The article uses the term "feeling" here to discuss two very different concepts:
B-Feelings: Behavioral feelings (BFs). This is an understanding of "feelings" as functional states in the brain. This is, in principle, entirely externally discoverable. An alien neuroscientist can know about my BFs far better than I ever could. This is because I know almost nothing about my brain's functional organization through introspection.
P-Feelings: Phenomenal feelings (PFs). This is an understanding of "feelings" as felt-experiences. This is the aspects of our experience that evade description such as the taste of mint, the smell of coffee, etc. I cannot tell my colorblind friend what the PF of seeing red is like. Nor can she discover it by examining my neurology. For the same reason, it's hard to say if we can ever know if some LLM experiences PFs.
If we somehow find a perfect mapping of BFs -> PFs by doing both neuroscience and asking people about their PFs, this data would be neutral on what some call "the hard problem of consciousness". It wouldn't tell us whether systems like LLMs that lack relevantly similar BFs to us are conscious. Nor why some BFs have associated PFs at all.
All philosophers of mind think there's an ideal mapping of BFs -> PFs[1] discoverable in principle. This won't help us make any progress at all on "the hard problem" (as the problem is currently understood.) If you want to know exactly why the problem is seemingly intractable or why BF -> PF mappings don't help, check out my comment here.
[1] Note that some think PFs either don't exist, or our reports about PFs are due to the way we form concepts about our experiences. They may reject BF -> PF mappings insofar as they reject that PFs refer to anything at all. In this case, understand the mappings as BF -> PF reports.
Just as an aside -- since I agree with your comment, and appreciate your shared insight into these conversations! -- I find the notion of finding the "consciousness centre" of the brain to be terribly amusing. Afaik, most of what we know about neurology comes from people being horrifically injured, animals being horrifically injured, or fMRI studies, so the logical implication of finding the "consciousness lobe" would be that one could simply sever it to create an unfeeling zombie. Which seems unlikely, but also a premise that Black Mirror should examine đ
(iirc someone here wrote a short story about a similar topic, earlier)
Of course, the idea that consciousness requires intelligence might be pre-AI thinking. As that assumption has begun to weaken, researchers have become increasingly willing to consider the possibility that subjective experience arises from evolutionarily older structures deep within the brain.
Was it ever a widespread view that consciousness requires intelligence?
If so, I would just like to plant my flag and say that I have always been on team "Consciousness and intelligence are not directly related".
If this starts to become a consensus, I do have to wonder what it will do to peoples' views on veganism.
You might enjoy this article from Quanta Magazine.
I'll just excerpt this quote with which I wholeheartedly agree:
We have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.
Anil Seth, University of Sussex
Not that I stake the notion of being compassionate to animals on the question of their consciousness. I think we should be kind to animals, not because they have conciousness, but because I believe that we do and a consciousness that has no place for kindness and compassion is worse than none at all.
I'm not saying you're definitely wrongâconsciousness is a mystery, and I have very few certain ideas about itâbut, like, you have subjective experience, right? Because, as far as I'm concerned, "consciousness" is basically just a synonym for "subjective experience".
We are confronted with the peculiar fact that there seems to be something happening from the inside. What is it? Why do I see 'red' instead of a mixture of wavelengths? Why do I hear 'music' instead of a cacophony of sounds? Why when reading do I stop seeing the text as word after word and instead drift off into another world? Those are my 'subjective experiences' of the world around me, and they are mine alone, no one else can ever know them, I can never explain them to anyone else.
Pattern matching. That's it. We are just rather excellent pattern matching machines that ascribe a label to patterns. That's not consciousness or a soul, that's just an accumulation of perceived and expected patterns.
What is your definition of consciousness? If you were to suspend your disbelief, and say that we were in fact conscious (using your definition), what would be the difference in our everyday experience?
In a philisophical/quantum definition to me, consciousness is reliant on a concept of a 'self', a near ominopotent dictator or orchestrator that has complete power and ability to pick and choose directives based on pure willpower on it's own merits, without care or reason for previous knowledge. This just can't exist in my view, we are bound by the laws of physics and a general consensus model of reality.
In a medical sense, it means to be able to actively consume patterns (including the pattern that is the collection of patterns that is defined as 'you').
