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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

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Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#371

Post by kbrkbr »

justonceokay wrote: post #173
trick-or-treat wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”. Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is no…

But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?

If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.

If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#372

Post by somenameforme »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #160
somenameforme wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.

You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings. And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things. But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the…

This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#373

Post by essentia0 »

lelanthran wrote: post #328
jillesvangurp wrote: post #239

Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources…

> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious. You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch. The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they shoul…

You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#374

Post by vixen99 »

card_zero wrote: post #242
jillesvangurp wrote: post #239

Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources…

The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.

I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#375

Post by mjburgess »

prmph wrote: post #300
jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulatio…

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.

What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.

What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.

The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#376

Post by svnt »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #362

Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop. I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with…

This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#378

Post by Joker_vD »

losvedir wrote: post #370

I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the…

This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.

There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#379

Post by nemomarx »

smackeyacky wrote: post #366
LoganDark wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's unknowable is whether or not there are real stars that correspond with what you seem to observe; not whether or not your observations themselves are the real stars.

Didn’t we already work out they are similar in their spectral output to the Sun, enough to conclude they are the same kind of thing? And observing their movements makes them far away. Do each of us have to do the experiments again to validate that we know what they are?

Something could only appear to be similar to the Sun. We have to trust in observation at some level for all of those experiments to be valid, basically, which means first believing that you're conscious and second believing that you can experience reality and so on from there.

You can never really disprove that some malicious entity is just making you think you're seeing the stars and talking to people, if you want to go back to philosophy about it. There's a bit of assumed faith

Re: It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

#380

Post by Xcelerate »

prmph wrote: post #300
jwilliams wrote: post #111

Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you e…

Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulatio…

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

> I know for sure what I am perceiving

This reflects my view. And I’ve always found it mildly amusing that beings I cannot prove to myself are perceiving attempt to convince me that I’m not perceiving, when that’s exactly what I’m maximally sure of. Imagine arguing with an LLM designed to convince you that you’re not real. It would be weird, wouldn’t it?

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