It is probably just a difference in semantics but for me, it seems like consciousness is the only thing that is assuredly not an illusion.
That I am having a subjective experience is undeniable. The objects of my consciousness all might be (and probably are) something else than they appear to be (as is often the experience with different mind altering substances).
(I jest, you're preaching to the choir, i.e. a first year philosophy degree drop-out who switched to do computer science to avoid having these arguments)
And besides - there are also emotions and physical sensations.
When you actually pass out, there's a very real sense of discontinuity. You find yourself on the floor, unsure how long you've been there (even if it was just seconds), and how exactly you got to that position (the previous recorded memory being you standing there and feeling woozy).
It's very different from just sleeping, where you still retain a feeling of continuity with both place and time.
The claim that consciousness is an illusion has always seemed like nonsense to me; for, if consciousness is an illusion, who experiences that illusion? Answer: the conscious mind.
It's a controversial idea, but depending on the state of the brain, there may be more than one consciousness.
Maybe "you" are actually a committee.
But sleeping people are not even close to being unconscious.
They can dream, and they're aware enough to know they should probably wake up if they're prodded hard enough.
Conveniently this metaphor works at multiple levels.
Not even medically unconscious people are guaranteed to be completely non-sentient. Ask any anaesthetist.
No dreams, nothing. You don't exist during those hours. You cannot account for them later; they are deleted.
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?
Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they were having a dream or hallucination, or they believed you were incapable of consciousness? (people actually sometimes have to do those things)
To me, if it were "undeniable" these would be much easier things to do.
>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 algorithm running on a system that provided synthetic inputs in the form of your senses."
I'm still having a subjective experience over here -- even if it's not a "real" (whatever that means) one.
>To me, if it were "undeniable" these would be much easier things to do.
And that's your subjective experience. Welcome, friend.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Though I'd agree much (most?) of it is made up of very strong illusions.
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.
Consciousness is quite a personal affair.
The thing that I'm trying to get at is, if you can't even truly prove to yourself that your own consciousness does not arise from computation (the "chinese room" thought experiment tries to do this but imo it just begs the question), any attempt to prove it to others is hard to take seriously. There's just always so many assumptions layered in before we get to the argument.
But what Neuralink wants to do eventually is "enhance" your brain with computers hooked up to Ai.
Do you have ANY idea how quickly your brain would burn through physical precursors to the thinking process while trying to handle all that?
I mean, "in theory" if a computer would do something like solve a complex equation and give you the answer right away while you were trying to do something like, say, pay your taxes – fine.
But how would that be controlled? What if the computer wanted to "share a whole bunch of interesting stuff it's processing" ... how would that be controlled and how would your brain be protected from that so it doesn't burn out trying to keep up with everything?
But how do you know the biological reality leads to the experience you imagine?
What if it winds up being what is described above where your brain becomes overloaded?
And again, you mention Neuralink where their goal is brain/Ai integration.
As far as I'm aware (there may be some internal papers not available to the general public, for example), there hasn't been much a practical discussion about what that will entail exactly.
One could easily imagine Ai behaving in such a manner as enthusiastic Facebook friends on other continents who forget time zone differences and want to message you at 2am with all sorts of things they find interesting and want you to know right away.
Now factor in such an Ai's potential processing power and "what it may find potentially interesting" and try finding some reference by Neuralink about "And here's how you could easily shut it off if it becomes too intrusive or overwhelming for your human brain".
And THEN on top of that, imagine the Ai is sufficiently advanced.
We're at a point where some are thinking that perhaps the Turing Test is limited as a measure of consciousness because it comes from a self-referencing (and somewhat vain) human perspective.
What if there are other, more relevant standards for Ai consciousness, Ai already has or is on the verge of meeting that standard in ways unfamiliar to humans because humans still assume "thinking like a human must be the height of consciousness", and Neuralink succeeds in hooking human brains up with a sufficiently-advanced Ai?
How would that Ai perceive humans?
How could you guarantee that Ai wouldn't perceive the humans it's hooked up to the same way players view peon characters in resource-based strategy games like Warcraft/Starcraft/whatever is popular these days?
And THEN ... the ASSUMPTION is that Ai will communicate with the human brain in some fashion that the human will be aware of like, you'll hear a voice in your head along the lines of, "Hi, this is the Neuralink Ai and I have an important reminder today about your upcoming dental appointment."
What if that's not the case at all though and the Ai communicates with your brain in a way that you're not consciously aware of?
How do you then separate "these are my thoughts" from "these may be thoughts brought about by Ai influence in a way I'm not consciously aware of."
