It's nearly impossible to draw any conclusions from these isolated, uncontrolled single discoveries of feral children. At least a few modern experts believe Victor probably could have learned sign language, but Itard only tried to teach him speech. It's hard to believe a human of normal cognitive ability can't do at least as well as a gorilla, but two hundred years ago, no one knew it was possible to teach a gorilla sign language. Speech may be far more difficult to pick up later in life than other forms of language because of the complexity of the vocal motor patterns involved. Many also speculate Victor could have been autistic or frankly just severely traumatized from being abandoned and left in the wild as a child. Trying to reason from this one case study to find implications for the role played in language acquisition by all humans, or potentially all computational systems whether artificial or organic, seems like a tall task.
Feral Minds
41–50 of 54 posts
Re: Feral Minds
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I have no formal knowledge in the domain to go much deeper but
I can understand the problem you stated about defining the terms properly.
I suppose this spinning around on word definitions is similar to my "awareness of awareness" description in that we have the ability to ponder the meaning of the very tool (language) that we are thinking with.
But my old head begins to implode if I go very deep...
Re: Feral Minds
#43Earlier 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?" 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…
>I prefer using my definition because it offers something more testable than just some (arbitrary?) degree of similarity.
That's fine to have a preference, but we must also concede that many (most?) human classification ontologies are arbitrary. Even in your example of what constitutes a "smiling" or "frowning" farmer is a somewhat arbitrary definition. What you might call a frown, I may call a smiling 'smirk.'
I think this testable framework preference may border on a reductionist perspective that dismisses the hard problem of consciousness on the assumption that if it can't be measured, it's not real (see also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103504). Consider the perception of muscle fatigue/burning; in the context of a workout it may be found to be pleasurable, but in the context of an illness it might be felt as suffering. An MRI may "test" and show both have the same neural circuits activated but yet the subjective experience is vastly different. Just because we don't (yet...maybe?) have the tools to test for it, would we conclude that differences in subjective experience don't exist?
Re: Feral Minds
#44It may be more useful to reason about the consequences of the capabilities of any form of AI, than trying to box consciousness.
Somehow connected to the above, one can use "axioms" to understand and predict minds. Here are a couple of examples:
Axiom of need: "For any evolved entity that relies on X for its survival, if that entity has a sufficiently advanced mind, then there is a 'subjective' perception of the need for X that is deep and outside its conscious control. I.e., a feeling or intense craving."
Example of the above:
X=Food -> perception of hunger
X=Procreation -> Love, lust
X=Survival -> Good vibes from interacting with peers
X=Peers -> I can attribute "consciousness" when I see it
Axiom of fear: "For any evolved entity that relies on avoiding Y for its survival, if that entity has a sufficiently advanced mind, then there is a 'subjective' perception of the avoidance of Y that is deep and outside its conscious control. I.e., a fear or intense phobia."
Y=Snakes -> Fear of snakes
Y=arbitrary external threat -> Fear of discord, fear of alienation.
Y=alienation -> shame
I can think of a few more axioms, but this is getting long so I'll omit them. The axioms themselves may or may not be correct, but just as one does in mathematics, one can take them as true and see where the chain of thought leads. For me, the axioms above imply that we can create* entities that, as appreciated from outside, will seem entirely conscious to us. And I guess this is a procedural definition of consciousness.
* Via synthetic evolution, e.g. gradient descent.
Re: Feral Minds
#45Unfortunately, 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…
Isn't that next level the "theory of mind", that the article says LLMs seem to have achieved (in at least some form) now ?
Re: Feral Minds
#46It's nearly impossible to draw any conclusions from these isolated, uncontrolled single discoveries of feral children. At least a few modern experts believe Victor probably could have learned sign language, but Itard only tried to teach him speech. It's hard to believe a human of normal cognitive ability can't do at least as well as a gorilla, but two hundred years ago, no one knew it was possible to teach a gorilla…
To reiterate your point:
Is it possible to teach any (or even most) gorillas sign language though, or was that a an exceptional simian ?
In the same vein, he might just have gotten unlucky with Victor...
Re: Feral Minds
#47Unfortunately, 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…
If I ever create a working definition of artificial consciousness, I’m definitely calling it quidlesmoopy.
Re: Feral Minds
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great (although that's a hypothesis for a cause rather than a definition), but for any discussion with another person, you have to be sure in advance that they don't use one of the other 49 common meanings of "consciousness". What I care about when I ask if an AI is or isn't conscious, is if it has the kind of experiences of existing that I know I have. Why is there a feeling of sensations rather than just the sensat…
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?" is a fairly universal reaction, so we know that even if others' qualia are not identical to ours, they are at least isomorphic.
