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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#151

Post by mangolie »

orwin wrote: post #107
selcuka wrote: post #15

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the…

My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be. I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test,…

That does not explain how it is possible for a simulation to experience itself

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#152

Post by whackernews »

sambapa wrote: post #108
deyiao wrote: post #35

Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution. In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.…

If this comment is serious, then you may have the beginnings of AI psychosis

Haha, right? The lads talking like he’s the only one to have figured this out and it’s the truth! Philosophising with AI is so mid. This guys the general public.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#153

Post by skirmish »

dfabulich wrote: post #29
zetalyrae wrote: post #11

The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible cons…

Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”" Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense. If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical . IMO, the problem is actually…

> If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.

Huh, evolution vs. creationism, many arguments happened over many years, yet one side was simply nonsensical.

> if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers

That is how science is done; if you reject that approach a priori, no wonder your conclusions become unreliable.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#154

Post by ben_w »

Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own:

> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”

This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".

> We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.

If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.

> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious

Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.

The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.

(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#155

Post by mangolie »

Sankozi wrote: post #130

The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.

In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#156

Post by RealityVoid »

barrkel wrote: post #140
jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain? This isn't enough: echo "I feel pain" Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#157

Post by cgio »

orwin wrote: post #107
selcuka wrote: post #15

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the…

My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be. I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test,…

By saying it’s simulated you don’t make a simplification. What does it simulate? What are the mechanics of simulation and is it substrate specific or independent? Can a computer simulate these qualia? It’s easy to say something is simple but harder to prove it is any simpler than the alternatives.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#158

Post by daseiner1 »

selcuka wrote: post #15

> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the…

> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.

a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.

b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#159

Post by cgio »

suzzer99 wrote: post #98
thepasch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways: 1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a s…

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…

You are probably converging to Tononi’s IIT. Read the criticism from Aaronson too. Not fundamentally against your approach.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#160

Post by Brian_K_White »

somenameforme wrote: post #117
suzzer99 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my question: Is our consciousness fundamentally different than a gorilla's? If the answer is no, then I'd ask if a gorilla's consciousness is fundamentally different than a baboon's? I think that answer has to be no by definition, assuming the first answer is no. And so on, until we get to where a human's consciousness is not fundamentally different than a tube worm, just a continuum of degrees. I'm not sure w…

You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.

You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.

And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.

But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.

I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.

We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.

Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.

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