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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#191

Post by rozab »

amelius wrote: post #155
rozab wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blindsight by Peter Watts has some interesting ideas about how consciousness may not be a necessarily condition for advanced life, and indeed may be a hindrance and an evolutionary dead end. The appendices also have a lot of good references on the subject. You can read under CC here https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

> consciousness may not be a necessarily condition for advanced life This will probably be shown true when silicon-based life takes over.

Indeed! I won't spoil it, but there's some very prescient ideas about what are essentially LLMs and how they behave

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#192

Post by pmarreck »

willbudd wrote: post #100
pmarreck wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be a will-free intelligence though, and it's confusing for people because we've never seen that before so I don't think we can make any assumptions. There's no Darwinian forces in effect among entities that have no will, as it were...

Will-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.

> I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions

The first problem is epistemological... If you think that creative decisions are made by complying with a "reward function," you are entirely missing something. Most values are fundamentally based on irrationality. I've literally spent an entire life doing things that everyone else told me was wrong and being interested in things that almost no one else saw the value in, but which ended up being "correct" (for me, at least, and also leading to tangible success). I have no reason to believe that any of my decisions were rational, functional, or acted according to a "reward function"... and I'm a programmer! So I COMPLETELY understand the appeal of the explanatory power of "reward functions." And yet, I can assure you that this is a piss-poor explanation for many creative decisions that literally no one else understands but the person making it, but which then bears fruit despite all reason to the contrary. Some might call this "intuition"

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#193

Post by munch117 »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #176
munch117 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definition: Consciousness is those parts of the workings of the brain that are available to introspection. End definition. People so love to throw all kinds of babble under the heading of consciousness, so there's scant chance that people will agree on any kind of definition, let alone this one. But it's what I've been using, and I find that it makes all the supposedly hard questions about consciousness very simple t…

But this is a totally meaningless definition. It says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way and contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable.

> contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable

It's observable. You simply ask people what they have been or are thinking or sensing. If they are able to relate that, then, by the definition, they were conscious about it. Of course they might be lying or misremember; introspection is not intersubjective, and therefore hard to create reproducible experiments around. But that doesn't mean introspective information doesn't exist.

> says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way

What kind of experience is observable, except by introspection?

The only observations of experiences that anyone can have are through either one's own introspection, or through what others have related of their introspection.

If you are to say that you have had a "phenomenological experience of consciousness" that you want me to explain, then you are giving an introspective report of a brain process that left an imprint that you can now describe. If the experience was not available to introspection, then you wouldn't be asking, because you wouldn't realise there was an experience at all.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#194

Post by pmarreck »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #105
pmarreck wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just an emergent phenomenon The lack of tangibility or measurability ("rationality") of said "emergent phenomenon" is a problem with this line of reasoning IMHO. This is essentially no different in utility as an explanatory theory than the religious explanations.

I think a lot of people misunderstand what emergence is [*]. But that might actually be a red herring anyway. The real problem is how does one measure consciousness in the first place? [*] it's less of a super strange magical phenomenon, and more like a rather mundane philosophical version of mathematics' integration.

That's in fact the real problem, and I don't think it's solvable because it's irrational. Only rational things are "solvable".

Here's a similar conundrum: Without using a human as a "living proxy ruler" or actual sales data, come up with an algorithm that uses only empirical data (not touching human behavior around it!) to determine the fair market value of the Mona Lisa. Then, apply that to some artwork it's never seen before and see if it concords with what "meat computers" (humans) believe the value of it is.

My strong position is that not only will you not be able to do this now, but you will not be able to do this ever.

I think rationality will get us VERY far, though, so we should keep doubling down on it. My money's on it being insufficient to produce an apparent intelligent and unique being, though.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#195

Post by amelius »

Aardwolf wrote: post #188
amelius wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument goes as follows: 1. People are talking about consciousness. 2. This talking happens in the physical world (soundwaves are being produced, etc.) 3. We assume that other people have consciousness since they talk about it. As you say, there is no absolute proof of this, but Occam's razor makes it silly to assume otherwise. 4. So, the soundwaves (physics) are happening because of consciousness. There is a ca…

Not all sound is created that way, e.g. rain falling from the sky is not, do you intent to mean all physics, including rain, originate from consciousness in some way (such as in theories that everything is an illusion, ...), or rather, that consciousness can affect physics in some way, e.g. because you can choose to speak and produce sound waves

Yes, the second option is the one used in the argument.

