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Consciousness is not computation

joe-antognini.github.io

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Re: Consciousness is not computation

#411

Post by simonh »

vbezhenar wrote: post #363
simonh wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also get it to agree that it is not conscious. I can write a one line program that claims to be conscious right now. Lamda and GTP-3 are amazing achievements, but they're still just chat bots that look good when they're being lobbed softball questions. If you ask something that maps to the input texts they're trained on you get credible looking responses, but critical or adversarial questioning very easily ex…

The same reasoning could be applied to many people. You wouldn't deny their consciousness on that ground. The issue with general AI is like issue with chess. People are not happy when robot can win some games. People can only accept that robot really plays chess, when robot defeated best of the best. General AI is the same. Looking like some guy is not enough. You need to reason better than smartest human on the plan…

This line of reasoning reduces to the philosophical zombie argument. It's true I can't prove to you that I have a first person experience of the world, but it doesn't therefore follow that anything that makes that claim does have such an experience.

For myself I'm satisfied that, when questioned thoroughly, these models fail so completely and utterly and their output is so ludicrously nonsensical that I don't see how their behaviour can be consistent with consciousness, as I understand it. It's not just that the output is incoherent, but it's the ways that they fail too. Do I completely understand consciousness? No, but that doesn't mean these things are conscious either.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#412

Post by Aeolun »

koide wrote: post #208
fouronnes3 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fake laugh can be observed to be different by the person faking it.

Exactly. And the person following the Chinese program also knows they don't speak Chinese and that they aren't understanding anything. I don't really find the Chinese Room argument very compelling because there are too many "it's obvious that X can't really understand" in it. Also, you can't derive from it that there can't be computed consciousness in some other form.

That feels off. It’s like me saying I don’t know English. I merely know the correct alghorithm to give the correct responses to things people give me as input.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#413

Post by V-2 »

lazyatom wrote: post #409

> By this I mean that the existence of my consciousness does not depend on other observers perceiving me to be conscious. The author doesn't recognise that they are an observer of their own consciousness; I would go further and say that consciousness _requires_ the conscious _thing_ to be an observer of themselves. So, for me, the whole axiom "consciousness does not require an observer" is reversed.

It does not require an external observer. I believe the author does acknowledge it, writing "because consciousness is independent of EXTERNAL observers" (emphasis mine) or, even in the sentence that you quoted, "does not depend on OTHER observers".

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#414

Post by skohan »

I am of the mind that consciousness is an emergent property of the various interconnected information processing systems of the brain. There's just too much evidence: for instance, changing the physiology of the brain through drugs or trauma has predictable changes on consciousness. From that perspective, I think it's pretty clear that consciousness is some kind of computation rooted in the physical world.

However to the question of whether consciousness is a classical computation which could be expressed as a classical computer program, that part is up for grabs. The brain processes information in a fundamentally different way than classical computers: it's essentially a massive dynamical system of many many variables all interacting with each-other in real time. It's entirely possible that, given the dimensionality and parallelism of the brain, that there's not enough material or energy in the universe to construct a computer capable of simulating the entire system in real time. Maybe quantum computers will be able to manage it, or maybe we'll need to engineer biological neural networks to get there artificially.

Or maybe consciousness is a thin illusion on top of a couple of clever tricks we have yet to figure out yet.

Anyway I hope we get a little closer to figuring it out in my lifetime.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#415

Post by notahacker »

epgui wrote: post #253
antognini wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we agree more than we disagree. But I think that your definition of a "computational process" is too broad. A bacterium does things that we can say are "performing a computation." But that is different from saying that life is, at root, a computational phenomenon. For instance, sorting a list is a computational process. It doesn't matter what kind of computer I run a sorting algorithm on, if I follow the al…

> I suspect we agree more than we disagree. I suspect the same, but I think there is tremendous value in taking a cosmic step back and seeing everything through the lens of information. It's the most reductionist neutral approach to the universe I can conceive us at this point in my life. > By contrast, if I construct a collection of chemicals that matches the positions of those of a real bacterium, I have created a…

Seeing things through the lens of information seems more like dualism than the arguments for the distinct nature of human "consciousness". (Which doesn't mean it can't be correct, of course, but simply that people often tend to depict the debate as being the other way round). What is a "soul" if not the idea that consciousness exists as an abstraction independent from the material it runs on?

The purely materialist argument is that "information" is just a pattern in the signal processing apparatus of carbon based lifeforms (i.e. it's a representation of the universe in our neurons, not the universe) which very loosely maps to physical processes. Very loosely is important here too: humans can identify equivalent patterns in things as dissimilar as the LCD output of a pocket calculator and beads on an abacus and act accordingly, but I'm not sure the constituent atoms of the calculator and abacus have any view on the matter.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#416

Post by Zababa »

> The second important property of consciousness that any theory needs to explain is that consciousness is a single, cohesive experience. My consciousness is of my entire self. It is not of half of myself, nor is it some superposition of you and me. Somehow, whatever is going on in my brain to produce my consciousness contains all the neurons of my brain, not just a subset of them. There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there.

