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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

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

#321

Post by avastmick »

I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.

I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand.

A lot of way smarter people than me think it’s a worthwhile concept to wrestle with. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it.

A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to justify humans “specialness”?

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

#322

Post by lottin »

prolyxis wrote: post #212
anon-3988 wrote: post #199

If we are talking about intelligence or "agency", then I don't see why something other than carbon can do it. But if we are talking about "there's there there", then I am not sure if we will ever find an explanation for this. Let's say that X is what gives rise to "there's there there". What does this tell me? Nothing. This is perhaps the most interesting, most important, and most baffling mystery of the universe. It…

I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for consciousness.

I think the main ingredient is a living being.

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

#323

Post by vereis »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #275
amenhotep wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Solipsism is incoherent because it's not radical skepticism. All of the critique of the external world also apply to belief in the primacy on internal experience. Any good solipsist should just accept the "evil demon" of descartes, embrace radical doubt, and say "I don't even know if I truly exist or not". "I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm a replicant or not, Deckard!"

well doesn't the argument suggest the only thing you can be certain of is I, or at least some 'experiencing agent' exist, otherwise there would be no subject to do the experiencing

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

#324

Post by thr0w4w4yHNabc »

verisimi wrote: post #269
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let me rewrite it: > Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen? > Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you have links to written work from them? Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound like you've been perusing…

But you're using the word 'perusing'....!! Who's swallowed the dictionary now, huh?

[flagged]

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

#325

Post by zero-sharp »

andrewflnr wrote: post #294
zero-sharp wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle. I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definit…

Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)

There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement (science).

If consciousness isn't a physical process, then you've lost me again. People have discussed these things for hundreds of years.

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

#326

Post by coldtea »

everdrive wrote: post #48
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #3

We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity inven…

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…

>Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined

That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we need a good definition of to understand what we're talking about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion - it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things aren't, because it's directly experienced.

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

#327

Post by CooCooCaCha »

jpt4 wrote: post #277
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you. The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure,…

> Communication is about being understood. > The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text, without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I…

[flagged]

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

#328

Post by blamestross »

avastmick wrote: post #321

I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else. I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking brings: I am lost it all the “arguments”; I really do not understand. A lot of way smarter people than me thin…

Once you start considering it just metacognition, it gets to be a much more useful concept, but most people seem to desperately want it to be "special".

Ask any therapist, consciousness has limits, it has bound depth. It takes a lot of work to re-train it. It isn't a magical human only special thing.

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

#329

Post by moffkalast »

killerstorm wrote: post #144
neom wrote: post #78

My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi ) That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.

Well, this guy is highly proficient at administering an artificial lysergic acid to LLMs: https://x.com/repligate/status/1792010019744960577

And a few drinks too many: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/13vv941/tempera...

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

#330

Post by soulofmischief »

jpt4 wrote: post #258
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let me rewrite it: > Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen? > Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you have links to written work from them? Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound like you've been perusing…

At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more rigorously defend his position, but doing so respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome, demanding multiple links. The proposed revision…

Some notes from the editor...

I do think there is a middle ground. Look at Bukowski as a good example of effective terseness.

On one hand, you can indeed rely on the precision of a large and unequivocal vocabulary, removing all doubt as to your intentions.

On the other hand, you can also rely on context and find beauty in conveying advanced meaning within a simpler interface. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry says, "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

There is a creative art to compressing meaning. As evidenced by the response to your first post, things can actually get lost in translation once you stray from the common vernacular in an attempt at precision. The more you can say with less, the more effective each word becomes.

With practice, you can communicate quite profound thoughts in a form that even the most uneducated among us can understand. Know Your Audience. We may be on Hacker News, but we are also on the Web. People encounter and digest a massive amount of text every day. Making them work a little less in order to understand you can be beneficial for everyone.

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