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Feral Minds

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Re: Feral Minds

#31

Post by djoldman »

gnramires wrote: post #15
djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

I think your argument may be a little too strong. Would you refrain from discussing, say, happiness, sadness, etc. in your daily life without a formal definition of what happiness is exactly at a structural level? And I say that as someone interested in formalizing ethics, and formalizing all of those notions. The point is, to even (ideally, formally) define them we need intuition and intuitive discussions about what…

You raise some good questions.

Although humans discuss emotions a great deal, there doesn't seem to exist formal definitions for those concepts. Despite this, data can be collected that sidesteps this fact that can be useful: we can ask many people if they feel particular emotions and draw conclusions from that data. Still we must concede that a shared definition may not exist, which weakens these conclusions.

In the case of consciousness, we could ask many people if they thought that someone/something else was conscious, but it's not clear what value that would have.

Re: Feral Minds

#32

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #21
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mm, I'm still on the "by definition inadequate" side personally. I just don't see any unambiguous way to verify that another being even experiences qualia, to say nothing of actual consciousness.

> I just don't see any unambiguous way to verify that another being even experiences qualia, to say nothing of actual consciousness That's actually one of the core parts of Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument"[0]. The problem isn't so much that verification is "difficult", it's that certainty in the specific sense of intelligibly private is a logical impossibility. The implication is that "experiential qualia"…

clicks link

"Wittgenstein does not present his arguments in a succinct and linear fashion; instead, he describes particular uses of language, and prompts the reader to contemplate the implications of those uses. As a result, there is considerable dispute about both the nature of the argument and its implications. Indeed, it has become common to talk of private language arguments."

Yeah, sorry, I don't have a hundred hours to spend on some dude who decided to write half of an argument in ten different places. Maybe a link to plato.stanford.edu would've been better.

Re: Feral Minds

#33

Post by peterlk »

lebuffon wrote: post #30
djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

In my layman's mind consciousness, at it's lowest level, is awareness, as mentioned in the article. I think what humans have achieved is the next level which is "awareness" of our awareness. The ability to self-reflect. Perhaps it is even a form of "recursive consciousness" (?) And perhaps structured language is the secret sauce that makes this possible. Without that next level I can't differentiate humans from other…

This is the problem with terms like this. There are definitions in academia/industry that differentiate between awareness, consciousness, qualia, intelligence, sentience, and more. But these distinctions require some pondering to understand and are divergent from general understanding which treats them as roughly the same thing. For example, consciousness for me is the ability for something to take directed action to affect their surroundings. This means that a robot can be conscious. But now the question for what we’re talking about here is: is it aware? It is possible to display consciousness without awareness (see blindsight studies), but to my knowledge it is not possible to be aware without consciousness. And then we get to sentience, which is still very slippery, and often relies on definitions involving “qualia”, which is also quite slippery.

Re: Feral Minds

#34

Post by beepbooptheory »

ilaksh wrote: post #11
djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

It's still a very interesting article. But I think that your point is correct. This article demonstrates why philosophy was largely obsoleted by science.

It's true, given enough time, we won't ask questions anymore. Every abstract concept and moral belief will be simply data. "Meaning" will stop making sense. There will only be science and those who do science.

Some poor fool might ask every once and a while "why are we doing this science anyway?" and they will be swiftly silenced.

We will of course force children away from their natural wonder, as nothing good could come from something like that. There are plenty of other things to fill the kids brain with anyway.

There will only be data. Meaninglessly complete and perfect data. A young would-be Kurt will come along and ask "is it possible this is really complete? all our data? how might we verify it?" He too, would need to be silenced.

One night your wife will sob "but why are you being like this?" But you know this is a silly thing to ask: you are just what your atoms are, we can measure them perfectly you know. What other "why" does she want?

Things like "value" and "human" and "well being" aren't important concepts anyway. If it can't be resolved down to data, lets just let the market and the state decide. It's not like we are going to be able to bring up some obsolete, non-falsifiable ideas in order to defend ourselves! It doesn't matter much anyway, its not science.

And when you die you will know that your whole life really meant nothing but at best a small donation to the science. Because what value could subjective experience really have outside of, you know, doing science. But you are still happy, you did Science. But don't ask why you are happy!

And the great drama of science vs. philosophy will have ended. There was always going to be a winner after all! It was totally a battle, not a dichotomy. And the battle is over.

\s

Re: Feral Minds

#35

Post by djoldman »

netcan wrote: post #17
djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

>One might say who cares if they don't define it? Well, if you don't define it, there's no point in discussing whether it exists, how it came to be, or what it comprises. > You might as well be asking the question: how close are we to quidlesmoopy? Adequately, and generally defining intelligence, consiousness, AGI & such... big ask. Impossible in practice. So... dies that mean the conversation ends here because any f…

I think placeholder definitions are the way to go: one defines a concept that is acknowledged not to be the target and works with it.

