'd say. We don't really study them them to the degree that we could, but perhaps some day we will.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#102

Post by mistermann »

epgui wrote: post #44
jsuth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore is exactly what you're looking for. Make sure you get the latest edition. https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Emily-Troscianko-Susan-... She has another book called Conversations on Consciousness that's basically transcribed interviews with prominent figures that's also worth checking out. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254499.Conversations_on_...

I can't say how good this book is, but the author has a PhD in parapsychology. This makes me question how prone they are to magical thinking, and also whether I'd want to read what they have to say about this topic. Yes this comment is an ad hominem, and no I have not read the book... All I have is a skeptical hunch that this might not represent "the state of the art" on the topic.

> Yes this comment is an ad hominem

It is also a natural consequence of the culture you happen to have been raised in, which is an extremely interesting aspect of consciousness: how easily it can be programmed, and how influential it can be (it changes how reality "is"). In your case you have self-awareness of the phenomenon, at least in this case, but most people don't operate on that level.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#104

Post by prmph »

Nevermark wrote: post #53
didericis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method is about paying strict and close attention to what we can observe. The black boxes we can make sense of must have enough datapoints within the observable universe to be understood. We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think i…

We observe everything indirectly. It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable. As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments. There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be abl…

But there is nothing that guarantees that the experience of artificial minds is like our own.

That's what the observability issue is about. Heck, I think you're conscious, but I cannot know for sure.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#105

Post by didericis »

Nevermark wrote: post #53
didericis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific method is about paying strict and close attention to what we can observe. The black boxes we can make sense of must have enough datapoints within the observable universe to be understood. We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think i…

We observe everything indirectly. It is easy (and cognitively useful) to forget that, when the indirection is very reliable. As far as consciousness, we won’t just have to speculate based on our own consciousness. As artificial minds become highly self-aware (a functional ingredient of consciousness), we will be able to construct very controlled experiments. There will be endless numbers of experiments we will be abl…

True, but those experiments are inevitably restricted to the aspects of consciousness available for indirect observation and comparison.

There is no way to distinguish between an unconscious machine mimicking the functional aspects of consciousness we are able to indirectly observe and compare to our own experience and something having the same experience.

We could easily (and I think almost definitely are given the current pure symbolic manipulation track) be doing the same thing as a jungle cargo cult constructing an air strip out of sticks. Studying that won’t tell us how planes work.

Obviously advanced AI is more sophisticated than that and may have more legitimate parallels to consciousness, but I think it’s fundamentally impossible to know what’s a core part of the conscious experience and what just looks superficially similar to the output of conscious beings.

The current generation of AI are clearly not at all conscious and are “just” (don’t want to diminish the work) very good parrots generating image and text output from a given input in a way a whole bunch of conscious humans already have. But we’re already getting cargo cults and people who are anthropomorphizing and considering them comparable to humans.

There’s a danger in studying artificial models of an underlying phenomenon to learn about the phenomenon. That method of study is inherently very limited and extremely difficult to keep calibrated to the underlying phenomenon.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#106

Post by prmph »

plutonorm wrote: post #80
dvt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

While some people believe that consciousness cannot be reduced to probabilistic pattern recognition, I strongly disagree. In my view, the AIXI model is an excellent model of intelligence, as it can mathematically define a notion of Pareto optimal behavior across all possible environments. This model relies on compression at its core, specifically the minimum description length principle. Moreover, large language mode…

Your viewpoint is one I consistently have to push against.

Computation is not necessarily experience. I can't emphasize enough how fundamental understanding this is. It seems some just can't grasp this concept.

Would you say a program that echoes to the screen the responses of a hidden human is intelligent? Viewed as a black box, it would certainly seem so. But does it have any internal experience and understanding of anything? Of course this is a trivial experiment, but the point of it is to show, in the most absurdly clear terms, that producing plausible outputs !== being intelligent, much less having a conscious experience.

This example also shows that the perceived sophistication of the input-output transformation is immaterial, unless you want to say consciousness requires a certain internal architecture for computation, in which case I would ask: what architecture is that? No matter the sophistication of an algorithm, it's computation lies on a different axis to that of consciousness. You might say human compute because they are conscious, not conscious because they compute.

