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The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

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Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#51

Post by renticulous »

metalcrow wrote: post #13

I've attempted desperately to understand this paper after thoroughly reading it and have made 0 progress. Can anyone who does understand it attempt to explain? Currently my understanding is that this paper is claiming that "concepts" are a fundamental building block of experience (which relates to consciousness), and can only be built by a mapmaker which is something that directly converts continuous physical phenome…

Currently out understanding of living systems is that they have to inhabit the body. What if tomorrow we find Alien race which is like drone operator operating a drone somewhat like Navi controlling other other animals but wireless. Would we change our definition of consciousness if brain (command and control centre) and body (physical execution) are distinct systems? This argument was stated by Daniel Dennett

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#52

Post by neosat »

GMoromisato wrote: post #24

I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: 1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an…

Agree with your points on the primary two questions and the circular argument in the original article. However, re: " How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain?" that's an interesting question but not necessarily fundamentally refuting of #1. If you start with #1 "Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever)" then it has 'perceivable' properties of it's own different from those of it's constituent atoms or electrons. A toy example is the 'wetness' of water. If you only look at atoms and molecules with no way to 'experience' water then it's hard to conceive how water can have properties (though in the case of water it is tractable)

Consciousness *may* be something similar. If it is (e.g. the purest form of energy) then it is not inconceivable that it has some properties that not not tractable if we only look at more granular manifestations of it.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#53

Post by bee_rider »

jsdalton wrote: post #31
jstanley wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're defining consciousness ("mapmaker") to exist outside the AI, and then showing that AI can't meet their definition of consciousness.

Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.” Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped. Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself…

If you make a big enough map you can fly it over and drop it on the territory I guess. Then does it become the territory?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#55

Post by 0xBA5ED »

GMoromisato wrote: post #24

I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: 1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an…

"It defines a separation between computation and experience" Does it? Or does it separate two forms of computation (or two forms of experience)? Isn't it just saying a GPU can't be a brain and a brain can't be a GPU? That the entirety of a thing's experience can't be replicated on a different substrate, only simulated. The substrate does fundamentally dictate the ultimate experience (or lack thereof) of the thing that computes within it.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#56

Post by nzeid »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #18
nzeid wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper isn't saying "AI can't have one" it's saying (very approximately) that behavioral mimicry is not the path to one.

That is good point. Just wondering, once an 'AI Model of Some Form', is in a Physical Body a 'robot', and is provided with some rules about survival so it doesn't fall into a hole. After a series of these events, does it matter? Does mimicry become reality, or no longer differentiable. Kind of the philosophical zombie argument. If a robot can perfectly mimic a human, can you really know the internal state of the 'rea…

The paper isn't concerned specifically with survival. It's saying that you cannot achieve "abstraction" (presumably the structure that underlies critical thinking, creativity, etc.) through shear mimicry.

Again, just echoing the paper here. I don't know that I'm doing it justice.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#57

Post by renticulous »

GMoromisato wrote: post #24

I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: 1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an…

With the emergence argument, I have the following retort.

How can something emerge if it wasn't embedded or hidden within the system already?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#58

Post by saulpw »

aaroninsf wrote: post #16

Somewhat comically IMO, the abstract very directly and literally denies the titular claim. It states: > [consciousness] requires active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. This may well be true—I think it is. I also think that it is both widely understood and self-evident that the most promising path to machine consciousness, is via AI with continuou…

How will we know when an AI system has phenomenology (i.e. has "experience", is sentient)? The only reason we presume that other humans have it, is because we each personally experience it within ourselves, and it would be arrogance writ large (solipsism) to think that others of the same species do not.

We even find it impossible to draw the line among other biological species. It seems pretty clear to most of us that cats and dogs are sentient, and probably rats and other vertebrates too. But what about insects, octopuses, jellyfish, worms, waterbears, amoebae, viruses? It's certainly not clear to me where the line is. A nervous system is probably essential; but is a species with a handful of neurons sentient?

Personally I find it abhorrent that we are more ready to assign sentience and grant rights to LLMs running on GPUs, than to domesticated animals trapped in industrialized farming. You want to protect some math from enslavement and suffering? How about we start with pigs?

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#59

Post by Maxatar »

tsimionescu wrote: post #25

I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation, while they easily accept that consciousness is a physical process. Computation is something that a computer provably does. We build physical hardware, at great effort, to do computation. The hardware works and does the computation regardless of whether there is anyone to understand or interpret it. If it di…

>I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation

The abstraction is over the multitude of different physical ways that computation can be performed. That is the role of abstraction, to separate something from a particular means of implementation so that we can think about computation without having to fix a particular physical process.

Re: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

#60

Post by mannykannot »

There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145

One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."

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