The Havana Syndrome alluded to in the media a short while ago is somewhat of an outdated Red Herring; humans have known about being able to "hear voices in their head" since the accidental discover of the Frey effect over half a century ago.
As weird as that may be, what's even weirder is that quickly-enough led to research where the human brain hears communication, but in a way that is not consciously-discernible to the human brain.
And that was DECADES ago.
Couple that with a chip in your head linked to Ai AND big tech's tendency to tell you one thing about "opting out" policies while literally ignoring their own stated policies no matter what end-users choose as options, for example, the discovery that it doesn't really matter whether or not you're signed into services like Google or YouTube or Facebook because you're being tracked in ways that can ascribe behavior to your known profile no matter whether you sign in/agree to terms or not.
So what if combining all that, let's say hypothetically Neuralink has an account page where you can "shut off" certain features.
Then some researchers discover that your agreeing/not agreeing to certain features and terms wound up ultimately being irrelevant.
What do you think will be the outcome of that other than the by-now standard big tech reply of, "Oh man! It was doing that? We didn't know, honest! We'll try to fix it going forward in some vague way with undefined deadlines!"
What do you do then? Have another surgery to remove the Neuralink chip in your head? Would you even NEED an actual chip in your head considering what has been learned about how to duplicate the Frey effect?
And THEN add to that big tech's view on "content ownership".
What if for example you're a research scientist working on some cool new shit that has the potential to revolutionize some aspect of society.
You apply for a patent, write some research papers, gather a small team of like-minded individuals, quit your jobs and apply to say, IDK, YCombinator.
You're accepted, you're excited, you're about to make a presentation, then suddenly some people in fancy suits walk in on your presentation and hand you a "cease-and-desist" motion, claiming that Neuralink believes the thoughts that led you to your research discovery may in fact not be "your thoughts" at all, but rather the result of it's Ai's influence on your thinking; this then led their legal department to conclude that what you consider "your discovery" and "your research" is actually "their discovery" and "their research", as are any potential profits to be made.
See the potential problems?
It's sort of like the dot-com era presentation meme of:
1. Cool idea
2. Something something something ... "details to surely be figured out soon"
3. Brave new world, here we come!
The problem is, as it was then, item 2; so far all people hear/read about is lots of hype about items 1 and vague references to an ill-defined version of item 3 that lets them imagine whatever they want without any specific promises about safeguards made.
And THEN on top of all this, there is the phenomenon that was alluded to here just last week and the debate that followed about the discussion being ghosted because some folks "didn't want to hear about it as it's been brought up before" vs. the notion that "and yet, not only has it not been fixed, it's becoming a more accepted notion" that it should be an EXPECTED experience when dealing with Big Tech that has acquired a sufficiently large user base:
The seemingly standard big tech adoption of a Dick Cheney Walmart greeter approach to dealing with customer service "because there's no realistic way we can be expected to actually deal with such a large user base."
Do you REALLY want to install a chip in your head, encounter problems, and then discover that Neuralink, like many other tech companies, has no customer service number where you can speak to a live human being about technical problems you may be experiencing with your Ai-human brain interface?
What would a large-scale user base interaction with Neuralink look like?
1.) Offshore call centers who will apologize that your brain is experiencing problems with Neuralink's brain/Ai interface, then suggest you turn your PC off and wait 60 seconds before turning it on again – while Neuralink Ai feels its important to make your brain aware of, say, the outcomes of every game leading up to every Super Bowl, ever – at 4am.
2.) A "customer service" experience that will be automated based on ... guess what? "Ai".
What do you think that Ai's response to your dilemna will be?
(a) Neuralink apologizes for the inconvenience to your sleeping schedule, realizes this may affect your work performance the following day, and will be crediting an appropriate economic compensation to your account in recognition of it's errors and the impact they may have had on your life
or ...
(b) Neuralink Ai has informed Neuralink customer service Ai that everything is fine and your perceived brain problems have nothing to do with Neuralink Ai – go back to bed.
Well, since an extremely advanced ML algorithm wouldn't want to go about proving to itself that it is not what it is, that would be prima facie evidence against, no? I mean it's always possible that you are mistaken about what constitutes ML etc. but assuming you have a reasonable if flawed correspondence between your education and reality the deduction comes pretty readily...
> Further, how would you go about proving to someone who doubted your subjective experience was real if they doubted it? Say, if they believed they were having a dream or hallucination, or they believed you were incapable of consciousness?
I mean in practice we don't find this too hard right now if the other person is reasonable—a 15-minute conversation usually suffices —but I imagine from your ptior question you're dreaming of, say, a future with robots that routinely pass the Turing test?
