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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#121

Post by number6 »

willbudd wrote: post #100
pmarreck wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a will-free intelligence though, and it's confusing for people because we've never seen that before so I don't think we can make any assumptions. There's no Darwinian forces in effect among entities that have no will, as it were...

Will-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.

Blindsight is a brilliant book exploring will free intelligences

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#122

Post by mannykannot »

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"?

The article says the bet is this: "Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023." It is a straightforward fact that no such mechanism has been discovered, and that is all we need to show that Koch has lost the bet.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#123

Post by number6 »

rvense wrote: post #74
number6 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know how many but it took about 315,000 years

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#124

Post by gizajob »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #99
imtringued wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You're probably right. We have a couple examples of this happening. There's the interesting quarks that people with split brain hemispheres experience. https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8 And dissociative identity disorder where there arguably multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the same brain. It is probably an evolutionary advantage that humans have a ( mostly) uniform singular consciousness.

I think you’re mistaken, in that it’s naturally the same consciousness but different identities and recognisably different/altered personality states that come in and out in DID. The consciousness itself is always the same and continuous.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#125

Post by FartyMcFarter »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #32
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 the "software" runs on the brain, and is stored on the brain. How can you possibly understand it without touching the brain at all? You could make hypotheses about how our consciousness works, but testing and validating them in a white-box manner seems impossible.

I meant black box of course.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#127

Post by hackinthebochs »

literalis wrote: post #109
hnfong wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? LLMs should make us take seriously that the whole idea of consciousness is just superstition and unnecessary. That definition is precisely how people define something that isn't real and doesn't exist. If you can get there, it is quite amusing to think about a huge group of people who would think the idea of angels as complete foolish superstition but consciousness? Of…

There's something that goes on inside the heads of organisms sufficiently like us. We give that something the name consciousness. It doesn't make much sense to deny that it is there. Denying consciousness because it doesn't fit well into our ontology derived from science is to elevate science to unreasonable heights. Science is great, but it's subject matter is inferred (the external world). It doesn't have the power to undermine non-inferred knowledge.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#128

Post by dangond »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #88
willbudd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> 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. How so? The vast majority of life on earth is far less intelligent than human beings by any objective measure, and yet it still thrives.

Sure, but if you're a creature that's useful to humans, you'll find that you'll either get domesticated and lose all your freedom or get hunted to near (or total) extinction. Any life on earth with some semblance of intelligence is dominated by us. Dolphins, as smart as they are, have no way to use their intelligence to flip the script and become the dominant species, and are dependent on us not deciding that they would be useful to us (beyond the ones we take for aquariums).

The only exceptions I can think of to the above rule are viruses and bacteria, where (in most cases) we can't really exterminate them entirely from the face of the earth even if we wanted to. However, it seems to me that sufficient intelligence would allow for better understanding of different bacterial/viral structures that would allow you to make a specific chemical that would be very good at killing that specific thing.

Overall, the danger from a bootstrapping AI that becomes vastly more intelligent than humans (if possible) seems to me to be that we would lose full agency according to its whims as it gets more and more power.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#130

Post by thelittleone »

candiddevmike wrote: post #95
imtringued wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Depending on how fringe your beliefs are, we may all be part of a shared consciousness (Jung's collective unconscious).

This is a very underappreciated perspective, but with any significant period of isolation conbined with effective meditation will likely point you in this direction. Plant medicines can accelerate the path to that experience. And for me it brought incredible peace. Perhaps its ignorance, perhaps I'm wrong, but it feels as real as the love of my children.
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