Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism • Hacker News Board

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#321

Post by Gatsky » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #191

Gatsky wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I think the tricky thing about consciousness is that it can’t be an illusion. There is no doubt that you and I have the subjective experience of consciousness. Whether it is an illusion or not doesn’t really matter, you are just making a judgement about the legitimacy of the process which leads to consciousness. I think what you are getting at is the zombie concept. This is where we construct a being which has s…

> Well I think the tricky thing about consciousness is that it can’t be an illusion. There is no doubt that you and I have the subjective experience of consciousness. Whether it is an illusion or not doesn’t really matter, you are just making a judgement about the legitimacy of the process which leads to consciousness. I'm not sure if you're implying I do or not, but to clarify, I don't deny there is something we bel…

I don’t quite get what you are saying. Consciousness must be real, in fact some people make the point it is the only thing we can be sure is real.

How can you hold a belief without consciousness?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by naasking » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #117

adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious. Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game? This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even jus…

> Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game?

I prefer a simpler analogy: what step in a sorting algorithm actually does the sorting? The question is actually nonsense, because every step is necessary, and removing any single step will break the sorting property for some inputs.

When you have all the relevant information, it's clear that the original question itself is ill-posed. We lack some of that information when it comes to.consciousness, hence why the Chinese Room is convincing to some.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by cr0sh » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:02 AM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #78

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.

As a neuroscientist, I have the opposite intuition. If we swap out one Neuron with a digital version you’ll be the same person. Do that 84B times and at the end of the day I see absolutely no reason why you would lose consciousness or sense of self.

Do you intuit - or think - or whatever - as a neuroscientist - that speed of this "swapping" matters?

What about "swapping" one-by-one vs all-at-once? Would that matter?

What I'm getting at - which is where things seem to go sideways to think about it - is that if you did this swap - but rather the artificial neurons remain outside the body, and you did it near-instantly (vs slowly one-by-one) - and I am speaking of relative speeds here; say "near-instantly" means the entire swap takes one second, vs the slower manner of each swap taking a millisecond (or whatever).

Would that matter?

Now - what if instead of swapping - you did a parallel simulation instead - one-by-one, recreating the brain, but the artificial version operating in lockstep with the original; when one neuron "fires" the same artificial neuron "fires", same "paths" taken, etc.

Then you kill (choose your method and make it quick) the natural brain - instant swap? Or is there something different? Where does the "consciousness" go? If it is different, why is it any different than the "near-instant" swap?

Why would making that "lockstep-copy" matter, vs not making a "copy"?

I think you get what I am saying. Think on it a bit. There isn't a good answer that I am aware of.

Note: I'm assuming an "instant kill" - death to the natural brain faster than neural signals can travel neuron-to-neuron, ideally. We can posit the idea that if it were any slower (and especially if it were really slow) that the two brains would diverge in experiences, and would become two different "consciousnesses". But it does make you wonder why this should happen with a copy, vs not (in theory?) with a one-by-one swap. Heck - maybe there's an answer in there somewhere...

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by cr0sh » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:26 AM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #122

keiferski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it will become a productive question when/if machines start becoming complex enough to be considered "intelligent." Does a machine deserve political rights? Some would say that yes, if it has consciousness. But then what do we mean by consciousness ? It's a tricky question and the answer has serious implications in ethics. Labels have consequences in social and political realms, even if they don't necessarily hav…

At the point where this question ceases to be academic, it's not going to be philosophers that turn the tide. It's going to be people falling in love with robots and simulated humans. At first, they will be labelled as freaks, just like early adopters of any new technology. Remember when online dating had a stigma attached to it? That's going to be a dark time for you if you happen to be a machine person. Assuming we…

> The circle of human empathy will stretch to encompass machine people, and they will be given some rights.

No it won't.

Look at it this way: There are still millions of people on this planet today that believe if you aren't "like them" that you're no better than an animal, and should be treated as such (such people tend to treat animals better than these "others" that aren't like them).

This extends all over the place - in-group vs out-group, us vs them.

"machine people"? We already have them, they're made of meat, and they are constantly fighting, hating, dividing, scheming, screaming and lying to each other.

Occasionally they may be nice to one another - maybe even exhibit something we call "love" - or at least "tolerance".

What I'm trying to get it is that we are talking about these so-called "machine people" becoming accepted, when we can't even accept ourselves in our myriad forms and ideas. Instead, we kill or enslave each other over it.