Day to day though? Doesn't really matter either way, we're all just vibrations, philosophy is a drag existentially but it's cool to ruminate on from time to time. I do think if people thought more about their apparent patterns then lives would be made better as it seperates the failures and success of others and the self down to indivudalized, yet aggregated, patterns of data.
consciousness is reliant on a concept of a 'self', a near ominopotent dictator or orchestrator that has complete power and ability to pick and choose directives based on pure willpower on it's own merits, without care or reason for previous knowledge.
This is really just 'free will' and I'm not sure that 'consciousness' and free will are the same thing, Consciousness for me is that I am having a subjective experience "I think therefore I am" kind of thing. I have an inner world that feels like 'me' and no one else can see into that world. I think Consciousness can exist with or without 'free will'
I've struggled deeply with the ideas of 'free will'. I believe fully in a deterministic universe and logically if you think that through then free will probably doesn't exist. But my brain completely rejects this, I cannot accept it whatsoever and I refuse to believe we do not have some kind of 'free will'. The idea that we don't is so heinous (the idea that morality doesn't exist and no one has ever made a moral choice in their lives and that I personally who have tried my best to live an honest life and treat people around me well is really no different than being child molester is totally unacceptable to what it means to be human for me. It's too nihilistic, I'm with Dostoevsky on this one, nihilism is the destroyer of man. We have to reject it.
I consider myself a 'Compatibilist' when it comes to 'free will'. Maybe there is something there in Godel's 'Incompleteness Theorems', even a completely deterministic system has outcomes that cannot be predicted or known. I don't have any real answers, it's one of the great mysteries of life.
Apologies, I'm not what definition of free will you're working with, so it's hard to comment much, but I'm not sure how lacking it would necessarily preclude the existence of morality ... put differently, how would one even distinguish between a free and not free choice? A lot of our lives are not perfectly under control -- much as I will it, I can't change some fundamental facts about my life, or my world -- but I chose what I had for lunch (of a limited selection of what was available in the pantry).
I feel that if we truly have no free will then you have never made any decision in your life, no one has, and every thought and action anyone has ever performed was already determined at the moment of the big bang. It means we are all just billiard balls, nothing but the result of physical actions that came before.
Aah, gotcha! Not that I expect this to be convincing, so instead -- in case it's interesting (and you wish to discuss further) -- I'd like to share how I've come to think of this? Although please feel free to ignore it, as matters such as these are often quite near and dear, and I don't want to assume to critique your position -- just wanted to talk about my own as it's the general topic of discussion atm.
So, thought experiment: is it actually, like, possible to predict the billiards balls, or is it so cosmically beyond us as not to be of import to us mortals? For instance, it's impossible to know both the position and momentum of individual atomic particles, as the measurement of one necessarily affects the other. That's probably meaningless on a day to day basis, but at the scale of the universe, it adds up! And even if it were possible, the raw power necessary to simulate a second universe faster than the first (in order to predict its behaviour) feels unlikely to exist.
Thus, if prediction is mathematically possible, but both technically and theoretically impossible, is there a meaningful distinction between a universe where predetermination exists but we can never know it, and a universe where humans have free will (ie some sort of extra-physical willpower force)? If one's perception of one's actions is that they are chosen of their own volition, and it is effectively impossible to prove otherwise, the question feels moot.
(as you note though it opens the possibility that humans we perceive of as monstrous are such, not due to their own desires or choices, but due to circumstances outside their control. And tbh that conclusion is what drives my morality and empathy, since the desire -- if not the means or ability -- to better ourselves seems intrinsic. And supporting that feels morally good)
Oh, don't worry I am no believer in 'hard determinism' I'm a 'compatibilist' which says that yes, we do live in a deterministic universe AND we still have free will. Godel's Incompleteness theorems have shown us that even in deterministic systems all outcomes cannot be known or predicted. We know that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that is not possible to know both the position and speed of even a single particle in the universe which would be required to make the predictions and that is fundamental to our knowledge of physics, not a problem that we can ever 'solve'.
Then there is what you argue that even if there was no true free-will our experience of life would be exactly the same, so what does it matter and maybe the entire argument is silly. I think I can get behind this as well, but I would much prefer we have 'real' free-will of some kind.
It may be that I'm not understanding some of the nuance you're thinking of when you're describing patterns, but I don't see how desire fits into your conception of being a pattern matching machine (I did look your comments below as well where you kind of touch on this, though not directly). For base level things like "I feel hungry (sensory input) so I should eat (output decision)" I can understand what you mean. But for abstract desires like wanting to do activities that are personally fulfilling and/or larger than oneself (art, music, potentially long term goal seeking), pattern matching feels like too simple of a model for consciousness.