Seeing my own phrasing echoed back, I notice an ambiguity: "the same kind" can be either "all the same things" or "it is kinda close".
The former is provably different between humans: aphantasia, gender dysphoria, sexuality (including the absence), ASD, the conservative/liberal divide, that some people describe having religious experiences and others don't, amusia, … there's so many ways to be different, I'd be surprised if any of us is entirely "normal".
I meant the latter. And the only positive evidence I have for that, is that other people were writing about it before I was born… which doesn't actually tell you that I have it, as for all you know I might be a P-zombie that's just parroting phrases it once read, I'm the only one who can be sure that there's an "I" in this body of mine.
Re: Feral Minds
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great (although that's a hypothesis for a cause rather than a definition), but for any discussion with another person, you have to be sure in advance that they don't use one of the other 49 common meanings of "consciousness". What I care about when I ask if an AI is or isn't conscious, is if it has the kind of experiences of existing that I know I have. Why is there a feeling of sensations rather than just the sensat…
I found the works of Thomas Metzinger illuminating, at least in terms of human consciousness.
+1 for Metzinger's ideas. It's pretty much the only theory of consciousness that I've read about that makes any sense.
Here is a little extract for anyone not familiar:
> My first step in this chapter is to introduce the hypothetical notion of a phenomenal self-model (PSM). [...] I will then investigate how a PSM, integrated into a yet more complex, higher-order form of representational content, forms the central necessary condition for a conscious first-person perspective to emerge on the representational as well as on the functional level of description. [...]
> The content of the PSM is the content of the conscious self: your current bodily sensations, your present emotional situation, plus all the contents of your phenomenally experienced cognitive processing. They are constituents of your PSM. Intuitively, and in a certain metaphorical sense, one could even say that you are the content of your PSM. All those properties of yourself, to which you can now direct your attention, form the content of your current PSM. Your self-directed thoughts operate on the current contents of your PSM: they cannot operate on anything else. [...]
> From a logical and epistemological perspective it is helpful to differentiate between simulation and emulation, in order to further enrich the concept of a PSM. We can then, in a second step, conceptually analyze the PSM as a special variant, namely, self-emulation. [...] It is the possibility of reflexive or self-directed emulation that is of particular interest from a philosophical perspective. Self-modeling is that special case, in which the target system and the simulating-emulating system are identical: A self-modeling information-processing system internally and continuously simulates its own observable output as well as it emulates abstract properties of its own internal information processing. [...]
> Using a term from computer science, we could therefore metaphorically describe self-modeling in a conscious agent as “internal user modeling.” In human beings, it is particularly interesting to note how the self-model simultaneously treats the target system “as an object” (e.g., by using proprioceptive feedback in internally simulating ongoing bodily movements) and “as a subject” (e.g., by emulating its own cognitive processing in a way that makes it available for conscious access). This is what “embodiment” means, and what at the same time generates the intuitive roots of the mind-body problem: the human self-model treats the target system as subject and object at the same time. [...]
from Chapter 6 of "Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity" by Thomas Metzinger.
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Also worth looking into are the similar explanations on concisousness-as-self-model (in a simulation generated by our brain) by Joscha Bach. I'm not sure if Bach came to the same perspective independently or he read Metzinger, but he definitely presents his ideas in a more accessible language language (vs. Metzinger's heavy, precise philosophical jargon, which I found heavy to read).
I'd love to find more sources on this (books/talks/papers), or find a place where these ideas are actively discussed.
Re: Feral Minds
#50Earlier 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?" is a fairly universal reaction, so we know that even if others' qualia are not identical to ours, they are at least isomorphic. Seeing my own phrasing echoed back, I notice an ambiguity: "the same kind" can be either "all the same things" or "it is kinda close". The former is provabl…
> for all you know I might be a P-zombie that's just parroting phrases it once read
Right, but as long as the phrases you parrot appear to continue a conversation that I usefully model as produced by (another?) consciousness, I pragmatically (see Peirce) don't care what the actual mechanism that produced them may be. (an analogy: when using computers we almost always care that a protocol is followed, often care that a specific function is computed, sometimes care about which algorithm computes it, and almost never care about the exact implementation) If you were to be a giant lookup table or a Searlean room instead of a conscious being, well, that's on you.
> what if I am a P-zombie dreaming "I" am conscious? — not Zhuangzi
see also https://xkcd.com/810/