Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

deepmind.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 62 posts

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#11

Post by Kim_Bruning »

mstank wrote: post #2

Glad to see Searle's Chinese Room mentioned early on in the paper. "Syntax is not sufficient for semantics," no matter how much compute we throw at the problem. My very amateur view is that until the underlying compute architecture and substrate resembles artificial biology more than silicon, we wont get there. The latest advances in AI have given me even more appreciation of biology and evolution. It's incredible wh…

Hofstadter and Dennett have taken great pains to try to debunk Searle. No love lost in that corner of the philosophical world.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#12

Post by in-silico »

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion:

1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human.

2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in which human exceptionalism is the default.

Those first two groups comprise the majority of people, and are not worth engaging with.

3. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they might be conscious, usually for computationalism/functionalism reasons. This is the group that I place myself in.

4. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they can't be conscious, usually for biological naturalist reasons. This seems to be the predominant group on Hacker News (among those who discuss it).

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#13

Post by sunrunner »

in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with.

The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of consciousness as a super-bundle of the above (which is how I assume a lot of default ideas about consciousness are) actually sticks, or whether it falls apart when beings can have a subset of those properties but not all.

Also, I nominate myself to be in the 'People who have thought about it and are becoming more doubtful that I myself am conscious, and the question might be moot.' group.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#14

Post by Kim_Bruning »

in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

Am I the only person who is confused by there being a philosophy called "biological naturalism", which is not the science?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#15

Post by in-silico »

sunrunner wrote: post #13
in-silico wrote: post #12

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in w…

I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with. The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of cons…

I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#16

Post by Kim_Bruning »

in-silico wrote: post #15
sunrunner wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with. The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of cons…

I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.

Take a look at Daniel Dennett, for starters!

If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this:

Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. "

Some days that's me, with a headache.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#17

Post by in-silico »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #16
in-silico wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.

Take a look at Daniel Dennett, for starters! If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this: Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. " Some days that's me, with a headache.

So it's more of a semantic argument than an actual rejection of the idea that you experience qualia/sentience/something?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#18

Post by defterGoose »

jdmoreira wrote: post #5

This is the complete opposite of Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" hypothesis, which intuitively makes much more sense to me.

It's the pervasive theme in the book, but never really given a conceptual grounding further than "this sort of looks like recursion or can be modelled circularly so it's a strange loop". The vagueness of it reveals itself as being "more intuitive", because a vaguer pattern will have more matches. I don't remember Hofstadter digressing on whether these loops work "in reverse" either, which is sort of what the author here is denying. Basically positing that f doesn't have a well-defined inverse.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#19

Post by tmvphil »

> To fully understand the difference between the embodied robot running an algorithm on a chip and the biological mapmaker, we need to remember that for the latter, subjective experience is a given, not because of abstract information processing, but because of a specific, metabolically constituted physical reality.

Total drivel. Consciousness in biological systems is "a given" because of metabolism?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness

#20

Post by emp17344 »

yogthos wrote: post #3

The paper makes a huge assumption that only thermodynamic constitutions can produce consciousness. The assumptions seems completely unsubstantiated given that thermodynamics are just states and states are replicable. The whole Chinese Room idea is pure sophistry as well. Both Dennett and Hofstadter address it quite well in Consciousness Explained and I am a Strange Loop respectively.

You know that Dennett and Hofstadter aren’t the beginning and end of Philosophy of Mind, right? Calling Searle’s Room “complete sophistry” is hilariously misguided, considering the vast majority of academic philosophers consider it valid: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5002#
Post reply on HN