I think pattern matching is not quite the correct term.
Think of how we understand AI works â high dimensional structures emerge in the neural relationships that can e.g. provide the ability to reason based on past experiences. I donât think itâs 1:1 or anything but I think itâs a strong hint that weâre on the right track to understanding how our brains work and how we evolved.
(just as an interjection -- since neural networks are universal function approximators, one could reasonably expect them to approximate the outward behaviour of any function, including that of the human brain, but also like climate systems, graphics rendering pipelines, video game matchmaking algos, etc. It feels like drawing a conclusion about the structure of any of those modelled systems from the architecture of a neural network would either speak to a similarity that underlies all of them, or that it's spurious. Imo tho)
Aah, understood! So I think the goal of any theory of consciousness is to model it at an abstract level: to be able to make testable claims about it, and to reasonably model all existing behaviour for it. Furthermore, an ideal model should be simpler (for some definition of simplicity) than a competing model.
From that perspective -- although we can both agree that it's all just math in the end! -- I expect that the pursuit of a "theory of consciousness" (so to speak) is not incompatible with the notion that we're squishy computers in the end? Just that that model is more complex and less predictive than most proposed models of consciousness (although I'll carve out the ones which believe all things in the universe -- rocks, stars, hydrogen gas -- are conscious. That one ... doesn't predict much).
I just don't think we'll ever get to a point we can make testable claims about what is essentially a subjective experience. My suspicion is that it's an emergent property of having enough neurons connected together that form highly abstract relationships, emerging gradually from the time we are in utero and continuing through to the early toddler stage. (newborns being perhaps 80-90% of the way there?) This is just my own gut feelings from watching my kids grow up, not remotely scientific. :P
I imagine a sufficiently advanced and large AI will also be conscious, but perhaps in a very different way?
Oh, also agreed that it's (probably) an emergent property! I think I joked as much in a different comment here; the idea that a single section of the brain is the "seat of consciousness" seems as though it does not pass the sniff test.
However, as a counterpoint! As far as I understand it, all of physics is an emergent property of some universal parameters (fine structure constant, relative strength of the weak vs strong nuclear forces, etc.), and we're working on the formulae which fall out from that (although a grand universal theory is still beyond us). Chemistry is a further emergent property of physics, in that complex reactions can occur between atoms in particular environments -- and speaking of which, biology could be seen as an emergent field from chemistry. And so on and so forth.
So I don't feel that emergence necessarily precludes prediction, but I'm not a scientific philosopher, therefore that's an uneducated opinion đ personally, I agree that we're unlikely to stumble over a theory of consciousness that is predictive, but we've figured out stranger things? So I feel that it's difficult to rule out out of hand.
The senses themselves accumulate the world around us through biderectional feedback, and by using previously perceived patterns we create aggregated patterns as larger more monolithic patterns, which may be further combined or segmented or used in other stored patterns. Sounds, smells, touch, sight, are all patterns that are an accumulation of thousands of patterns that are defined by their relation to different data points.
The 'self' in itself is just a bottom-up collection of previously perceived patterns that are variously built on one another accumulating independently of each pattern to aide in other pattern generalizations. A decent example would be that "memories" are not a monolith, but instead a "memory" of an event is just a collection of known patterns that were independently developed, then grouped as a new pattern based on a build-up of hundreds of other modular patterns.
Nothing really 'perceives' these patterns, they are just patterns on patterns grouped by associated senses and historical data. There is nothing that "perceives" them because nothing is really an orchestrator. You can think of it as a hivemind of the body if that helps.
Muscles, brains, cells, they all store individual datum that work together to generate patterns, various muscles in the body, or in the brain, have the ability to store larger patterns for recreation (the ability to bend an elbow, requires the usage of the collective muscle tissues, which in turn know how to control the cells, which in turn is powered by energy reserves, is all one pattern that is stored centrally in the brain, that delegates the pattern action and knowledge of the downstream patterns).
If it helps, the brain is centrally a database or jumptable for the patterns "owned" or known by the other modifiers on the system (arms, muscles, cells). The all just act on patterns that were developed and defined in a workflow.
The same way there is no prime orchestrator for the universe, there is no prime orchestrator for the self, ie no consciousness.
