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Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

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Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#161

Post by everdrive »

metabagel wrote: post #117
everdrive wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte & Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling personification into something which really bears zero resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with consciousness. If w…

Perhaps, trees have a very muted consciousness. Perhaps every living thing is conscious at some level ranging from nearly zero to far in excess of human consciousness.

I think this just redefines consciousness to mean "things that are alive." This may be a fine concept, but it is not what people commonly mean by consciousness. I strongly suspect that people who want to extend consciousness to all living things (and beyond) do some from a _moral_ perspective -- they want to connect people to all living things in some moral and spiritual sense. And they want to remove the historical moral hierarchy whereby mankind has placed himself at the top of creation.

I have no interest in the antiquated view that man is the peak of creation. However, extending consciousness to everything seems to be a spiritual act, and quite distinct from determining a scientific definition of consciousness.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#162

Post by CuriouslyC »

lxgr wrote: post #157
CuriouslyC wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is equal evidence for two hypotheses, but one resonates with your personal experience and causes you to live a better life, what could possibly possess you to take the disempowering view?

Practically leading my life as if I had free will and being convinced I actually do have free will – despite zero evidence either way other than my senses and my reasoning, both of which regularly fail/deceive me in all kinds of situations – are two very different things. There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not mak…

The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I don't think the notion that your senses and reality are not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating that goes into taking sensory input and generating an experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of making decisions.

Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#163

Post by everdrive »

DFHippie wrote: post #87
everdrive wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my mind, this is part of the mysticism of the movement. If you define a word widely enough, then anything can fit. I hate to invoke this, but this often feels like a Motte & Bailey argument. If you want to call "God" the energy which started the big bang, you're sort of smuggling personification into something which really bears zero resemblance to traditional religious ideas. And so it is with consciousness. If w…

But if you say consciousness is "a specific evolved mechanism, and like the eye, has probably convergently evolved to serve different purposes" then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say, "See, here is consciousness. It helps this organism achieve the expected purpose." I think this is what NoMoreNicksLeft is getting at. I believe the typical (mis)understanding proce…

>then you must have some notion what this mechanism is and what it's purpose is so you can say,

My intuitive sense is that consciousness is present in so many mammals precisely because mammal young require so much care after birth. ie, it is beneficial for a mother to have differentiate between her own consciousness and the consciousness of her children. And, to care for her young and possess an intuitive sense for the needs of her young. It feels like this trait, once bootstrapped, could find other evolutionarily-beneficial behaviors, such as hunting in packs, building cities, or forming competitive social hierarchies. (you can't really have social status without consciousness)

To be clear, I'm not a biologist, and for sure I could be wrong here. I think the general principle holds though -- if a species of animal possesses a trait, then that trait either currently or previously conferred some evolutionary benefit. It's easy enough to think of what those benefits could sensibly be, and of course more difficult to actually go ahead and prove it out.

>I believe the typical (mis)understanding proceeds like so: "I am conscious. I not only know things, but I have a sensation of knowing them. This (computer/animal) reacts to things in such a way that it demonstrably knows them in some sense, but it has no sensation of knowing them. Now what is this wonderful thing that distinguishes me from it? How did it come to be? What purpose does it serve?"

I think that's a really fair characterization, but I also think that this "feeling of what happens" does characterize consciousness. 1) this means that an AI _could_ be conscious, but it would probably also need to have been programmed to sense input and also have some sort of identity. 2) if we don't believe that consciousness is a "feeling of what happens," but instead is just a response to external stimuli, then I would think consciousness is just synonymous with "living things," and there's no point in having a separate concept for it.

>One purpose the concept of consciousness serves is that it gives a special ethical status to its possessor.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you saying that "from the perspective of the conscious being, that person themselves puts more value on themselves or other conscious beings?" -- or, are you saying that "conscious beings _should_ put more emphasis on other conscious beings, and therefore it's important to extend consciousness other things?" I think in either case, I would say that this bias towards other conscious beings is just sort of an in-built human bias, and isn't particularly important when it comes to scientific understanding of consciousness. (from a moral standpoint, I concede it could be important.)

