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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

arxiv.org

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Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#131

Post by neom »

boesboes wrote: post #113
mgdante wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Raising the temperature is probably a close analog to psychedelics.

I've read once they determined the mechanism by which a.o lsd 'works', is by lowering/disabling a lot of the filtering between neurons. This leads us to recognise all kinds of patterns that are not really there. Visual hallucinations being the obvious form of this, but I suppose the same applies to other things like our personalities and self; that's neither here nor there anyway. Now I'm not 100% sure how temperatur…

That's not really correct. default mode network activity is somewhat disrupted, but LSD works primarily by interaction with the 5-HT2A receptor subtype, this is multiple neurotransmitter systems, including serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate, and in many examples it's via excitement not inhibition/lowering/disabling. Excitatory neurotransmission in glutamate is looking like the the most important of the work in the 5-HT2A area.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#132

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

alex_duf wrote: post #23
seydor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I m still conflicted what we do with the bag of flesh after the fact. Are we bag holding forever?

Something tells me the bag might change its mind about the whole operation once the upload is finished and it realises what's up next. So yeah not sure I like the idea.

“The equation must be balanced!”

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#133

Post by mytailorisrich »

grishka wrote: post #10

For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.

Human consciousness has logically to be a product of the physical structure of human beings.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#134

Post by Conlectus »

potatoman22 wrote: post #130

The authors suggest incorporating elements of neuroscience into machine learning models. I don't see why the bitter lesson [1] doesn't apply here. 1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Isn’t ReLU an element of neuroscience that was incorporated into machine learning to great success?

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#135

Post by ben_w »

anon291 wrote: post #121
ben_w wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem. There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence.

> There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes conflate them without realising it in the middle of a sentence. When a word has a myriad meanings, none of which are generally accepted, we typically say the word has no definition. Sure, particular senses of its meaning may be well-defined, but t…

> none of which are generally accepted

It's not "none", though. A paramedic will absolutely know exactly what they mean when they're performing a test for consciousness, it's just that test isn't useful in this context.

"Awareness of internal and external existence" is another, and I think Claude 3 demonstrates behaviour which fits this meaning of the term.

Qualia is a huge open question because nobody knows what that one would mean or imply or how to test for it.

And so on.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#136

Post by amenhotep »

lumb63 wrote: post #57
everdrive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition. Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is collo…

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…

You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#137

Post by _heimdall »

belter wrote: post #114
Zambyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in humans, it is something we learn as we grow.

That is particularly interesting specially in the context of the ways we know the human brain works. For example in Automatic writing, patients with neurological damage, can write coherent text without conscious awareness of the content. Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the words. And finally...who never, when particularly tired or worried with…

> Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the words.

Hah, well maybe I have aphasia then. My whole life I've heard and even remembered lyrics while a singing along with the radio but if you asked me immediately after the song was over I couldn't tell you the words or the meaning.

I hear the music being played and the sounds of the lyrics, but unless I'm trying to pay attention to the words I just completely miss them.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#138

Post by jvanderbot »

potatoman22 wrote: post #130

The authors suggest incorporating elements of neuroscience into machine learning models. I don't see why the bitter lesson [1] doesn't apply here. 1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

Regarding that article, not main post,

> Today all this is discarded

I can only comment on the one field where I am intimately familiar: computer vision. It is true that when you need a text description of the contents of an image, we have discarded feature-based approached. But attempts to change vision-based tracking, mapping, and navigation into a learned process have not performed well in the applications I have worked on. It's true that end to end control from raw images to output can do very well, but in most systems, the feature based approaches are still employed along side CNN for tracking. ML-only tracking is subject to a lot of noise because of its lack of good history, poor association, and sensitivity to outliers.

So, it's not discarded, it's supplanted by CNN as the primary signal, but our old tricks (reassociation, factor graphs, batch processing, even plain old homographies and MH-EKF) are still very much the scaffolding.

I expect it is the same in other sub fields mentioned - the main driver for improvement is no longer human directed knowledge-based algorithms, but rather human-designed, learning-based, heterogenous pipelines. Even the RAG or Tesla autopilot (probably) fits this bill nicely.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#139

Post by mannykannot »

tomhoward wrote: post #11

I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…

> I’d suggest it’s particularly important to explore these discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or validity.

I agree, and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Kastrup, for one, seems to sometimes behave as though ridicule makes his philosophy more correct.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#140

Post by XorNot »

kbrkbr wrote: post #128

I want to open a side thread about your definitions or descriptions of what "consciousness" is. I think that could be pretty interesting after reading all the comments, and I think there's a lot of knowledge hidden here that we could throw together. Some things that I understood, in my words: - consciousness is probably not reducible to smaller, non-conscious parts of which it is composed. You could maybe say it is i…

The fact a conscious mind loses capability when brain damage happens shows quite clearly that consciousness as a process is reducible to smaller non-conscious parts though.

There's also an innate problem in assuming the human experience of say, "green" is consistent. What I actually see when I see the colour green only appears consistent with the physical behaviour of light. Whether any two people really see colours the same way is highly questionable.

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