Think of it this way: You have a coin, you flip it, you place a cloth on top of it. You have no idea what it is, but collectively the universe has determined it's orientation, even if there was no direct orchestrator. The various laws of physics (patterns of physics), all of history leading up to it (the patterns of time), the air pressure, the fabrication of the coin, the movements that moved it, they all have worked in consensus to define the 'decision' of what the present point of the coins, being heads up or down, is defined by a consensus model of reality built on patterns that were perceived by all items in the known universe. This is my modified version of the wine glass thought experiment (the name escapes me, will update once it comes to me) that I find helps define what I mean.
I have to agree with u/plutonic that your idea of consciousness would better be described as free will. My actions and experience may very well be, and I believe are, just the result of a series of physical phenomena. However, these all cause a subjective experience to arise. I experience this illusion, so what would you call that other than consciousness? Even if you have the idea that "all items in the known universe" are having this illusory experience rather than a separate individual, that would still be consciousness.
Damn, what a bummer. Sorry you had to find out this way. :(
I think it is called 'narrative transportation'. I listed it because it's one of those deeply personal subjective experiences that is hard to describe.
Q: may I ask what your definition of consciousness is? For example, do you define it in contrast to another state (e.g. unconsciousness, inebriatedness, etc.), as a set of positive traits (e.g. responsiveness to external stimuli, complexity of behaviour, recognition of self in a mirror, etc.), your internal experiences (e.g. a personal narration of events, the sensation of existence, etc.), ...?
If you've already explained yourself elsewhere I could poke through your comment history, but I always feel like a voyeur by doing so without permission đ
I answered most of this in other replies, sorry! Check out the parent comment of mine and see there, I love talking about this because it's such an interesting conversation and I have yet to found anyone who agrees with me, which is fine, people tend to get defensive when I discuss how 'you' don't exist and that the idea of a 'consciousness' is just an easy "pattern" yor the mind to fall back to in the face of existence.
np np! I read through your response to PegalusSeptim; thank you for the quick summary! I rather enjoy this field as well, but it's been a while since I had a good debate about it :3
Fwiw, I totally agree with the subset of your take, which is that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon: we're not embodied by some mystical life force granting personhood, as distinct from all other creatures on Earth. That said, maybe I have some slight disagreements with some portrayals of the proposed method by which consciousness arises? In particular:
it seems like it might have a tough time describing attention? We appear to have a limit to the number of patterns that can be attended to at a given time, which implies that some sort of perceiver/processing bottleneck must exist. For example: it's possible to overload people with stimuli that would, individually, be tolerable (e.g. task them to perform a visual task, then an auditory task, then both simultaneously. Then, have them do the simultaneous task, but only attend to a single type of stimuli. Relative results should near universally be worse for the combined task than either individual task, and the focused attention task should land in the middle);
broadly, language seems difficult to encode as a lookup table? People seem capable of producing effectively unique (in all of history -- choose any 6-gram from my comment and it should hopefully be unique đ ), well structured, nearly infinite output -- which seems like it would imply an infinite size lookup table, or else, a thought process more complex than a simple, one pass query-response system. Er, the latter implying that consciousness could be hiding there;
I might've missed something, but I'm not sure it touches upon how the intuitive notion of selfhood and consciousness seem to have arisen so frequently throughout history? That we seem to have notions of experience and an internal world, and whatnot.
Phew that was a bit longer than I intended XD it's a fun subject, but I appear to have blown my evening re-reading the Wikipedia article on consciousness to attempt to contribute to the conversation. It's a girthy article, but there's a bunch of good work in there by philosophers of old! ... by which apparently I mean the 80s ...
I'd note that my fav from back in the day (Global Workspace Theory) is still around, so if you're interested in reading about an alternative perspective, it would do a better job of explaining it than I!
This is a general, pop science type overview of some of the things that are happening in the study of consciousness. Nothing too deep or academic, but I thought a pleasant enough read worth sharing nonetheless.
I think my views on consciousness and AI have changed a lot in related ways in the past several years.
Thinking in a loop on some set of inputs at a sufficient level is going to mimic consciousness to the point I think differentiating human vs an AGI consciousness to be a foolâs errand akin to proving the existence of a soul. I was also initially in the camp of â I donât think the current implementations of AI are a path to consciousness or equivalentâ and I think I was also mistaken about that as well.