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#164

Post by catlover76 »

card_zero wrote: post #26
edgyquant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters very much when it comes to perspective. The posters point is spot on so unless you have some counter you should just delete yours.

Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large rock does not have an advanced ability to understand things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree. (Extra bits edited in follow:) I detect another implied point, which is that there are levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, t…

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Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#165

Post by aleksiy123 »

Anyone else starting to get a feeling that whether something is conscious, or even studying consciousness matters at all in a practical sense.

More of just a nerd snipe or red herring to waste time on.

Like working to understand consciousness probably won't actually advance building an GAI in any meaningful way.

Nor will it be the driver of how we interact with our surroundings be it rock, dirt, tree fish, dog, human, robot or universe?

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#166

Post by fooker »

michaelmrose wrote: post #86
fooker wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your book, what would it take for something other than a human or animal to demonstrate consciousness?

I would be tempted to imagine it might be conscious if it merely acted as if it had motive and a model of the world. At first blush chatGPT seems conscious for instance.

I think by that definition you can argue that all the entities I mentioned in my original comment are conscious.

There is no way to quantify how expressive your model of the world has to be, or what mechanisms you have to act.

For example, a single neuron in an artificial neural network has a model of the world (it's weight), and can act by producing different outputs for different inputs.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#167

Post by heavenlyblue »

titzer wrote: post #63
User23 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to “because it did.” Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a reason. And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here! Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential con…

The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen. The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some t…

> The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique.

It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#168

Post by a_cardboard_box »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #159
gradus_ad wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to distinguish choice/will and consciousness. Conscious experience can happen in an entirely deterministic context..they are orthogonal concepts.

Sort of, but then philosophers have certainly discussed the topic of why would there be conscious experience if it didn't serve any function. It would be cruel irony if consciousness was a vestigial appendage of the cosmos, an unempowered observer. Not a proof of anything just something to think about. For me, the real driving idea is that what we call physics is the aggregate behavior of conscious entities making ch…

I think the best argument for consciousness having an effect on the physical world is that the physical world contains a formulation of the hard problem of consciousness. If consciousness doesn't affect what words get written, then no discussion of consciousness is actually about consciousness.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#169

Post by Scarblac »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #165

Anyone else starting to get a feeling that whether something is conscious, or even studying consciousness matters at all in a practical sense. More of just a nerd snipe or red herring to waste time on. Like working to understand consciousness probably won't actually advance building an GAI in any meaningful way. Nor will it be the driver of how we interact with our surroundings be it rock, dirt, tree fish, dog, human…

There may be an ethical element, we try not to hurt animals but don't care about crushing rocks.

Re: Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?

#170

Post by nathan_compton »

fooker wrote: post #36
nathan_compton wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience smart people are pretty dumb. In seriousness, though, its hard for me to believe that there would be a lot of variation in this among neuroscientists, who I would expect to answer yes only to humans and animals. Like consciousness isn't exactly as big of a mystery as its made out to be. To begin with its a genuine observable phenomenon in an informal way: we identify people as conscious more or less…

Your answer has the prejudice than only people and animals can be conscious. I don't disagree, but that instantly makes the answer to the question "is the universe conscious" negative. Also AI, which currently is significantly more capable, at least in mimicking consciousness, than most animals.

I don't have that prejudice. I'm entirely open to the possibility that AI or other stuff could be conscious. In fact, I'm decidedly of the opinion that consciousness isn't magic and shouldn't be expected to be confined to specific arrangements of material per se. However, I am saying that we know quite a lot how brains work and how that relates to the observable phenomenon we bundle under the word consciousness and that knowledge allows us to say with some degree of certainty that a rock isn't conscious in any usefully descriptive way. I also believe that, despite their sophistication, language models aren't conscious because they specifically lack a lot of the sorts of structures which underly consciousness, which seems to me to be a specific kind of thing having to do with brains and language models don't need most of the circuitry that underpins consciousness because their training apparatus is external to the neural network. But I'm prepared to be wrong about this.

I simply object to the bald hand waving away of decades of neuroscience research and philosophical work with the suggestion that consciousness is a big question mark. It isn't, and I tend to think people who assert that are more interested in mystifying things than in clarifying them.

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