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One of the seminal papers of the 20th century. And like any truly good philosophy paper the argument is very clear and a real head-scratcher.
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt?…
> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digi…
I've thought a lot about what is lacking in modern VLMs that preclude consciousness. In my view the difference is that their talk of "self" is a simulacrum of the real thing. Current models are feed forward and so self-talk is driven by some parameter that turns on when the network detects context that possibly references the model, and this parameter drives downstream self-talk. It's a very good simulacrum, but it is a far cry from a model with recurrent self-reference around which the inference process is organized. The richness of the self-model in a hypothetical recurrent network with capabilities of modern LMs is much greater than the parameter on/off representation in feed forward networks.
I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/…
I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/…
I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/…
I don't think you understood the paper, to be honest.
I read this article since it was referred to often in philosophy of mind, including by Daniel Dennett in "Consciousness Explained". Yet... while I expected some deeper dive into Umwelts, I got (in my experience) a tautology around the word "be". Which, IMHO, should be tabooed in all serious philosophical discussion, as "be" is the mother of word-lockpicks. Vide E-Prime, English without "be", https://en.wikipedia.org/…
I'd love to respond, but I am shadowbanned.
Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption.
Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions", and one is all that plus "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing", which is to say, a person. What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat, but that doesn't actually imply that bats implement or contain a personal point of view. If they don't, then it might be that there is no "what it is like to be a bat", but at most "what it is like to experience being a bat as a person implemented by a system which is not a bat".
I'm pretty sure we could study a bat's brain, if it hasn't already been done, and get a good idea of what echolocation would feel like. Fundamentally echolocation is a bit like vision in that the bat can direct it's echolocation sense in whatever direction it likes, and a bit like peripheral vision it can also control the acuity of this sense by how fast it sends out chirps - varying from 5-20 per second when scannin…
This misses the point of the discussion. Yes, we can understand what it is like to be a human with echolocation. However, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat .
What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world. Why do such systems need this gestalt?…