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If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

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Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#61

Post by josh-sematic »

indigo945 wrote: post #42
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #39

A very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads. My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device. Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.

> And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate > physical manifestation - rather than being merely a > rhetorical device. Denial of Qualia has long been an outlier position in the philosophy of mind, so this is not altogether surprising. (This is saying nothing, of course, about whether it is true or not.)

I don’t know that I’d call it that much of an outlier position. Compatibilists, functionalists, and plenty of physicalists in general would deny that qualia exist or that they’re a well-defined notion.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#62

Post by tmvphil »

I appreciate the article, even though I disagree. The number of people who are absolutely certain of their position is just way too high.

Anyway, I do think the heart of the practical question is what distinctions between machine / human / other biological intelligences are critical versus incidental. In this article the meat of the argument comes only right at the end

> Digital computers employ signal quantisation along with a variety of other error prevention methods in order to neutralise holistic physical effects like crosstalk between circuits. The purpose of digital logic is to make computational output invariant to the underlying physics – up to some thermal noise floor. This discretises their behavioural space – perturb the electric field slightly and this shouldn’t flip any bits. This is great – this is what permits reliable, deterministic computing in a wide variety of physical environments. However, if what we are interested in is phenomenal introspection, these error prevention systems prevent the exact kind of holistic behaviour we value.

There could be something here, but I am not convinced. Why is "varies in behavior with respect to arbitrary perturbations" a critical feature of consciousness? And is this even true for brains? If a perturbation is small compared to a neural impulse, will it affect anything?

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#63

Post by perpetuallunch »

prmph wrote: post #49
eru wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably. But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

You are committing a type error. Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold

We can’t measure the temperature of consciousness like we can the temperature of simulated snow.

As you write consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, but it may, at least to some degree, we don’t know. We don’t have reliable methods of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, or even a rigorous and agreed upon set of metrics to measure.

Where as simulated snow is most certainly not real snow at all.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#64

Post by MrDrDr »

hannasanarion wrote: post #44
MrDrDr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes and no. In my opinion, consciousness is not a process (yes I think Descartes was wrong). The 'thing' that is conscious, whatever it is, is the thing that is capable of experiencing the world. It doesn't need to do anything else to be conscious. Panpsychism is the closest thing to anything that make sense to me ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism ). This view also makes it possible to separate consciousnes…

Sounds like you might also be tending towards Illusionism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi... ) the idea that "Consciousness" isn't a real "thing", or even a real property of a thing, just the name we give to one pattern that emerges from adaptive reasoning systems. I think that Illusionism and related philosophies will tend to be seen as "correct" once AI systems become more and more co…

I believe I am conscious and that consciousness is a thing. I just don't believe there is a process where 'unconscious' things become conscious. So Panpsychism is a bit of a cope out. It's not a verifiable in any scientific sense and so can't be disproved. You could say that it's therefore a 'folk psychology' or a religious belief. But at the fundamentals of any word view (scientific or otherwise) are axiomatic beliefs or articles of faith and I think consciousness is best off living down there.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#65

Post by criddell »

eru wrote: post #37
criddell wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the debate because I've learned a lot of stuff about consciousness, thinking, free will, determinism, agency, intelligence, emergence, problems with reductionism, qualia, etc... Lots of these concepts may be related but it might just be a correlation. For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).

Determinism is interesting. It's mostly a question of 'deterministic in what context'. Eg the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice. Similarly, algorithms are often analysed as if the antagonist that provides the data has free choice (so we assume the worst case to be sure). That's a very different non-determinism from assuming a probability distributions. And different frames might be accurat…

> the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice

How else could they be written?

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#66

Post by IshKebab »

ChrisGreenHeur wrote: post #56
IshKebab wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why though? There are only two reasonable reasons I can think of: 1. Scale. There's clearly a scale of consciousness (a jellyfish isn't very conscious but an ape is). Current LLMs are so small (on the scale of brains) that they must be not very conscious at all. 2. Structure. There might be some fundamental structure of computation that is required for consciousness that LLMs don't have yet. For example the ability t…

No matter how large the llm hardware is it won’t be made of brain meat. The stuff we actually know is conscious.

Even though we know brains are conscious it seems absurd to thing that there is some non-computational magic in the brain is the secret to consciousness.

There are some religious people who clutch at nonsense like quantum microtubules, but nobody has found anything real that would preclude pure computation from being conscious. (And yes that does have all sorts of mind-bending consequences.)

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#67

Post by eru »

prmph wrote: post #49
eru wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably. But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

You are committing a type error. Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold

I'm with Turing on this one.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#68

Post by eru »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #46
eru wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe? Yes, it is possible! See how a Quine is constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) As an analogy: you can have a zip archive that expands to itself. Or even more so: to itself (the simulation of itself in itself) plus something arbitrary (standing in for the rest…

There's also information in the compiler and the zip binary, without that I'm pretty sure it's not possible.

You can stick a full copy of the compiler and the zip binary into that archive, if you want to.

The 'intron' can be arbitrarily large.

You can add the complete schematics for your CPU. And the standard model of particle physics.

Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

#69

Post by amanaplanacanal »

elif wrote: post #12

I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…

Everybody wants to argue about whether machines are conscious, without even deciding whether other mammals are conscious.

My sense is that the whole machine consciousness debate really kicked off since LLMs started being able to spew out a bunch of words in a row that sound like they make sense. Since only humans could do that before now, and humans are conscious, therefore...

I don't think language has anything to do with consciousness.

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