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The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

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Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#151

Post by bch8_ »

Teever wrote: post #150
bch8_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of my understanding I believe the response from the position taken by the paper is that this is still committing the abstraction fallacy (Assuming you aren't just agreeing with them here, which I don't think you are). The book itself doesn't physically instantiate the information it contains in its text. In a vacuum it is informationally inert. That doesn't mean it doesn't physically exist. Likewise the c…

If this mechanical clock mechanism was part of some sort of Von Neumann probe that was sitting dormant in a star system waiting for the clock to strike a specific time and when that occurs it triggers another mechanism in the probe that combines stored nucleotides to produce a particular sequence of RNA and DNA that is seeded into a suitable world and that soup of RNA and DNA eventually evolves into intelligent biolo…

No because it doesn't physically instantiate the concept of 3:00pm. By the author's contention if you go and find an analog clock right now and read the time, the clock still doesn't have an intrinsic property of "X AM/PM", so it wouldn't in this scenario either.

In a vacuum (Without an observer/mapmaker) there would be no way to derive the semantic content of an analog clock purely from its real physical properties. Additionally, the physical state of an analog clock that we read (map) to say 3PM could be representative of any time whatsoever, because it is purely dependent on the mapping function. The same physical properties could mean "3pm" or "4pm" or "5:48:00 AM" etc etc.

To put it differently, think about (instantiate the concept of) the time 3:00PM right now. Okay, so that thought just existed. When it existed it was comprised of physical processes. Those physical processes bear no relation to the analog clock set to "3PM". Neither are less real, they are just completely distinct physical phenomena. There is no reason in particular to think that a machine capable of computing the time "3PM" bears resemblance to a machine capable of having the thought "It is 3pm" or "[thinking about] the time of 3pm". By the same token there is no particular reason to think that a mind capable of having the thought "It is 3pm" necessarily contains a computer in it, or that a computer is a necessary, constitutive component of that physical thought.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#152

Post by Teever »

bch8_ wrote: post #151
Teever wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this mechanical clock mechanism was part of some sort of Von Neumann probe that was sitting dormant in a star system waiting for the clock to strike a specific time and when that occurs it triggers another mechanism in the probe that combines stored nucleotides to produce a particular sequence of RNA and DNA that is seeded into a suitable world and that soup of RNA and DNA eventually evolves into intelligent biolo…

No because it doesn't physically instantiate the concept of 3:00pm. By the author's contention if you go and find an analog clock right now and read the time, the clock still doesn't have an intrinsic property of "X AM/PM", so it wouldn't in this scenario either. In a vacuum (Without an observer/mapmaker) there would be no way to derive the semantic content of an analog clock purely from its real physical properties.…

The implication of the argument that you're making is that humans could never understand any alien artifact that we come across. Or that we could never understand the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Linear B, or that we could ever understand the purpose of the Antikythera mechanism.

It may be the case that it will be impossible for us to understand a particular alien artifact if we came across it because it is too complex for us to understand, but that doesn't mean that we wouldn't be able to understand all alien artifacts that have ever existed (if they exist)

One could say that hieroglyphs are different because they were made by people, so they have a mapmaker but all that indicates is that meaning can persist across the lifespan of the creators and then if that's the case it's just a question of for how long, and through what casual chains can that meaning persist.

You might also suggest that the function of the Antikythera mechanism is just something that we arbitrarily project onto it but that's not likely. The gear ratios correspond to actual astronomical periods that we didn't just arbitrarily decide, instead we discovered them. That means that the meaning as an astrological clock was fixed into the mechanism by the creators and transmitted to us.

It's the same thing with DNA. It has no mapmaker and yet it contains meaning, meaning that we've made tremendous strides to understand. How is that possible for a thing that doesn't have a mapmaker to have meaning?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#153

Post by bch8_ »

Teever wrote: post #152
bch8_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because it doesn't physically instantiate the concept of 3:00pm. By the author's contention if you go and find an analog clock right now and read the time, the clock still doesn't have an intrinsic property of "X AM/PM", so it wouldn't in this scenario either. In a vacuum (Without an observer/mapmaker) there would be no way to derive the semantic content of an analog clock purely from its real physical properties.…

The implication of the argument that you're making is that humans could never understand any alien artifact that we come across. Or that we could never understand the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs or Linear B, or that we could ever understand the purpose of the Antikythera mechanism. It may be the case that it will be impossible for us to understand a particular alien artifact if we came across it because it is too…

No that's not an implication of the argument. You are misunderstanding. It is not necessary to continuously inject increasingly complicated historical scenarios, I am not going to respond to those, we can just talk about the clock. If you want to restate your argument in terms of that example, I will be happy to respond. As it stands I am not even sure what you think the argument was if those are the implications, or what the point of all of these scenarios is supposed to be. Also, I am just relaying the argument of the paper FYI, I am not making the argument.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#154

Post by tsimionescu »

bch8_ wrote: post #146
tsimionescu wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the results that the computer screen shows, and the inputs fed into the machine, are entirely physical, observer-independent processes. Just like an inscribed papyrus contains letters in a physically observable, provable sense - even if the semantics of those letters are entirely man made. This is in fact very similar to the notion of text - text is a physical medium, that provably contains a message that one hum…

