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The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

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Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#81

Post by IAmBroom »

txrx0000 wrote: post #9

The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non…

> But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean

And by "we", you mean "you".

If I read an article about the nature of "consciousness", I assume it means "as opposed to being a rock or a twig".

N=2; two definitions.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#82

Post by IAmBroom »

bonoboTP wrote: post #16
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #8

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone a…

The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues. And the origins of language are famously…

It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky.

It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction).

"We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#83

Post by IAmBroom »

agaj-nimm wrote: post #22
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #8

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone a…

The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.

Or, the number "7" has magical/emotional importance to (at least) Western peoples (as does 3, 12, and infamously - 13).

If they were 8 and now 7, but still called "8 sisters", I'd be more impressed.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#84

Post by IAmBroom »

detourdog wrote: post #24
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #8

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow. The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone a…

Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.

Very currently. Just 1,000 years ago people memorized Beowulf to keep the text.

But it is hard for us to imagine times before us, it is true.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#85

Post by IAmBroom »

txrx0000 wrote: post #71
TheHardProblem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean…

I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied. I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thin…

You continue to make the same mistake made above:

> I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.

Markov Theorem functions can predict a word. They have no knowledge, no creativity, and no more productivity than a hammer or magnifying glass. LLMs are in the "more like Markov Theorems" set of tools, and far more complex, but there is no proof of "knowledge" and no "creativity" (name an unprompted piece of work done by an LLM...).

However, I completely agree with your statement here:

> I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#86

Post by kelseyfrog »

polytely wrote: post #12
kubb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?

Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)

I triggered a period of no internal monologue while driving once, just using basic meditative practices. What surprised me was that everything still worked.

Without loss of ability or function, I could still navigate the world, follow rules, maintain safety. The experience made me appreciate how vast and competent the non-verbal part of the mind is.

The verbal component is loud, takes up space, and generally acts as if it's the whole thing. It isn't. It's a symbolic veneer over something much more profound and mysterious than we generally have direct access to in our day to day lives.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#87

Post by bonoboTP »

IAmBroom wrote: post #82
bonoboTP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues. And the origins of language are famously…

It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky. It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction). "We don't know" doe…

I have no idea how this is a reply to what I wrote. I agree with you but it's unrelated.

It shows there was an influx of linguistic influence from a migrating group. There were many waves of such things. Genetically Europeans are continuous with populations with the pre-PIE influx too.

Language did change fast before PIE, in all likelihood. But it didn't have to be "progress", it could have been regular churn just as it's been since then. PIE wasn't more primitive in grammatical capabilities than modern languages.

And PIE wasn't a just one language or one tiny tribe necessarily. But had many variants and dialects and relatives and other languages living near it from which it borrowed. There is no indication that anything out of the ordinary was going on at that time. It was regular language stuff as it's been before and after.

And it matters that we can't go further back because it's not unlikely that there could be other relationships, like PIE being connected to Proto-Uralic potentially, but we can't really substantiate this at such distance in time. But it's not implausible by itself. Just can't show it at this temporal distance and this rate of natural churn.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#88

Post by detourdog »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #68
detourdog wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.

Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.

That may work prehistoric cultures that have fragments in our current languages. This is an incomplete picture because we don’t know about the dead ends. Oral histories disappear when the cultures die out.

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#89

Post by tim333 »

tim333 wrote: post #77

The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats. Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionar…

edit: mouse that is conscious...

Re: The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

#90

Post by txrx0000 »

IAmBroom wrote: post #85
txrx0000 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied. I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thin…

You continue to make the same mistake made above: > I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. Markov Theorem functions can predict a word. They have no knowledge, no creativity, and no more productivity than a hammer or magnifying glass. LLMs are in the "more like Markov Theorems" set of tools, and far more complex, but there is no proof of "knowl…

What mistake did I make?

You've correctly pointed out how Markov models and modern LLMs are similar in a way, and how modern LLMs don't have full agency. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that Markov models are very slightly conscious in some human-like way.

All information processing happens on matter-based substrates, brains and computers alike. I'll even provide a somewhat specific hypothesis: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for consciousness. I'm not aware of any existing evidence that would rule this out. And inquiry about consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations over time. It might even turn out that solving the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics.

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