This shows that consciousness is not just qualia, i.e. the observation of physics.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#196

Post by keernan »

wilonth wrote: post #120

Trying to understand how the 86 billions of neurons in humans achieve consciousness is like trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other. Basically impossible impossibility. For a system which derives its behavior from complex interactions between those billion components, you can only understand its origins how it was tuned, and some high-level concepts of its workings. (Which…

>... trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other.

Isn't that just a computational problem? In theory, couldn't every expression and result be debug.print and followed? Indeed, in theory couldn't a second chatGPT process follow the debug.print process of the first chatGPT process and then explain to humans how the result of the first process was derived?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#197

Post by a_cardboard_box »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #183

> Consciousness is everything a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. > Despite a vast effort — and a 25-year bet — researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific…

Consciousness is something some beings experience. We have direct knowledge that it exists because we experience it. We can assign a word to this experience, but we can't define it objectively such that a non-conscious being would understand it. That doesn't mean it's useless to talk about this real experience we have. It just means we can never be entirely sure we're talking about the same thing.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#198

Post by hungryforcodes »

munch117 wrote: post #193
hungryforcodes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is a totally meaningless definition. It says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way and contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable.

> contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable It's observable. You simply ask people what they have been or are thinking or sensing. If they are able to relate that, then, by the definition, they were conscious about it. Of course they might be lying or misremember; introspection is not intersubjective, and therefore hard to create reproducible experiments around. But that doesn't mean introspective informati…

OK

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#199

Post by munch117 »

atlantic wrote: post #185
munch117 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definition: Consciousness is those parts of the workings of the brain that are available to introspection. End definition. People so love to throw all kinds of babble under the heading of consciousness, so there's scant chance that people will agree on any kind of definition, let alone this one. But it's what I've been using, and I find that it makes all the supposedly hard questions about consciousness very simple t…

So you're taking the question under investigation - whether consciousness is fundamental, or whether it is an epiphenomenon, possibly of brain function - and making one of the possible answers into an axiom of your system? How does that solve anything? You're just imposing a particular hypothesis before investigation even gets started.

It fits with everyday uses of the word "conscious".

Let's say someone is lying motionless on the ground. You then say they've "lost consciousness". Later, they wake up and object that they were not unconscious. "I could hear everything you said. I was paralysed, but conscious the whole time." Being able to relate their experience is what proves that they were conscious.

Someone will say that they "made a conscious decision". Same thing. They can relate the thought process behind the decision.

Someone will say: "I got lost on the way to the airport. I must have unconsciously wanted to stay home." In this case they tell you that they made a decision, but they cannot relate the thought process behind the decision, and they don't believe that at any point they could have. It is a decision not available to introspection, therefore "unconscious".

> the question under investigation

What investigation? Which observation is in need of explanation? All I have is the introspective observation of myself thinking, and reports from others making similar introspective observations.

If you are going to say that "consciousness" needs explanation, then your question is ill-formed, because your question contains a word that has no definition and no agreed upon meaning.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#200

Post by BestGuess »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #183

> Consciousness is everything a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. > Despite a vast effort — and a 25-year bet — researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific…

Near I can tell all I can find is wikipedia paraphrasing him paraphrasing someone else. "the feeling of what it is like to be something" sounds like to me a lot of words to just say "self awareness". Now I'm ignorant of all of this fair warning, but that seems pretty dang well explained isn't it? went and looked for brain science and awareness things, but it seems like there's lots of explanations for lots of parts of it. Same way we got lots of explanations for lots of stuff in science near as I know, so how the hell does that mean "neuroscience loses"? Like if we don't got a perfect explanation of everything science don't count?

Anyhow I went and read the article but it didn't even explain what isn't explained like you said where there just wasn't a meaning that was laid out. Got the feelin "it isn't perfect so I win" which is a really cheap trick and a really dumb bet. But I don't really know this stuff so all I can say is "to someone who doesn't know this stuff this article didn't help a dang bit". Maybe someone can explain the dang thing to me better

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