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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#71

Post by rvense »

tunnuz wrote: post #35
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~…

Do we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?

Consciousness, like intelligence and many others, is a prescientific term, and most debates about 'the nature of consciousness' (et al) are really just debates about the definition of the term.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#72

Post by nologic01 »

If you think about it (pun) we have little clue how the higher functions of the brain come about (assuming consciousness is a higher function), how they might be connected, what is innate and what grows only after cultural seeding.

The problem is not necessarily intractable. Despite the pretense of omnipotent scientific capabilities (which is now in obscene display with the AI craze) in fact our mental models for explaining things have not advanced very much after the 19th century.

Explaining the brain captivates our brains and we attribute special, even metaphysical signifance to it, but the fact is we havent explained any complex system.

In other words, how would you even explain "consciousness". In words? In mathematical equations? As a reproducible experiment? As inexplicable "behavior" in some cellular automaton?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#73

Post by imtringued »

sabellito wrote: post #48
jfengel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Didn't you just agree that "consciousness" is not defined? Then how can you follow that with "... it's still clear that the bet is lost. We do not understand in 2023 how neurons give rise to consciousness"?

You don't understand how bets work. The parties involved decide the conditions, not you or me.

The neuroscientist wagered that he or other neuroscientists will achieve something in 25 years. They did not. If the goal was poorly specified or impossible to achieve, that is on the person starting and accepting the bet.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#74

Post by rvense »

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!

How many monkeys and how many typewriters to write out the code for GPT-4?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#75

Post by methou »

Reading this reminds me of my first work at a big lab in the field of cognitive sciences. Basic we were tracing the source of visual awareness which is a part of consciousness. The goal is to find identify the tiniest bit leads to awareness of visual perception of objects, is it bottom-up like pixels to shapes to boom! It's a circle! or it's a ring! Or is it top down, I feel that there's a hole, and then figure out what that about. The academic debates are like 30 some years long about this, but pixels take the leads because it is easier to implement with math, you can get a computer to "understand" moderately complex shapes, or identify the owners of many many faces. Anyway it ties at the understanding of topology of images, could a computer understand a shape however its properties changes? In motion pictures, is a movement considered to be an appearance of new object with "destruction" of old one, or just a move. How do you define that in the language of mathematics that both covers machine and human vision. It was some joyful years of working with the scientists but I was too under-educated to even remember how have they put computability and topology in the same work.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#76

Post by Kim_Bruning »

imtringued wrote: post #67
hnfong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

If I were to run a single-threaded program on a dual core machine, would it run twice as fast?

I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all.

(Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen.

But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made to go together are actually together.

Eg. when you assemble cogs and cylinders and wheels into a car. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

If you mix in some random parts from a cruise ship, you don't suddenly get a car that can go on water and carry 1000 passengers. You just get a bunch of parts that don't go together )

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#77

Post by Kim_Bruning »

hnfong wrote: post #57
tunnuz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?

Short answer is no. The working definition is "I am conscious, I know it. Anything that looks sufficiently like me is presumed to have consciousness."

That sounds like a rather anthropocentric application of anthropomorphism.

(I'd have gone further but I ran out of applicable anthro- terms)

It does feel a lot like the definition of "life" though. That's also a slippery moving-goalposts kind of thing.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#78

Post by chromoblob »

imtringued wrote: post #67
hnfong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

How would you test that?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#79

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ttctciyf wrote: post #43
a13o wrote: post #23

'Consciousness' is about as academically stringent as medical humorism, so Chalmers has found himself a nice free wine supply.

If you're saying that a good definition of consciousness does not exist within medicine or biology, then that is (IMO) one way of stating the "hard problem"[1] of consciousness that Chalmers famously posited. Another way of putting it might be that there is simply no coherent scientific framework within which consciousness is well defined. It seems to have no place in any science-based ontological scheme. It seems ou…

A bit like the gods, in that respect.

Maybe Consciousness doesn't actually exist.

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