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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#131

Post by adverbly »

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.

It's almost starting to look like the way to make progress is not to stick electrodes into biological systems and measure a few dozen neurons to try and reverse engineer biological consciousness.

Might actually be easier to create artificial consciousness such that we can actually measure and more closely study what is happening.

The biological approach is fiendishly difficult. If we can barely understand how an LLVM is working, what chance do we have of trying to understand one by only looking at the raw electrical output few dozen transistors from a machine running one.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#132

Post by oefnak »

gizajob wrote: post #124
patmorgan23 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So they share the same memories?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#133

Post by hackinthebochs »

htag wrote: post #49
detourdog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. How are those two even approximately related? 1. If you want to know about the amount of information inside of our genome then you can just look at the genome directly. You don't need to count the number of mutations. 2. A genetic mutation isn't a computation. It's a random event. 3. Why did you choose a…

>How are those two even approximately related?

Computation is roughly equivalent to iterating over a space of possibilities and selecting the subset that satisfy some evaluative function. To determine the inverse of a matrix, I can take the rough shape of the outcome and iterate over all possibilities, picking out the ones that multiply to the identity matrix. Evolution is the process of randomly testing variations in organisms to select the subset that satisfy the objective of superior fitness. So in a sense, evolution "computes" the blueprint for organisms that maximize fitness. The computational complexity of a given genome is then some function of the size of the species-wide population of each ancestor generation summed, with massive time and space constants.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#134

Post by pasmafaute »

gizajob wrote: post #124
patmorgan23 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a pretty strong claim considering this is a field of study notorious for the obstacles to collecting direct evidence.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#135

Post by LocalH »

imtringued wrote: post #61
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 exp…

The only "problem" with that argument is largely that it assumes that human consciousness is somehow different from all other possible forms of consciousness, and that's not at all a given.

What if the universe itself is conscious? We'd have absolutely no way to measure that from our limited perspective.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#136

Post by lewispollard »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #111
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,…

> The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?' The answer should be obvious to anyone earnestly thinking about the question: it doesn't. The "single consciousness" is just the abstraction we apply. We can, and often do, apply that same model to entire groups of people from cliques, to communities, to cultures, to nation states and just about any cross section of humanity one cares to. With a l…

Absolutely, even ancient Buddhist thinking comes to the same conclusion: consciousness isn't a single "thing", it arises moment to moment in contact with sense organs (including "thinking" or "mind" as a sense organ). There isn't a single point of consciousness that is "I", that's just an abstraction we develop.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#137

Post by 1differential »

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~…

you would enjoy this video - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/112wa88/argumen...

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#138

Post by detourdog »

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.

I have been thinking about it more and it could be the existing language models are actually large enough and it is lack of differentiations that leads to immature responses.

The developing these ideas further faces at least the challenge that an AI that is exposed to the public will develop an in accurate understanding of our world.

One driver of these misunderstandings is the lack of understanding expressed in the average internet post. The second big driver is that commercial needs requires a thought police mentality. This mentality distorts the expression of the answer the AI is articulating which my look like psychosis to the observers.

I believe that an AI will have to develop in isolation. The maturity of the current system is not able to distinguish a fact vs. fantasy. This is a problem we all posses at different levels. It's also possible we only need our personal AI assistant to be only 80% and the remaining 20% it gains from a dialog of it's host (the user).

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#139

Post by LocalH »

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…

> Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not

Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts? Similar to how the blood-brain barrier exists as a defense mechanism. The wording "deliberately" can imply a pedestal that doesn't really exist, that places "deliberate" human design above "natural" micro-evolution that basically happened by chance. It would stand to reason that a more complex brain, that's harder to understand, would survive natural selection. Even the brains of tiny animals are quite complex in their smallness, they encode a lot of different knowledge ("instruction set" if you prefer), that enable them to do certain things that would take us a lot of manual "over-the-top" processing and calculating. For example, the ability for a cat to right themselves nearly perfectly when falling, given enough distance. Their brains can inherently calculate the exact amount of force, and the exact motions to take, to achieve the desired amount of rotation in three-dimensional space.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#140

Post by interlinked »

willbudd wrote: post #65
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!

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".

> it's pretty much game over

Not if it takes the computational capacity of the entire world to simulate a brain with an iq of 65.

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