So for the purposes of discussion, one may define consciousness(prime) as something less than true consciousness and attempt to work with that lesser definition. However, at all times, one must admit to working with a lesser definition that may never lead to knowledge that applies to the target definition.

We must also admit that consciousness as many understand it may not exist.

Re: Feral Minds

#36

Post by morsecodist »

djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

I agree that definitions are the problem. It seems the conscious term is overloaded and refers to a lot of concepts some of which are overlapping and some are totally different.

People also want to define conscious in terms of the concept they feel is most importantly different about humans. So this definitions conversation gets mixed with a what concepts are important conversation.

For example, the thing that I think is important is subjective experience. I think this is the most important difference between beings that need to be given moral consideration and those that don't and this is always what I have thought of as consciousness. However, I often have conversations where I am just talking past someone because they are interested in something else entirely. I hope we can start defining this upfront and having separate conversations here.

Re: Feral Minds

#37

Post by aebtebeten »

082349872349872 wrote: post #5
djoldman wrote: post #4

Unfortunately, the hype about LLMs has generated breathless ruminations on AGI and consciousness. Dig a little deeper and there doesn't seem to be much there, as one may find that these terms are not adequately defined. Here we see this attempt: > First, a disclaimer. Consciousness is a notoriously slippery term, if nonetheless possessed of a certain common-sense quality. In some ways, being conscious just means bein…

I have a definition of consciousness: consciousness arises when a creature not only applies a theory of mind to others (predators, prey, and its conspecifics would all be likely others) but also applies a theory of mind to itself. (given that we have the most data on ourselves, it is not surprising that we'd have an "I", but it is a little surprising that the "I" modelled usually has such a high variance from others'…

today's serendipity: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3

Re: Feral Minds

#38

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #32
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just don't see any unambiguous way to verify that another being even experiences qualia, to say nothing of actual consciousness That's actually one of the core parts of Wittgenstein's "Private Language Argument"[0]. The problem isn't so much that verification is "difficult", it's that certainty in the specific sense of intelligibly private is a logical impossibility. The implication is that "experiential qualia"…

clicks link "Wittgenstein does not present his arguments in a succinct and linear fashion; instead, he describes particular uses of language, and prompts the reader to contemplate the implications of those uses. As a result, there is considerable dispute about both the nature of the argument and its implications. Indeed, it has become common to talk of private language arguments." Yeah, sorry, I don't have a hundred…

Sure, if you want: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

But the wiki entry is a far more succinct summation of the main points of the argument. The very first subsection, which you apparently didn't even try to read, in the wiki is "Significance" which summarizes the argument in all of...2 paragraphs.

Re: Feral Minds

#39

Post by 082349872349872 »

bumby wrote: post #28
082349872349872 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know that other H sapiens have the same kind of experiences of existing as you have? Best I can do is that "I know, right?" is a fairly universal reaction, so we know that even if others' qualia are not identical to ours, they are at least isomorphic. As to "more than mere stimulus-response", much of me is pretty basic stimulus-response. Certainly the derivative controller, and arguably all the proportional…

> How do we know that other H sapiens have the same kind of experiences of existing as you have? Best I can do is that "I know, right?" This was answered in a different comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103099 I think the point is that we agree that I (as the individual asking) has consciousness, then we can infer that others have consciousness based on similarity. Another H sapiens is very much like me…

I prefer using my definition because it offers something more testable than just some (arbitrary?) degree of similarity.

For instance, cows have been shown to spend (significantly) more time standing near (randomly placed) pictures of smiling farmers than pictures of frowning farmers, which suggests that they have enough of a theory of mind to prefer farmers who appear to be in good moods to those who appear to be in poor ones.

That, of course, doesn't say anything about whether cows have a theory of their own mind, nor did that study do the (perhaps not so obvious?) step of recording picture placement relative to the cow's "bubble" (a curious bovine approaches head on; a frightened bovine leaves head first; a skeptical bovine places itself sideways to the object at a distance, with one eye upon it, so it can change to either of the first two if it comes to a decision either way), but at least it offers something more quantifiable than "I believe this thing to be more like me than that thing".

Re: Feral Minds

#40

Post by 082349872349872 »

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind#Deficits

> Theory of mind deficits have also been observed in deaf children who are late signers (i.e. are born to hearing parents), but such a deficit is due to the delay in language learning, not any cognitive deficit, and therefore disappears once the child learns sign language.

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