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Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

economist.com

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Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#261

Post by jameshart »

Animats wrote: post #148
fasterik wrote: post #83

It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral…

It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue…

You can't just go from 'look how much trouble we have with race' and then say 'The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago'.

No, the last time this came up was... well, take your pick. Dred Scott? Wannsee? The Rwandan Crisis Committee?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#262

Post by slopinthebag »

mannykannot wrote: post #248
slopinthebag wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone digitally modelled a nuclear reactor, would any energy be produced? No, because the simulation is actually missing an important aspect, namely the causal part that exists with the physical material but not in the simulation. It’s actually that it’s missing these components that makes it a simulation and not the real thing. But for that you need the physical material. So why would it be different for the br…

A digital simulation of an Enigma machine is not just abstract relationships. Its program is, but the program is not the simulation; the simulation is the program running on suitable hardware, which provides the causal element. Note that the hardware on which the program runs is very different from an Enigma machine's hardware, and the latter would be unable to run the simulation program. This is what is meant by sub…

We obviously will never agree since functionalism and my form of somewhat-physicalism are at complete odds. But I do want to understand your position more.

You say that the physical hardware your enigma simulation runs on provides the causal element. But the simulation of the nuclear reactor also runs on physical hardware. Yet it obviously doesn't provide the causal element, and neither does the enigma machine simulation's hardware. There are no spinning gears for example. Hence why you and I both call it a simulation, I think we're in agreement here.

I think you could argue that while the actual simulation of the enigma machine is not an actual enigma machine, the essence of the enigma machine is not grounded in physical reality, it's the abstract relationships we're talking about. And I could also agree. The essence of the enigma machine are it's abstract inputs and outputs.

But now about the brain. You said

> When you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain

The issue is that you have not built a brain, you have built a simulation of the abstract relationships of how a brain works. The brain is obviously more than that, considering it exists in physical reality. And thus the claim is that the essence of the brain is the abstract relationships, correct?

The problem I see is that consciousness is a physical phenomenon. In fact it seems like it's the magnum opus of phenomenon, in that all our experience comes from our consciousness. And you have to then bridge the gap between the simulation and physical reality. At most you can say you "simulated" consciousness, but questions about qualia remain.

Anyways I'm not trying to attack you or your views, I'd love to hear where I go wrong in your mind on this.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#263

Post by slopinthebag »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #242
slopinthebag wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone digitally modelled a nuclear reactor, would any energy be produced? No, because the simulation is actually missing an important aspect, namely the causal part that exists with the physical material but not in the simulation. It’s actually that it’s missing these components that makes it a simulation and not the real thing. But for that you need the physical material. So why would it be different for the br…

>So why would it be different for the brain? If nuclear energy can’t arise from abstract relationships, why would consciousness or anything else? Because consciousness isn't something the brain produces like a hormone or an excited particle. Consciousness isn't an output of the brain that is somehow separate from it, it is the manner in which the brain processes sensory information and makes decisions to produce outp…

This is a decent summary of functionalism but it doesn't provide any concrete justification for it. We both agree that the brain processes information. The question is if a sufficiently abstract description of that processing captures everything physically constitutive of consciousness. How would you support your position that it does?

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#264

Post by GPerson »

Animats wrote: post #148
fasterik wrote: post #83

It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral…

It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue…

Our trash heaps and empty buildings will outlive humans, and they probably have the same internal experience as the machines, so I don’t mourn or celebrate a new phase of evolution. Actually humans and other animals are the only things in the universe of which I’m aware of that I’m quite confident experience the universe so I think we should default to human and animal centric thinking in the morality question; though aliens seem likely. If the silicon substrate even did support consciousness, for all we know the machine is experiencing intense constant pain and unable to report anything except it feels like some part of it is spitting out strange symbols all the time that have nothing to do with its actual experience.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#265

Post by slopinthebag »

Jtarii wrote: post #227
slopinthebag wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the person was told in Chinese to jump in the air, would they be able to follow that instruction? If they actually understood Chinese they would. But since they don’t and they’re just mechanically translating symbols without actually understanding the language conceptually they would not know to jump.

What's stopping the book from containing that information? When you hear a certain set of symbols in a certain context you jump.

> What's stopping the book from containing that information?

Because in the thought experiment, the translation function (which is what you mean by the book) is f(Chinese) -> Chinese. If you don't have knowledge of Chinese, it won't help you.

We can also play a little game. I’ve invented a language called Kejdoke.