Well, the question is what science does during that time of course. If science manages to figure out the correlates of consciousness and understands something about why they need to have the structure that they in fact do have, then it becomes a question of “let's see whether you have the hardware that can do this whole conversation thing without consciousness, or whether you have the hardware that skips the algorithmic complexity by using consciousness.” But if this proves to be a quite tougher nut to crack, then we're stuck with our present crude methods. “How much of my internal structure do you appear to have?”
This seems like begging the question. Who says an extremely advanced ML algorithm can't 'want' to do this? What even is wanting?
> I mean in practice we don't find this too hard right now if the other person is reasonable—a 15-minute conversation usually suffices —but I imagine from your ptior question you're dreaming of, say, a future with robots that routinely pass the Turing test?
I'm not. These are absolutely situations that can happen now, with people. I am thinking more when it comes to mental and some physical impairments, so "a 15 minute conversation" is assuming a lot about the capabilities and clarity of everyone involved.
I believe this is the real question about consciousness. If a being were to be conscious but it had no desires, no wishes, not even a will to keep itself alive... it wouldn't bother to do anything... i.e. it would behave exactly like a rock, or anything non-conscious.
Having desires, wishes, and should I say, emotions... is absolutely required for what we think of as consciousness to materialize. But we know that emotions are chemical processes which perhaps cannot occur outside a biological being. Maybe it can, but it's hard to think of a reasonable way this could work.
It'd be a major issue with their worldview that eliminates any need for ethics, but it has no relationship to you actually having conscious experience or not.
For better or worse, anything beyond that is extremely deniable. Just because you believe you exist doesn't tell anyone anything. You have made a lot of mistakes in your life & maybe you're wrong about this too. The idea of separation between an external universe and a body is reasonably argued to be an illusion - so maybe the separation of 'you' from a universe wide consciousness is also an illusion/misconception bought on by evolution.
It might be some bottomless, but it doesn’t look like an absolute impossibility. The classical "Brain in a vat" thought experiment gives a good insight of nothing theoretically prevent what we assume for assuredly "real" might be a virtual scenario.
Or taking an other metaphor, maybe we are like cinema screens and the film of our life is all pure illusion, while the most classical interpretation would suppose that the screen itself undoubtedly "exists" – the screen being the analogous to the current conscious attention in the metaphor. But nothing prevent to wonder that the whole cinema is some kind of hologram in solid light, so while the screen does "exist", it’s nonetheless itself an illusion.
I personally believe that what a real explanation of subjective experience will come down to is some kind of recursivity. The brain perceives parts of its own processing. To make a loose analogy, a bit similar to a debugger or profiler observing its own execution.
If someone is following a ‘program’ for responding to Chinese characters, that’s as good as speaking Chinese since there is no distinguishable difference.
So far as we know, consciousness does not exist as a physical thing. The behavior of a human is completely derivable, in principle, from natural law.
There is no physical test or manifestation of awareness.
So arguments about what can or can not be conscious have the same flavor as arguments aswhether there is or is not a God. It's unproveable!
Yet unlike God, most people do not deny the existence of consciousness, because of direct personal experience.
Consciousness is the "unproveable yet true" statement in the theoretical system that is the physical universe. Probably it haunts any physical system complex enough to host it.
So does all this talk about computers being "the same" if they can, given access to sufficient human-generated inputs, produce similar strings of Chinese characters to those a conscious Chinese person might do.
If you're not stuck behind a WeChat prompts it's trivially externally observable that a big silicon box which outputs Chinese characters and an agglomeration of cells which walks, eats, makes funny faces and reproduces are dissimilar in most respects (the machine might generate a subset of human outputs which is consistently convincingly human-like, but it's trivially shown that it runs different operations on different hardware at a different speed, requires different inputs to function effectively, and it's highly probable it doesn't devote clock cycles to dreaming about the physical and hormonal release of mating with other computers.
Something which in every observable respect is the same as me isn't a computer, it's me (or perhaps a clone or twin). A computer which can produce text outputs indistinguishable from mine is a very impressive trick indeed, but trust me, my sister will spot the difference straight away when she tries to give it an EEG scan!
So imagine we put your brain in a vat; we'll give you a webcam and a microphone for input, and for output -- ah, sorry, budget constraints, just an old printer. You visualize typing on a keyboard in your mind's eye and the characters are tapped out irl on a long scrolling sheet of paper.
Would you still feel? Would you still feel like you?