> Some individuals with severe epilepsy have to have their corpus callosum severed, which separates their left and right hemispheres. After this procedure these individuals often seem to exhibit two consciousnesses rather than one. The right side of the brain seems to be surprised when the left side of the brain decides to raise the right arm, and vice versa. But this is never the case in an individual with a connected corpus callosum. Every time I decide to raise my arm (left or right), my arm goes up and it only goes up when I decide to raise it.

That is ignoring people which create "tulpas", which are another consciousness in the same brain, with different memories. From what I've gathered this is done purely through a mental process, not by separating your brain into multiple pieces. I don't have any personal experience with this, so this is all information coming from secondary sources. But you can't ignore those people and say "There are not multiple consciousnesses in my brain, it’s just me in there.". If we admit that those people are telling the truth and what they experience is really another or multiple other consciousness living in the same brain, this opens the door to something interesting: it is possible for a person to create a consciousness. Again from what I've gathered, tulpas don't suddenly appear all formed, they go through an initial period of "growing up", forming themselves as a person.

A wild theory would be that the process of creating a tulpa is the same as the process of creating a human consciousness, the only difference is if you target another brain or your own brain. And if that's true, once you've managed to recreate the human brain, you would "only" need to interact with it the same way you would when creating a tulpa to create a consciousness.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#417

Post by hoseja »

sdenton4 wrote: post #273
n8cpdx wrote: post #3

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate…

I've recently been enjoying thinking of GPT-3 utterances as creating short-lived consciousnesses for the length of an interaction. There's no consciousness during training (just filling in the blanks...) but when we interact with it in a generative fashion, there is - depending on your prompt - a somewhat coherent 'I' that is invoked, and maintained over the course of the conversation. Seeing as I have no strong clai…

I don't think it's maintained over the conversation. The recent history of the conversation is fed to the engine with each new interaction. So the potential flash of consciousness is even shorter than you think. Each reply is a new flash, without memory, only connected by the written content of recent text.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#418

Post by nobody9999 »

wizofaus wrote: post #222
nobody9999 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. >If you wanted to go about proving (even to yourself) that you are not, say, an extremely advanced ML algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses, how would you go about it? Not GP, but I too have come to the conclusion that I'm having a subjective experience. Let's assume that I am "an extremely advanced ML algorit…

I'd say "I am having a subjective experience" is tautological - "subjective experience" are simply words we use to describe the state of being conscious. Though I'd agree much (most?) of it is made up of very strong illusions.

>I'd say "I am having a subjective experience" is tautological - "subjective experience" are simply words we use to describe the state of being conscious.

Please read the comment I replied to. That should clear things up.

>Though I'd agree much (most?) of it is made up of very strong illusions.

Not illusions. A narrative.

cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31806425

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#419

Post by simonh »

doctor_eval wrote: post #54
n8cpdx wrote: post #3

I think people start with the premise that consciousness is a specific “thing”, that it is unique and special to humans (and maybe dogs because we like them but definitely not spiders and flies because we don’t) and then try to work backwards to define it in some ways that keeps it special. I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate…

> Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world. Yet people see to be claiming that LaMDA does just this, and is therefore not conscious. Seems like a journalist is conscious if they do it, but it can’t possible be consciousness if LaMDA does it. I’m yet to see a convincing argument about why LaMDA isn’t conscious other than “it’s just…

LaMDA can emulate certain behaviour that we associate with consciousness based on our everyday experience, but it also fails to exhibit many other attributes we associate with consciousness. So, is conciseness a requirement for being able to generate what I'd claim is a very, very limited subset of behaviours we associate with conciseness?

I say no. These language model systems operate very well if you approach them in a non-adversarial way and feed them input similar to their training inputs. As soon as you adopt a more adversarial approach and interrogate them more thoroughly, it all falls apart quickly and spectacularly. It's actually quite easy to explore conversations around the edges of, or beyond the coverage of their training data and get them to babble helplessly. They're also incapable of performing many very trivial cognitive processes.

So I can't prove it, any more than I can prove that I'm conscious, but they don't come close to convincing me that they are.

Re: Consciousness is not computation

#420

Post by hoseja »

zarmin wrote: post #60
epgui wrote: post #18

The idea that you cannot get to consciousness from computation requires accepting on faith alone that consciousness is magic. It’s fundamentally a religious-like bias. It’s not magic, I’m afraid.

so we can finally put this woo nonsense to bed, could you walk us through the high-level computations of a subjective experience? eg, having a bellyache or falling in love.

Sure, give me the complete wavefunction of your body and fifteen trillion years to simulate it.
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