RNG | a day ago
The article uses the term "feeling" here to discuss two very different concepts:
B-Feelings: Behavioral feelings (BFs). This is an understanding of "feelings" as functional states in the brain. This is, in principle, entirely externally discoverable. An alien neuroscientist can know about my BFs far better than I ever could. This is because I know almost nothing about my brain's functional organization through introspection.
P-Feelings: Phenomenal feelings (PFs). This is an understanding of "feelings" as felt-experiences. This is the aspects of our experience that evade description such as the taste of mint, the smell of coffee, etc. I cannot tell my colorblind friend what the PF of seeing red is like. Nor can she discover it by examining my neurology. For the same reason, it's hard to say if we can ever know if some LLM experiences PFs.
If we somehow find a perfect mapping of BFs -> PFs by doing both neuroscience and asking people about their PFs, this data would be neutral on what some call "the hard problem of consciousness". It wouldn't tell us whether systems like LLMs that lack relevantly similar BFs to us are conscious. Nor why some BFs have associated PFs at all.
All philosophers of mind think there's an ideal mapping of BFs -> PFs[1] discoverable in principle. This won't help us make any progress at all on "the hard problem" (as the problem is currently understood.) If you want to know exactly why the problem is seemingly intractable or why BF -> PF mappings don't help, check out my comment here.
[1] Note that some think PFs either don't exist, or our reports about PFs are due to the way we form concepts about our experiences. They may reject BF -> PF mappings insofar as they reject that PFs refer to anything at all. In this case, understand the mappings as BF -> PF reports.
kacey | 20 hours ago
Just as an aside -- since I agree with your comment, and appreciate your shared insight into these conversations! -- I find the notion of finding the "consciousness centre" of the brain to be terribly amusing. Afaik, most of what we know about neurology comes from people being horrifically injured, animals being horrifically injured, or fMRI studies, so the logical implication of finding the "consciousness lobe" would be that one could simply sever it to create an unfeeling zombie. Which seems unlikely, but also a premise that Black Mirror should examine đ
(iirc someone here wrote a short story about a similar topic, earlier)
heraplem | a day ago
Was it ever a widespread view that consciousness requires intelligence?
If so, I would just like to plant my flag and say that I have always been on team "Consciousness and intelligence are not directly related".
If this starts to become a consensus, I do have to wonder what it will do to peoples' views on veganism.
carsonc | a day ago
You might enjoy this article from Quanta Magazine.
I'll just excerpt this quote with which I wholeheartedly agree:
Not that I stake the notion of being compassionate to animals on the question of their consciousness. I think we should be kind to animals, not because they have conciousness, but because I believe that we do and a consciousness that has no place for kindness and compassion is worse than none at all.
RNG | an hour ago
Or babies, young children, and the mentally impaired, which are less intelligent than many non-human members of the animal kingdom.
macleod | a day ago
I've said it before, but my stance has always been that consciousness does not exist.
In my view it's just a rationalist, or secular, continuance of the concept of a "soul" and in general it just does not exist.
heraplem | a day ago
I'm not saying you're definitely wrongâconsciousness is a mystery, and I have very few certain ideas about itâbut, like, you have subjective experience, right? Because, as far as I'm concerned, "consciousness" is basically just a synonym for "subjective experience".
plutonic | a day ago
We are confronted with the peculiar fact that there seems to be something happening from the inside. What is it? Why do I see 'red' instead of a mixture of wavelengths? Why do I hear 'music' instead of a cacophony of sounds? Why when reading do I stop seeing the text as word after word and instead drift off into another world? Those are my 'subjective experiences' of the world around me, and they are mine alone, no one else can ever know them, I can never explain them to anyone else.
macleod | 20 hours ago
Pattern matching. That's it. We are just rather excellent pattern matching machines that ascribe a label to patterns. That's not consciousness or a soul, that's just an accumulation of perceived and expected patterns.
plutonic | 20 hours ago
What is your definition of consciousness? If you were to suspend your disbelief, and say that we were in fact conscious (using your definition), what would be the difference in our everyday experience?
macleod | 16 hours ago
In a philisophical/quantum definition to me, consciousness is reliant on a concept of a 'self', a near ominopotent dictator or orchestrator that has complete power and ability to pick and choose directives based on pure willpower on it's own merits, without care or reason for previous knowledge. This just can't exist in my view, we are bound by the laws of physics and a general consensus model of reality.
In a medical sense, it means to be able to actively consume patterns (including the pattern that is the collection of patterns that is defined as 'you').