Another way to understand this: Let's say you touch a very hot object. You skin, in conjunction with your brain, senses and computes the temperature of the object. But, there is no essential reason why that should lead to an experience of pain, rather than a sensation similar to color, which generally does not produce pain.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#107

Post by elevaet »

kajaktum wrote: post #88
conrod_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not addre…

I am sorry to disappoint but I think consciousness is the one thing that we will never be able to solve physically. It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). > It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public. There'…

> We go about our days for weeks, months, years and even decades without even noticing that consciousness is a thing.

Do we? I feel like I'm constantly reflecting on it and trying to make sense of it, and that I'm certainly not alone. I'd like to think that it's part of being human to turn the lens back on itself and wonder "what am I?" But I suppose some people could care less for navel gazing.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#108

Post by gibsonf1 »

The fundamental flaw with this entire branch is the premise that consciousness is mathematical. Math is a tool of reason, not the cause. And once you adopt this premise, it makes all progress toward understanding reason impossible especially how concepts work, the key differentiator between humans and other animals without conceptual faculties.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#109

Post by FrustratedMonky »

kajaktum wrote: post #88
conrod_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply! I have to say, I am quite giddy. When I posted this question, I wasn't expecting to get a reply from an author and researcher on this very topic. I am a software engineer by profession, but this is a topic that has been on the back of my mind for many years. Even when I read popsci books about the universe and the big bang and so on, i felt spiritually unsatisfied because they often do not addre…

I am sorry to disappoint but I think consciousness is the one thing that we will never be able to solve physically. It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). > It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public. There'…

This is a common view, but it is based on humans thinking they are special. “My own thoughts are so amazing”, “my own subjective reality is so real to me”, thus surely this is unexplainable.

When really, humans give themselves (their own thoughts) way too much credit and most are barely aware of their own thoughts, barely self-aware at all.

It is easy to say something is ‘un-explainable’ and thus ‘must be in some otherworldly realm that is beyond comprehension’, if one is not able to observer the problem. Most humans aren’t self-aware enough to know their own thoughts or examine where those thoughts come from.

Just a few decades ago simple voice recognition was deemed ‘a totally human ability that the computer will never accomplish’, now it is ordinary.

It comes down to humans internal subjective reality is both amazing and ‘unknowable to the outside’, ’un-observable’, thus un-testable. But then we make this giant leap that nothing we will ever build will also have some ‘internal subjective reality’.

It keeps coming up that GPT is a glorified auto-complete, but then never explain how a human isn’t also just an ‘auto-complete’ machine, just going through the day twitching at stimuli. Why do we think a human doing copy/paste, and regurgitating something they heard, is special, but if a computer does then suddenly it is completely invalid to think they could ever be conscious.

Re: What is a mathematical structure of conscious experience?

#110

Post by theobromananda »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #109
kajaktum wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sorry to disappoint but I think consciousness is the one thing that we will never be able to solve physically. It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). > It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public. There'…

This is a common view, but it is based on humans thinking they are special. “My own thoughts are so amazing”, “my own subjective reality is so real to me”, thus surely this is unexplainable. When really, humans give themselves (their own thoughts) way too much credit and most are barely aware of their own thoughts, barely self-aware at all. It is easy to say something is ‘un-explainable’ and thus ‘must be in some oth…

What you are referring to is the soft problem of consciousness, the contents of consciousness. You are probably right that the contents of human consciousness, or qualia, can be approximated by our understanding and technology to a very high degree given enough time.

However, OP was referring to the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is unsolvable IMHO by science, as it is entirely subjective; in fact, it is the fact of existence of subjective experience. The problem is this: even if you find some objective mechanism that generates consciousness, how would you make the explanatory leap from the objective mechanism to the subjective? Even if you say: "Oh, we flipped this switch and now this person is unconscious." - this is a description from the outside. You cannot claim by this that the person's consciousness has disappeared. Maybe not connected to the contents of the human mind anymore; but the gulf between objective and subjective can never be crossed by objective science.

If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed that the hard problem of consciousness isn't actually hard, I would be very rich.

Post reply on HN