To the best of my understanding I believe the response from the position taken by the paper is that this is still committing the abstraction fallacy (Assuming you aren't just agreeing with them here, which I don't think you are). The book itself doesn't physically instantiate the information it contains in its text. In a vacuum it is informationally inert. That doesn't mean it doesn't physically exist. Likewise the c…

I think the book example muddied the waters, unfortunately. I agree that the concept "3:00 PM" only exists in the mind of the observer. But I don't agree that this means the clock's mechanism isn't intrinsically, objectively, a time keeping mechanism. The clock is a physical instantiation of a time keeping algorithm, in an objective sense. The meaning of a particular time, or even the interpretation of time, is a subjective human experience, but that doesn't mean that computation is as well. If the clock wasn't a correct instantiation of the time keeping computation, it wouldn't be possible to interpret it as such, it wouldn't work - that's what makes me believe it's more than semantics.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#155

Post by bch8_ »

tsimionescu wrote: post #154
bch8_ wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of my understanding I believe the response from the position taken by the paper is that this is still committing the abstraction fallacy (Assuming you aren't just agreeing with them here, which I don't think you are). The book itself doesn't physically instantiate the information it contains in its text. In a vacuum it is informationally inert. That doesn't mean it doesn't physically exist. Likewise the c…

I think the book example muddied the waters, unfortunately. I agree that the concept "3:00 PM" only exists in the mind of the observer. But I don't agree that this means the clock's mechanism isn't intrinsically, objectively, a time keeping mechanism. The clock is a physical instantiation of a time keeping algorithm, in an objective sense. The meaning of a particular time, or even the interpretation of time, is a sub…

First I want to say I don't think this is an unreasonable position nor does it appear to be one without some degree of support in the expert debates. The position taken by this paper is not, as far as I can tell, a universally accepted argument (It isn't some tiny minority either FWIW). The bottom line is that in this field there are simply not many universally accepted positions whatsoever. A helpful framing I came across recently is that the field of consciousness research is still in a "pre-scientific" period in the same sense that astronomy and physics were "pre-scientific" prior to general relativity. Science could be done and theories existed, but something so fundamental was missing that you couldn't even reach a broad consensus on where to direct research.

With that out of the way, in my opinion the response from the position of the paper would be something along these lines. The problem with your claim that a clock intrinsically contains a time keeping algorithm/computation is that by this definition, almost anything you can imagine is a clock. For example, given the right mapping function, a rock can perform all computations necessary to be a clock. It may sound extreme but this is an internally consistent position, if you want you can look up the Putnam triviality argument for more info. Under this argument, not only can a rock perform all the computations necessary to be a clock, it can in fact implement every possible computation imaginable (given the right mapping function). This next bit isn't essential to the argument but just because I find it fascinating, we can take this point a step further. If you imagine an organism/mind capable of using a rock as a clock, it isn't impossible but it would require such a radically different way of perceiving reality that they may in fact not recognize our versions of clocks as clocks at all.

Backing out, the examples above clarify just how essential the mapping function is to imputing meaning to a physical process, and makes it harder to see how the physical processes taking place in our computers have any intrinsic meaning whatsoever. To put my cards on the table, the whole reason I ended up on this thread in the first place is because I have become somewhat obsessed with this paper in the past week or so. I did not expect to agree with it or even to find it particularly convincing. Not that I had given it tons of thought but if you asked me, my operating assumption has always been that the human brain is some form of a computer and, more to the point, that consciousness experienced by human brains is a result of some form of computation. Taken on its own terms, I believe this paper really does challenge that view fundamentally, and in a manner that cannot be easily dismissed.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#156

Post by bch8_ »

brotchie wrote: post #70
GMoromisato wrote: post #24

I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. 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…

Originally rejected the paper premise, but I get it now, certainly made me question my belief that consciousness binds to any arbitrary information processing that's of sufficient complexity. IIUC the author is saying that the human brain is running directly on "layer zero": chemical gradients / voltage changes, while AI computes on an abstraction one layer higher (binary bit flips over discretized dyanmics). In esse…

I went on a very similar trajectory to you w.r.t to the paper (From a similar starting point too). Just wanted to mention that the idea you are describing here is in principle compatible with the theory that the brain is an analog computer: https://picower.mit.edu/news/brain-waves-analog-organization...

I have been been spinning my tires a bit trying to decide if I think this theory of the mind is able to avoid the abstraction fallacy.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#157

Post by bch8_ »

Terretta wrote: post #148
mrandish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought your "layer zero" analogy was an interesting avenue to reason about but you lost me with: > My currently belief is that consciousness is some kind of field or property of the universe (i.e. a universal consciousness field) that "binds" to whatever information processing happens in our wet ware. First, because it requires a huge leap into fundamental and universal physical mechanics for which there is curren…

> currently zero objective evidence There is — arguably, as in, it is argued — evidence for some sort of field of higher dimensionality than three, and recently communication between brain areas through the field rather than physically. The more we uncover of the brain's functionality, the more it appears the physical parts we've tended to stare at are not themselves performing computation, but more like computation…

Can you share this recent evidence about communication through fields?
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