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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

#61

Post by TimTheTinker »

vsri wrote: post #42
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…

I resonate with this. I think some folks will object to the word "illusion" and it's connotations but I think it is resolved with: 1. Consciousness is a material thing (that we haven't found yet) 2. Consciousness is not a material thing (and therefore we cannot "find" it, and thus cannot be "known") 2 is the weirder proposition of course. It asserts a category of things that can't be conceived, but of course it feels…

2 is only weirder if you don't already accept non-material reality, i.e. the proposition There exist real things that are not themselves composed of matter and/or energy.

That's crossing into metaphysics, which isn't usually a welcome topic here, but the fact remains that more than 80% of the current and prior world population believes/believed in a non-material reality.

The persistence and stickiness of that belief throughout history ought to at least make us sit up and pay attention. Something's going on, and it's not a mere historic lack of scientific rigor, notwithstanding science's penchant for filling gaps people previously attributed to spiritual causes. That near-universal reflex to attribute things to spiritual causes in the first place is what's interesting - why do people not merely say the cause is "something physical we don't understand"?

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

#62

Post by polotics »

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…

there are many possible points eg. for example what happens if you rephrase your solution 2 by swapping the terms?

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

#64

Post by ReadEvalPost »

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…

I've tried to explain this paper to people in similar circumstances and have also struggled!

In my mind the key point of departure between this paper and the more standard computational functionalist approaches is the importance of metabolism. Metabolism _precedes_ organism. The body is first deeply entangled with the environment through exchanges of resources (content causality) before it is capable of building computers (vehicle causality). Having built and alphabetized the world we can understand them in terms of discrete state transitions.

I expect my explanations have been unsatisfying as we can immediately move to seeing metabolism as some alphabetized input/output system that can be immediately placed back into the computational framework. Moving outside of this framework requires engaging with the enactivist/organicist traditions, which is a rich but minority view.

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

#65

Post by chistev »

But what is consciousness?

The popular evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has said that the biggest unsolved mystery in Biology is - what is consciousness and why did it emerge?

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

"Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex 'lifelike' behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even 'predicting' or 'anticipating' them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, 'feed-forward', and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe."

WHY DID CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGE?

He speculates that consciousness must have been a product of our ancestors having to create a model of the world in which they inhabited.

To be able to think ahead (even if it's just one step into the future), and plan for eventualities must have led to the development of consciousness which gradually improved from its primitive form to the type of consciousness we now have.

"Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be 'self awareness', but I don't find this a fully satisfying explanation of the evolution of consciousness, and this is only partly because it involves an infinite regress-if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model...?"

The quoted passages are from his book, The Selfish Gene.

Richard regards consciousness as a really great puzzle.

https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by exitb »

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…

> Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something.

An illusion is a misinterpretation, which implies an observer. Who’s the observer then?

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

#69

Post by iterateoften »

exitb wrote: post #67
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…

> Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something. An illusion is a misinterpretation, which implies an observer. Who’s the observer then?

The next loop

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

#70

Post by brotchie »

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…

Originally rejected the paper premise, but I get it now, certainly made me question my belief that consciousness binds to any arbitrary information processing that's of sufficient complexity.

IIUC the author is saying that the human brain is running directly on "layer zero": chemical gradients / voltage changes, while AI computes on an abstraction one layer higher (binary bit flips over discretized dyanmics).

In essence, our brains are running directly on the "continuous" physical dynamics of the universe, while AI is running on a discretization of this (we're essentially discretizing the physical dynamics and to create state changes of 0 -> 1, 1 -> 0).

My currently belief is that consciousness is some kind of field or property of the universe (i.e. a universal consciousness field) that "binds" to whatever information processing happens in our wet ware. If you've done intense meditation / psychedelics, there's this moment when it becomes obvious that you are only "you" due to some kind of universal consciousness's binding to your memory and sensory inputs.

The "consciousness arises from information processing," i.e. the consciousness field binds to certain information processing patterns, can still hold, and yet not apply to AI (at least in its current form): The binding properties may only apply to continuous processes running directly on the universe's dynamics, and NOT to simulations running on discretized dynamics.

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