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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#221

Post by lgas »

pmarreck wrote: post #192
willbudd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions The first problem is epistemological... If you think that creative decisions are made by complying with a "reward function," you are entirely missing something. Most values are fundamentally based on irrationality. I've literally spent an entire life doing things that everyone else told me was wrong and being interested in things tha…

I think perhaps you're just misunderstanding some of the terms you're attempting to use. Those things that everyone else told you were wrong and that no one else saw the value in... your reward function rewards pursuing those. And in that context your decisions were rational and functional.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#222

Post by paxys »

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.

Software can always be reverse engineered by looking at hardware. When you don't have the source code what else is there to do?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#223

Post by scns »

quus wrote: post #178

Im a grad student in philosophy, and this one unfortunately risks perpetuating the annoying myth that philosophers are somehow in competition with the natural sciences — usually believed by people who have literally never taken any courses in philosophy. Quine said that philosophical inquiry is continuous with empirical inquiry, but I think it’d be fine to say that it’s just complementary.

The translation of Philosophy is: The Love Of Wisdom.

Our natural sciences build on the foundation those greeks laid.

Pythagoras?

Math and Music Science.

Aristotle?

> His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. (Wikipedia)

Plato?

Religion, science, human nature, love, sexuality, ethics, the idea of the soul, ethics, politics, aesthetics poetry and art. (Wikipedia combining two articles in two languages)

And many more.

Luckily the muslims preserved their writings, when the christians tried to destroy those "pagan" scribbles.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#224

Post by tonymillion »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #180
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?'. It doesn't seem to. When dreaming, it's possible to carry out conversations with other "people" in the dream which are indistinguishable from conscious beings you meet when awake. There's usually a single "self" in dreams, but the brain certainly seems to form extra consciousnesses on demand which react as though they had a sense of "self".

Is that different from having an imaginary conversation "in your head" with an imagined person?

i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind".

Could that be a temporary virtual consciousness (like a virtual CPU)?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#225

Post by paxys »

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.

Consciousness and AGI are completely orthogonal concepts. You can have either one without the other.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#226

Post by riwsky »

bananabiscuit wrote: post #219

Is it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain? Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred obs…

“Given my chosen definition of consciousness as XYZ, is it possible that consciousness is XYZ?”

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#227

Post by bananabiscuit »

riwsky wrote: post #226
bananabiscuit wrote: post #219

Is it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain? Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred obs…

“Given my chosen definition of consciousness as XYZ, is it possible that consciousness is XYZ?”

I’m going based on what my experience of consciousness is. Why do I need to look up some definition when I can just refer to any given second of my experience on this earth to see what it is and what properties it has?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#228

Post by 20after4 »

fzaninotto wrote: post #182
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~…

Many neuroscientists think like you, see Attention Schema Theory [1], popularized by Michael Graziano at Princeton University. This is a form of Illusionism [2] - according to Graziano, consciousness is an illusion. I've explored this idea by building a chatbot with an inner monologue, Molly [3], based on GPT-3. The result is spectacular: it gives the illusion of consciousness. And, according to Information Schema Th…

Really interesting experiment! Thanks for sharing.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#229

Post by xmonkee »

bananabiscuit wrote: post #219

Is it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain? Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred obs…

This will always fail because the premise is wrong. Consciousness does not arise in the brain. Brain activity correlates to impressions in consciousness, but consciousness is not a “thing”. Consciousness is equivalent to identity. You are that which sees all this that you see. Consciousness IS you. You don’t arise in your own brain.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#230

Post by 20after4 »

waselighis wrote: post #207
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 strongly disagree with this view, not so much the emergent part, but rather that "any sufficiently powerful cognitive system" can gain consciousness. To me, it suggests that consciousness is magic, because it doesn't matter how information is organized and stored, it doesn't matter how information is processed, consciousness will be able to emerge miraculously from even the most disorganized chaotic mess of informa…

Richard Feynman had an interesting observation about the way in which people differ in how they process thoughts and experiences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm92w2DlflA&t=41s
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