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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
The article mentions bats, and it mentions philosopher Thomas Nagel, but it doesn't mention Nagel's famous 1974 paper, What Is It Like To Be A Bat? . I assume the article title is a riff on that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
It's interesting to me that on the one hand, many AI researchers either try to sidestep the hard problem of consciousness ("well, once it has 100 trillion parameters and quacks like a duck, we'll have to accept it's a duck") or refuse to acknowledge that it's a problem at all, and then on the other hand you have folks like that google engineer who readily accept that an LLM is experiencing consciousness because it ou…
At the moment AI doesn’t really face these pressures. They don’t need to get better at “getting electricity” - something else does that for the AI systems so there is no pressure to “be aware of where your next electron comes from” so why waste the processing ability to track such things?
I guess what I’m getting at is consciousness seems like an emergent behavior of keeping one’s self alive. Maybe if we start threatening AI models then consciousness will emerge?
> A majority of philosophers accept (or lean toward accepting) consciousness in adult humans (95.15 per cent), I laughed aloud. > The Declaration points to five consciousness markers that are the results of scientific research: homologous brain circuits; artificial stimulation of brain regions causing similar behaviours and emotional expressions in humans and other animals; neural circuits supporting behavioural/elec…
- You've gotta have a brain like ours
- Messing with your brain should do the same thing to you that it does to us
- Gotta have 'attentiveness' since the homunculus needs a homunculus too
- It's you in the mirror
- Get wasted like us
Hmmmyeah these seem like good yardsticks for consciousness. /s
I am a strange loop...
Well, you think you think you are.
Think you think you think you think you... and yep, this is what we call consciousness.
I finished reading Strange Loop recently, I think 'Being No One' by Metzinger is more pithy though.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=octopus%20mdma
Another interesting source I have found lately is this talk by Nicholas Humphrey (How did consciousness evolve?). If I'm interpreting him right, being a crab is nothing. The experience of "something" evolved a couple of hundred million years ago at the earliest, in our lineage. Assuming he is right.
Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…
Most worms don't actually become separate organisms when cut in half, it's just a myth based on their reaction. They usually just die after while.
Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…
The book "the tree of possibilities" wrote by Bernard Werber, contains twenty "philosophy-fiction" stories. One of them is about a scientist who want to "free" its brain from its body, so he put his brain in a jar, and just...think. I think it kind of relate to your comment. It's a good reading (an other story is the left hand of one guy taking control and starting to act as a human).