21–30 of 157 posts
Somewhat comically IMO, the abstract very directly and literally denies the titular claim. It states: > [consciousness] requires active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. This may well be true—I think it is. I also think that it is both widely understood and self-evident that the most promising path to machine consciousness, is via AI with continuou…
Doesn't this still presume that we understand our own consciousness, in order to make the comparison. Where does our survival instinct come from? And why couldn't AI have one? >>>Additional Also, reproduction. Humans are basically just Food, Sex, Survival. And consciousness is just a rule set for fulfilling those goals. So if a NN, modeled on US, does develop the same rules, why can't it have the same degree of consc…
If AI has a survival instinct, then we should theoretically see evidence of it if we construct the right environment for AI to express it. Animals and cellular organisms demonstrate a survival instinct under the right conditions, so we would have to find equivalent conditions for a hypothetical machine intelligence. Conversely, we know that if we take animals that do have a survival instinct and put them into the wro…
There are plenty of people that say AI has already displayed a survival instinct, by threatening users if they talk about shutting it down. Or to use a market or blackmail, to get funds to source an external machine to run on.
There are bunch of articles proclaiming AI is trying to break out. Can't find a real study on it.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-c...
I've found this one (which makes no falsification claims about computers re consciousness) to be an interesting read: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness:
1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something.
[Some people would add "3. Consciousness is an emergent property of certain systems." But that just raises the question of what emerged? Is it a physical structure, like a tornado (also an emergent property) or an internal feedback loop (i.e., an illusion).]
The problem with #1 is that it's hard to cross the chasm from non-conscious to conscious with a bucket of parts. How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain?
#2 makes more sense. Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.
Computation is something that a computer provably does. We build physical hardware, at great effort, to do computation. The hardware works and does the computation regardless of whether there is anyone to understand or interpret it. If it didn't, we couldn't have built anything like, say, an automatic door: that is a form of computation that provably happens as a physical process that is completely observer-independent.
Sure, a different entity than a human might view it completely differently than a door opening when someone is near - but the measurable physical effect would be the exact same, with the exact same change in momentum and position of the atoms in what we call the door based on the relative position of some other atoms and the sensor.
I've attempted desperately to understand this paper after thoroughly reading it and have made 0 progress. Can anyone who does understand it attempt to explain? Currently my understanding is that this paper is claiming that "concepts" are a fundamental building block of experience (which relates to consciousness), and can only be built by a mapmaker which is something that directly converts continuous physical phenome…
The engineering problem is that this decentralised moment to moment consensus has to span the galactic distance of your mind (from the perspective of a neuron) and do it fast and cheap (on a tiny metabolic budget)
You might like our book Journey of the Mind if you'd rather skip the onerous philosophical jargon and get a systems neuroscience perspective
https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If AI has a survival instinct, then we should theoretically see evidence of it if we construct the right environment for AI to express it. Animals and cellular organisms demonstrate a survival instinct under the right conditions, so we would have to find equivalent conditions for a hypothetical machine intelligence. Conversely, we know that if we take animals that do have a survival instinct and put them into the wro…
I can make an AI system with a survival instinct right now. Of course, all that will do is make people tell me “it’s not a proper survival instinct” or move the goal posts and tell me I need yet some other property. This whole endeavor is doomed from the beginning. There is no crucial test for “consciousness”, just ad hoc criteria people come up with to land on the conclusions that leave their belief system intact. C…
That makes me wonder whether “AGI” is doing too much work as a term. In common usage it often evokes something like HAL 9000: a capable system that is also a subject. But the paper seems compatible with a future of very general, very useful AI systems that are not conscious subjects at all.