Might be important to read this reply I just left.
Day to day though? Doesn't really matter either way, we're all just vibrations, philosophy is a drag existentially but it's cool to ruminate on from time to time. I do think if people thought more about their apparent patterns then lives would be made better as it seperates the failures and success of others and the self down to indivudalized, yet aggregated, patterns of data.
plutonic | 15 hours ago
This is really just 'free will' and I'm not sure that 'consciousness' and free will are the same thing, Consciousness for me is that I am having a subjective experience "I think therefore I am" kind of thing. I have an inner world that feels like 'me' and no one else can see into that world. I think Consciousness can exist with or without 'free will'
I've struggled deeply with the ideas of 'free will'. I believe fully in a deterministic universe and logically if you think that through then free will probably doesn't exist. But my brain completely rejects this, I cannot accept it whatsoever and I refuse to believe we do not have some kind of 'free will'. The idea that we don't is so heinous (the idea that morality doesn't exist and no one has ever made a moral choice in their lives and that I personally who have tried my best to live an honest life and treat people around me well is really no different than being child molester is totally unacceptable to what it means to be human for me. It's too nihilistic, I'm with Dostoevsky on this one, nihilism is the destroyer of man. We have to reject it.
I consider myself a 'Compatibilist' when it comes to 'free will'. Maybe there is something there in Godel's 'Incompleteness Theorems', even a completely deterministic system has outcomes that cannot be predicted or known. I don't have any real answers, it's one of the great mysteries of life.
kacey | 11 hours ago
(interjecting; apologies)
Apologies, I'm not what definition of free will you're working with, so it's hard to comment much, but I'm not sure how lacking it would necessarily preclude the existence of morality ... put differently, how would one even distinguish between a free and not free choice? A lot of our lives are not perfectly under control -- much as I will it, I can't change some fundamental facts about my life, or my world -- but I chose what I had for lunch (of a limited selection of what was available in the pantry).
plutonic | 3 hours ago
I feel that if we truly have no free will then you have never made any decision in your life, no one has, and every thought and action anyone has ever performed was already determined at the moment of the big bang. It means we are all just billiard balls, nothing but the result of physical actions that came before.
This would be 'hard determinism' and I reject it.
kacey | 3 hours ago
Aah, gotcha! Not that I expect this to be convincing, so instead -- in case it's interesting (and you wish to discuss further) -- I'd like to share how I've come to think of this? Although please feel free to ignore it, as matters such as these are often quite near and dear, and I don't want to assume to critique your position -- just wanted to talk about my own as it's the general topic of discussion atm.
So, thought experiment: is it actually, like, possible to predict the billiards balls, or is it so cosmically beyond us as not to be of import to us mortals? For instance, it's impossible to know both the position and momentum of individual atomic particles, as the measurement of one necessarily affects the other. That's probably meaningless on a day to day basis, but at the scale of the universe, it adds up! And even if it were possible, the raw power necessary to simulate a second universe faster than the first (in order to predict its behaviour) feels unlikely to exist.
Thus, if prediction is mathematically possible, but both technically and theoretically impossible, is there a meaningful distinction between a universe where predetermination exists but we can never know it, and a universe where humans have free will (ie some sort of extra-physical willpower force)? If one's perception of one's actions is that they are chosen of their own volition, and it is effectively impossible to prove otherwise, the question feels moot.
(as you note though it opens the possibility that humans we perceive of as monstrous are such, not due to their own desires or choices, but due to circumstances outside their control. And tbh that conclusion is what drives my morality and empathy, since the desire -- if not the means or ability -- to better ourselves seems intrinsic. And supporting that feels morally good)
plutonic | 3 hours ago
Oh, don't worry I am no believer in 'hard determinism' I'm a 'compatibilist' which says that yes, we do live in a deterministic universe AND we still have free will. Godel's Incompleteness theorems have shown us that even in deterministic systems all outcomes cannot be known or predicted. We know that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that is not possible to know both the position and speed of even a single particle in the universe which would be required to make the predictions and that is fundamental to our knowledge of physics, not a problem that we can ever 'solve'.
