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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#61

Post by imtringued »

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~…

The problem with this argument is that everything is conscious at that point. The consciousness may operate at geological or faster than human time scales but who is to say that we operate very quickly or slowly to begin with? Your computer is already conscious before you even loaded software into it, before you added your fancy machine learning AI. The software merely gives the conscious processor its ability to express consciousness in a way that humans can understand.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#62

Post by 0xEF »

jfengel wrote: post #36
civilized wrote: post #14

Consciousness is not a well-scoped object of scientific investigation. It doesn't have a definition or characterization based on observable things or behavior. If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things.

That's correct, but it's still clear that the bet is lost. We do not understand in 2023 how neurons give rise to consciousness. Maybe there will come a point where it's in the gray area but not today. We know that people act in ways that we cannot explain even a little bit. Also, the bet is friendly. It's just a way to express their different underlying opinions. Neither one is put out by it. They will likely enjoy s…

Personally, I wish scientist made more of these public friendly bets. I feel they really help promote the discussion to a wider audience abd brings a bit of spirited competition to the matter rather than the capitalist motives we normally see with research. Something like The Long Now's Long Bets but with your average scientists where us regular folk can throw our two cents in (without the membership fee).

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#63

Post by hnfong »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27
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…

These days we have a better analogy. It's like trying to figure out how artificial neural networks work by looking at their weights! :D

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#64

Post by 9dev »

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.

By implicitly assigning „it“ an identity, you’re simply anthromorphizing an LLM. Bing doesn’t see anything. It isn’t able to do anything. It’s a very convoluted and complex mathematical model of weighted terms that spits out text generated from a prompt. And nothing science-wise suggests anything else. People seem to keep forgetting that.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#65

Post by willbudd »

number6 wrote: post #22
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!

You jest, but that has a good likelihood of becoming the watershed moment. The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least.

And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#66

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

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~…

Exactly. Basically an inward looking sense, with it's own qualia.

Of course the only way to know if someone/something else has a similar subjective experience of something as ourselves is to ask them, so there's always going to be wiggle room for people who don't want to believe that a future AI reporting conscious experience really is conscious in the same way that they are.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#67

Post by imtringued »

hnfong wrote: post #53
hcks wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’ll realise it’s meaningless. Also it’s not possible to measure consciousness (in the ”hard“ sense, as in ”why do I have qualia”, obviously you can assert something respond to external stimuli easily), therefore the question won’t ever be answered.

I think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument. The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?

This isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'.

If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses.

For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#68

Post by imtringued »

detourdog wrote: post #25
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.

You don't know how much biological consciousness relies on quantum effects we don't understand. We don't have large scale quantum computers so our computational models are too weak to approach it from that angle.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#69

Post by 4ad »

Ralfp wrote: post #41
4ad wrote: post #20

It seems so obvious to me that consciousness (whatever it is) is essentially software so poking at the brain is looking at the wrong layer of abstraction.

But if its a software, then how and where is it stored and where is the execution logic for it?

> how and where is it stored

I don't know, but it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if the code on your computer is on a HDD or SSD.

> and where is the execution logic for it?

I don't know, but it doesn't matter either. It's a question about the workings of the computer, not of the software.

Electronic computers make it really easy to separate the software from the hardware, and make it easy to dump the software in some other representation in order to understand it. When I want to understand a piece of code, I read its source code, I don't care about whether it's an amd64 or an arm64 CPU and the details of the encoding unless I am working on a compiler.

With biological computers it's much harder to dump the software. But nevertheless, until people realize that this is what they should attempt, or research how it can be done, I feel we won't make any progress on the nature of consciousness.

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