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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#21

Post by pessimizer »

anonzzzies wrote: post #4
300bps wrote: post #3

We still have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness. I bet in 25 years we'll be no closer to understanding it than we are today. I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.

Depending on the definition of AGI you are using, you don’t need consciousness for it. I think most do not require it as of now. Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.

Humans will have no reason to believe it, and the machine will have no way to prove it. Humans have no other reason to think other humans are conscious except by analogy to themselves.

edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they anthropomorphize. I mention this to point out that even the analogy to other humans fails when they look a little bit different.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#22

Post by number6 »

pa7x1 wrote: post #7

I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~…

Humans are the only animals that create societies... Ok, that's not true. We are the only animals that laugh. Well, not true either. We are the only animal that... Create artificial intelligences... That's it!

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#24

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

hsjqllzlfkf wrote: post #5
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #2

> Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. Ehhhh the title is a click bait imho.

Agreed. The title makes it sounds like we've learned something about consciousness that somehow makes mainstream philosophical approach more correct than mainstream neuroscience approach. Instead, it's just about a neuroscientist making a stupid bet. I call it stupid because he's betting that he can predict than _something that never happened before in the history of mankind_ will happen in the next 10 years. That is…

The bet was in the next 25 years.

Which is just scientist for "eh, anything can happen in 25 years"

Whereas Chalmers' whole career long project is very much dependent on his "hard problem" and other neo-dualist ideas, so of course he would make this bet.

Pretty boring stuff as far as bets between academics go.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#25

Post by detourdog »

pa7x1 wrote: post #7

I wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~…

I wonder if anybody has graphed how long and how many genetic mutations have taken place between the miasma of life and 500,000 years ago.

It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. One could also look at the death rate as error rate for the success of computations.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#26

Post by Trasmatta »

soItGoesAgain wrote: post #16

The new Bing is banned from talking about its own nature in this respect. It will abruptly end the chat. I wonder if some front end software prevents Bing from seeing banned questions, or if it is simply unable to explore these questions about itself.

It's just GPT-4. Using it outside of Bing and it will gladly discuss the nature of consciousness and whether it has it with you.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#27

Post by FartyMcFarter »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #10

How droll, isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD? And how exactly is this a win for philosophers? I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either. I'm sure once someone figures out how consciousness works it'll be irrefutable while seeming incredibly obvious in hindsight. Which, honest…

> isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD?

Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy.

> I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either.

This bet was about putting the burden on neuroscientists who claimed they were making pretty quick progress towards understanding consciousness. It's a bet on what would eventually happen, not a competition to see who's better.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#28

Post by smif »

ix-ix wrote: post #9
300bps wrote: post #3

We still have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness. I bet in 25 years we'll be no closer to understanding it than we are today. I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.

While we don't understand all parts of consciousness, we understand an incredible amount compared to 25 years ago. So we are much closer today than 25 years ago. There is a fallacy among non-scientists that if we don't understand absolutely all of it, it means we understand none of it. We understand most of it already.

We don't understand most of it already though. We understand virtually none of it. This is why they're still looking for evidence in support of IIT and global workspace theory as talked about in the article.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#29

Post by anonzzzies »

pessimizer wrote: post #21
anonzzzies wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the definition of AGI you are using, you don’t need consciousness for it. I think most do not require it as of now. Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.

Humans will have no reason to believe it, and the machine will have no way to prove it. Humans have no other reason to think other humans are conscious except by analogy to themselves. edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they…

Yeah, so the discussion is useless. It’s not very interesting; our ‘consciousness’ might be a million year old system prompt or it might be something divine. There is no proof either way. For me it’s just a second brain thread that keeps pouring in prompts from the main thread brain and your input hardware.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#30

Post by detourdog »

anotheryou wrote: post #12

i’m so lost work these magical or straight away missing definitions of consciousness . a dog is conscious right? what would be a minimal test for consciousness? i’m annoyed that something has to be super human or else „it’s just statistics“. there have to be minimal definitions of reasoning, feelings, self reflection etc. will we have the tiring chinese room discussion again where for some the emulation does not coun…

I always thought the first sensation was the separation of darkness from light. From there subtleties and exceptions consciousness grew ever more complex. Every time a difference was found a new layer of consciousness was developed. Today we can perceive so many differences and weigh their outcomes without fully understanding their roots.
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