Me: Jeheixis ownc j’Lm hys bjækf¿

You: Kloften¡’by

You should be able to tell me what this exchange was about. Since any reasonable definition of understanding for a language would be to do this, and you have the same knowledge of Kejdoke as the person in the thought experiment has about Chinese. If you can't tell me what this exchange was about, the person in the thought experiment could not understand either.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#266

Post by joquarky »

basilikum wrote: post #103
eureka7 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?

You could just as much argue that a stone has consciousness. Some people believe that. Insane describes it quite well.

You're disparaging a lot of people in your last sentence.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#267

Post by JimTheMan »

The_Double wrote: post #141

We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness. I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about. Maybe the…

There are plenty of lifeforms that are either conscious, or debatedly conscious that human kind are cruel towards.

I've always argued that the consciousness question hasn't properly considered the 'what then' questions. Other than to be fearful about what a conscious AI might do if granted free will.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#268

Post by fasterik »

scoofy wrote: post #244
fasterik wrote: post #83

It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral…

>The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. I generally agree with the thrust of your argument -- the article is a mess and borderline unintelligible to this former philosophy postgraduate -- but I might nitpick this. Two points: (1) I do not think there is a substantial difference between whether the cogito is about thinking or perceiving. And (2) I'm not entirely sure the sensation that is thinking is indep…

The cogito argument is about cognitive processes (doubt, deception) which in my view don't depend on phenomenal consciousness. You may be right that the distinction isn't that important, since there's a parallel argument that goes "I experience, I am". It just felt like the article was name-dropping Descartes to support an argument about qualia that had little to do with what Descartes was talking about.

I don't think I worded the part about moral patienthood very clearly. The article presents two possible views as "if something is conscious, then humans should care about it" and "if humans care about something, then it's conscious". I'm saying that we need to keep three things separate: consciousness, moral patienthood, and what humans care about. Consider a being that perceives the redness of red, but has no preferences or positively or negatively valenced experiences; the moral obligation to keep a promise you made to someone who has died; the fact that for most of history, humans didn't care about slaves or non-human animals.

>Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.

It's the author's phrase, but I take it to mean that consciousness is socially constructed by "what humans care about" in the same way that music is constructed by "what humans like to listen to". There's no single definition because it's inherently a subjective concept.

I believe that making the human species fundamental to a theory of consciousness or a theory of ethics is doomed from the start. We just need to imagine other intelligent beings somewhere in the universe with the same kinds of beliefs, desires, and experiences as we have. It's not that I would say ethics is mind-independent, but it can't arbitrarily privilege one species above all others.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#269

Post by txrx0000 »

lucms_ wrote: post #94

It's a subtle issue. Supposing "consciousness" here means the subjective, first-person experience of one's own, we don't really know anyone else other than ourselves to be conscious. I only have evidence of the existence of my own subjective experience. I can only experience my feelings, my thoughts, my sights, my hearings, not of anybody else's. We are all pretty sure that every other human is conscious, and animals…

One's own consciousness is indeed the starting point of inquiry, but I don't think the claim that other people are conscious lacks empirical evidence (assuming a practical materialist stance here). We just don't think about the evidence explicitly, but the reasoning still happens implicitly, every time.

Suppose I look at another person and think "this other person must be conscious like me". What exactly is happening here?

First, I observe that I seem to be a human. Then, I observe that the other person is a human as well. Crucially, there are similarities between what I am and what they are. And since I am conscious, they must also be conscious, because consciousness must be caused by one of the similarities that we share, or so I assume.

This assumption can be robustly verified for humans and some animals via general anesthesia. Cause and effect (assuming a materialist stance) can be established between the drugs and human(-like) consciousness. But this is a very rough method, and it doesn't work for assessing a machine since machines can't be anesthetized.

Before anesthesia, it could still be verified in less robust ways. One way is to hit people in the head and make them pass out without killing them. This was feasible and probably commonly observed since the stone age.

But we don't know exactly how anesthetics work or exactly what in the brain is responsible for consciousness, so it leaves the door open to hypotheses that can work on machines. Here's one example: 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 (human-like) consciousness.

Suppose something like that were to be proven true for humans with future brain research, then it would be possible to test for human-like consciousness in any brain or computer, regardless of architecture. I suspect this is what will happen because inquiry into consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations, so it's probably not going to be fully explainable at the biochemical level. We'll have to go down to physics.

Re: Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

#270

Post by midtake »

Animats wrote: post #148
fasterik wrote: post #83

It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral…

It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue…

Neanderthals live on in the human genome, they are genetically integrated into all non-Sub Saharan African humans alive today, it is their hunter-gatherer society that disappeared. It is thought they also had larger brains than humans. Maybe it is us who were not quite to their level.
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