Then there is what you argue that even if there was no true free-will our experience of life would be exactly the same, so what does it matter and maybe the entire argument is silly. I think I can get behind this as well, but I would much prefer we have 'real' free-will of some kind.
kacey | 2 hours ago
Makes sense! I'd just upvote and nod in agreement, but it always feels awkward to do so đ
Englerdy | 4 hours ago
It may be that I'm not understanding some of the nuance you're thinking of when you're describing patterns, but I don't see how desire fits into your conception of being a pattern matching machine (I did look your comments below as well where you kind of touch on this, though not directly). For base level things like "I feel hungry (sensory input) so I should eat (output decision)" I can understand what you mean. But for abstract desires like wanting to do activities that are personally fulfilling and/or larger than oneself (art, music, potentially long term goal seeking), pattern matching feels like too simple of a model for consciousness.
streblo | 3 hours ago
I think pattern matching is not quite the correct term.
Think of how we understand AI works â high dimensional structures emerge in the neural relationships that can e.g. provide the ability to reason based on past experiences. I donât think itâs 1:1 or anything but I think itâs a strong hint that weâre on the right track to understanding how our brains work and how we evolved.
kacey | 3 hours ago
(just as an interjection -- since neural networks are universal function approximators, one could reasonably expect them to approximate the outward behaviour of any function, including that of the human brain, but also like climate systems, graphics rendering pipelines, video game matchmaking algos, etc. It feels like drawing a conclusion about the structure of any of those modelled systems from the architecture of a neural network would either speak to a similarity that underlies all of them, or that it's spurious. Imo tho)
streblo | 3 hours ago
I think that's kind of my point: we're just piles of gooey math that can be approximated by a neural network :P
kacey | 2 hours ago
Aah, understood! So I think the goal of any theory of consciousness is to model it at an abstract level: to be able to make testable claims about it, and to reasonably model all existing behaviour for it. Furthermore, an ideal model should be simpler (for some definition of simplicity) than a competing model.
From that perspective -- although we can both agree that it's all just math in the end! -- I expect that the pursuit of a "theory of consciousness" (so to speak) is not incompatible with the notion that we're squishy computers in the end? Just that that model is more complex and less predictive than most proposed models of consciousness (although I'll carve out the ones which believe all things in the universe -- rocks, stars, hydrogen gas -- are conscious. That one ... doesn't predict much).
streblo | 2 hours ago
I just don't think we'll ever get to a point we can make testable claims about what is essentially a subjective experience. My suspicion is that it's an emergent property of having enough neurons connected together that form highly abstract relationships, emerging gradually from the time we are in utero and continuing through to the early toddler stage. (newborns being perhaps 80-90% of the way there?) This is just my own gut feelings from watching my kids grow up, not remotely scientific. :P
I imagine a sufficiently advanced and large AI will also be conscious, but perhaps in a very different way?
kacey | 2 hours ago
Oh, also agreed that it's (probably) an emergent property! I think I joked as much in a different comment here; the idea that a single section of the brain is the "seat of consciousness" seems as though it does not pass the sniff test.
However, as a counterpoint! As far as I understand it, all of physics is an emergent property of some universal parameters (fine structure constant, relative strength of the weak vs strong nuclear forces, etc.), and we're working on the formulae which fall out from that (although a grand universal theory is still beyond us). Chemistry is a further emergent property of physics, in that complex reactions can occur between atoms in particular environments -- and speaking of which, biology could be seen as an emergent field from chemistry. And so on and so forth.
So I don't feel that emergence necessarily precludes prediction, but I'm not a scientific philosopher, therefore that's an uneducated opinion đ personally, I agree that we're unlikely to stumble over a theory of consciousness that is predictive, but we've figured out stranger things? So I feel that it's difficult to rule out out of hand.
PelagiusSeptim | 18 hours ago
What do you mean when you say perceived? What perceives these patterns?
macleod | 16 hours ago
The senses themselves accumulate the world around us through biderectional feedback, and by using previously perceived patterns we create aggregated patterns as larger more monolithic patterns, which may be further combined or segmented or used in other stored patterns. Sounds, smells, touch, sight, are all patterns that are an accumulation of thousands of patterns that are defined by their relation to different data points.
The 'self' in itself is just a bottom-up collection of previously perceived patterns that are variously built on one another accumulating independently of each pattern to aide in other pattern generalizations. A decent example would be that "memories" are not a monolith, but instead a "memory" of an event is just a collection of known patterns that were independently developed, then grouped as a new pattern based on a build-up of hundreds of other modular patterns.