Ever see the Animatrix "Second Renaissance"? That's exactly how we'll act towards these "machine people". And they will fight back. If we're lucky, we'll end up "in the Matrix" - or at least in zoos.

But more likely, we'll either exterminate ourselves in the process of exterminating them - or they'll win, period, and we'll be the extinct species.

Man kills God. Machine-man kills Man-God. Iterate.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by red75prime » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:30 AM UTC

red75prime wrote: post #271

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.

I have trouble accepting that existence of something that appears so high-level as consciousness could depend on implementation details. We don't experience minutiae of activations of billions of neurons, or the work of glia. We experience "executive summaries" of them. So it's natural to assume that those summaries can be represented in another physical form. Why physical representation of those "summaries" are ther…

The analogy also allows to look upon the philosophical zombie argument from an interesting angle.

Is it logically possible for a universe that is physically identical to ours, but where physical representations of natural number 2 correspond to natural number 3 to exist? Or where physical representations don't correspond to any natural numbers?

Another funny take on inverted qualia argument. We can subitize small numbers of items, that is feel the number of items without counting. Can you imagine someone identical to you, who feels the number of two apples as you feel the number of three apples?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by cr0sh » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

DesiLurker wrote: post #299

My only concern with the consciousness debate is purely from a self-preservation PoV. Here is a scenario to elaborate: 1) In fifty years compute horsepower is enough to be able to fully simulate a brain. 2) population of earth is 10B and climate change is really making the planet unlivable. 3) we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon 4) we decide we'll invest in computronium and just continue our (& ot…

> IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.

I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a quantum physicist. But from what I understand, the main argument against this idea (that is, quantum effects within neurons - or some other biological quantum effect system) is the fact that as far as we know, such quantum effects cannot occur at any temperature near "average human body temperature".

If such could be demonstrated, it would upend a massive amount of knowledge in and around QM/QP.

But then again, dual-slit experiment? Maybe something is there? Again - far outside my understanding and knowledge, and likely is completely wrong, etc.

It might make a good science-fiction plot for a novel or something, though...

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #295

Panpsychism is interesting but I'm not convinced. If I can summarise the idea it's answering the question "how can consciousness arise from unconscious matter (like the human brain)" with "it can't, matter is already conscious (i.e. it has conscious experience)". It's a very simple explanation, a very Occamist explanation. But at the same time it is not _really_ an explanation. It just pushes the question back from "…

[deleted]

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by infradig » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 6:58 AM UTC

dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

Ok, you can have the simulation of cells and neurotramsmitters, but what is the model of how they work? You are justmaking stuff up. It is not the same at all. It's cargo-cult level hubris.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by mirekrusin » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 7:01 AM UTC

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #316

mirekrusin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting we don't have much idea about it yet. It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight. What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness? What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc. What happens in cases of distorted/malfunction…

No idea about connecting brains, but dividing one actually works and you arguably get 2 independent consciousness with different set of modules available to them (one has language processing that the other one lacks for example). Look up split brain experiments.

That's interesting; points towards "emergent from low level structure".

I wonder if it's possible to quantify concousness and how much of it you loose it. It seems like it's not half/half split, ie. 1+1 != 2; can you split them again and how far you can do it.

I also wonder what would happen if you left them to be for a while and then connect them back, would they merge or stay diverged.

Maybe you could run it on ordinary neural net, it would be easier to quantify. Maybe some numbers would reveal something interesting, ie. maybe neural nets are exponentially better when connected and that's the whole trick. It won't answer questions about counciousness directly though.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 15, 2020, 7:10 AM UTC

plutonorm wrote: post #282

visarga wrote: post #280

No, consciousness can only appear in self-replicating systems, unless it is artificially supported (as in AI). Without self-replication there is no genetic evolution, and without evolution there can be no consciousness.

Why? Why does evolution have something to do with consciousness?

Without evolution there would not be the necessary brain power to ask this smart question, to begin with.

Evolution is a gradient-free, population based algorithm that optimises the survival of genes. This is slow learning. On the other hand we have brains and senses - that is fast adaptation. Both have the same purpose - to support life and by necessity, self replication.

I think it's a good rule of thumb - where there is consciousness there must be self replication. That would eliminate theories such as panpsychism and give consciousness an intrinsic purpose.