Nothing really 'perceives' these patterns, they are just patterns on patterns grouped by associated senses and historical data. There is nothing that "perceives" them because nothing is really an orchestrator. You can think of it as a hivemind of the body if that helps.
Muscles, brains, cells, they all store individual datum that work together to generate patterns, various muscles in the body, or in the brain, have the ability to store larger patterns for recreation (the ability to bend an elbow, requires the usage of the collective muscle tissues, which in turn know how to control the cells, which in turn is powered by energy reserves, is all one pattern that is stored centrally in the brain, that delegates the pattern action and knowledge of the downstream patterns).
If it helps, the brain is centrally a database or jumptable for the patterns "owned" or known by the other modifiers on the system (arms, muscles, cells). The all just act on patterns that were developed and defined in a workflow.
The same way there is no prime orchestrator for the universe, there is no prime orchestrator for the self, ie no consciousness.
Think of it this way: You have a coin, you flip it, you place a cloth on top of it. You have no idea what it is, but collectively the universe has determined it's orientation, even if there was no direct orchestrator. The various laws of physics (patterns of physics), all of history leading up to it (the patterns of time), the air pressure, the fabrication of the coin, the movements that moved it, they all have worked in consensus to define the 'decision' of what the present point of the coins, being heads up or down, is defined by a consensus model of reality built on patterns that were perceived by all items in the known universe. This is my modified version of the wine glass thought experiment (the name escapes me, will update once it comes to me) that I find helps define what I mean.
PelagiusSeptim | 15 hours ago
I have to agree with u/plutonic that your idea of consciousness would better be described as free will. My actions and experience may very well be, and I believe are, just the result of a series of physical phenomena. However, these all cause a subjective experience to arise. I experience this illusion, so what would you call that other than consciousness? Even if you have the idea that "all items in the known universe" are having this illusory experience rather than a separate individual, that would still be consciousness.
updawg | 12 hours ago
I guess I'm not conscious :(
plutonic | 12 hours ago
Damn, what a bummer. Sorry you had to find out this way. :(
I think it is called 'narrative transportation'. I listed it because it's one of those deeply personal subjective experiences that is hard to describe.
kacey | 20 hours ago
Q: may I ask what your definition of consciousness is? For example, do you define it in contrast to another state (e.g. unconsciousness, inebriatedness, etc.), as a set of positive traits (e.g. responsiveness to external stimuli, complexity of behaviour, recognition of self in a mirror, etc.), your internal experiences (e.g. a personal narration of events, the sensation of existence, etc.), ...?
If you've already explained yourself elsewhere I could poke through your comment history, but I always feel like a voyeur by doing so without permission đ
macleod | 16 hours ago
I answered most of this in other replies, sorry! Check out the parent comment of mine and see there, I love talking about this because it's such an interesting conversation and I have yet to found anyone who agrees with me, which is fine, people tend to get defensive when I discuss how 'you' don't exist and that the idea of a 'consciousness' is just an easy "pattern" yor the mind to fall back to in the face of existence.
kacey | 15 hours ago
np np! I read through your response to PegalusSeptim; thank you for the quick summary! I rather enjoy this field as well, but it's been a while since I had a good debate about it :3
Fwiw, I totally agree with the subset of your take, which is that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon: we're not embodied by some mystical life force granting personhood, as distinct from all other creatures on Earth. That said, maybe I have some slight disagreements with some portrayals of the proposed method by which consciousness arises? In particular:
Phew that was a bit longer than I intended XD it's a fun subject, but I appear to have blown my evening re-reading the Wikipedia article on consciousness to attempt to contribute to the conversation. It's a girthy article, but there's a bunch of good work in there by philosophers of old! ... by which apparently I mean the 80s ...
I'd note that my fav from back in the day (Global Workspace Theory) is still around, so if you're interested in reading about an alternative perspective, it would do a better job of explaining it than I!
[OP] vili | a day ago
This is a general, pop science type overview of some of the things that are happening in the study of consciousness. Nothing too deep or academic, but I thought a pleasant enough read worth sharing nonetheless.
streblo | 17 hours ago
I think my views on consciousness and AI have changed a lot in related ways in the past several years.
Thinking in a loop on some set of inputs at a sufficient level is going to mimic consciousness to the point I think differentiating human vs an AGI consciousness to be a foolâs errand akin to proving the existence of a soul. I was also initially in the camp of â I donât think the current implementations of AI are a path to consciousness or equivalentâ and I think I was also mistaken about that as well.