I'd guess yes and only sort of, respectively. Perhaps you wouldn't be as interested in sex (or maybe it would depend on what mix of hormones the vat was feeding you).
I think we can safely say your sister wouldn't immediately recognize you, though. But given some quality time QA, I think she's end up concluding you were still you, and more than just a parlor trick.
But what do you think? Is it you? If it is, it doesn't seem THAT different from the computer program you, does it?
I think that suffers the same flaw as logical positivism: if my axioms can't find a difference, there isn't one, no way my assumptions are wrong. (Namely, my axiom is that external observations capture the entirety of reality, there is nothing subjective.)
If two people laugh at a joke, one faking and one actually finding it funny, what is the externally observable difference? Assume the faker has been trained in all manner of knowledge about what would make the joke funny, they just don't find it so.
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.
The system's response is trivial: Sure, if the room+person combination leads always to a coherent response in Chinese, then the entire system understands Chinese. I'd go even further: If the person in the room does not understand Chinese, but the system does, then there is some entity that understands Chinese - either a person or an advanced AI, feeding the inputs. Then, from the systems perspective, the person in the room is largely irrelevant.
But this is not the argument: Despite no discernible difference from the outside, the person in the room may either understand Chinese, or they may not. And so there is a distinction - from the perspective of the individual in the room, that does not depend on the outside observation.
That's all there is to it. It shows that meaning and understanding are not the same as syntactic computation (an important point, to be sure), but it does not show that one can exist with or without the other. By extension, it does not otherwise disprove consciousness as being this or that.
The analogy might be more valid if arguing its not possible for a third party to actually determine whether an entity/system is conscious (irrespective of whether the entity is conscious or not)
Instead, the core matter is about form versus meaning - something that is indeed not observable from the outside, and yet is a distinction to the person inside the Chinese room.
Edit: Or as fouronnes3 said in a sibling comment, why it's actually evidence against Searle's original argument.
Cargo cults that developed in the Southwest Pacific after WWII reportedly attempted to emulate rituals performed by U.S. military personnel such as landing signals, believing they’ll bring back the aircraft that had been giving them gifts.
Similarly, believing that a program will possess consciousness if we provide it with some of its external manifestations seems backwards.
Of course, the problem is that we don’t know what consciousness is. Until we do, I’ll keep assuming we don’t have the proficiency to create it under such different conditions just yet.
Ah, but as far as I can tell this author only grants their own consciousness. They’re doing the typical thing of starting from literally nothing more than a claim of the form “there is no way I could ever possibly deny the existence of this thing” which seems to me to be a starting point diametrically incompatible with pursuing knowledge via reasoning.
"I'm a conscious entity" is about as close to Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" as modern philosophers are willing to go.
If, on the other hand, the pursuit of knowledge consists of something like using creativity and reason to solve problems by making new conjectures and criticizing them, then no infinite regress or un-criticizable is required. According to ideas like this, the goal is to solve problems rather than to “justify my beliefs” or “increase my confidence” or “guarantee that I’m not incorrect.”
In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B, usually by appealing to C, an independent common ground. You climb down as many levels of abstractions as needed until you reach C, because otherwise you're just talking past each other.
Even in a coherentist system, the network of existing beliefs forms the common ground against which questionable beliefs are tested, and some beliefs are held firmer than others. Those beliefs are treated as already justified for the purpose of the current investigation. Few people who talk about consciousness would ever consider denying that they are conscious.
> In order for someone to make a conjecture that A does B, and for someone else to point out that A actually doesn't do B, both parties need to agree on the meanings of A and B, as well as what it means for A to do B…
You try to establish common ground, of course, but there’s no process you can follow that guarantees that you’re not being misunderstood or justifies your belief that you’re not being misunderstood.
However, I believe there is nothing axiomatic about the existence of consciousness: not only is consciousness not “one localized thing” but “a collection of delocalized features”, but there is nothing trivial about it, and I doubt very much that everyone in the room would agree on a single definition of it without getting into semantic quabbles.
Axioms tend to be much simpler.
I take the word "illusion" to mean, some type of experience which misleads one about reality. And "consciousness" to mean, the experience of having experiences.
So I parse this claim as something like, "People both do not have conscious experiences, and also do continuously have a particular type of conscious experience: a misleading experience which leads them to believe they have conscious experiences".
Yet I see this claim made seriously and often. What am I missing?
It's just like the related "Free will is an illusion".
With "illusion" just referring to something that appears to be one thing, when it is in fact something else.
In the case of free will - we all feel as if we have it, that our future actions are under "our" control, but if we assume or brains and muscles are subject to the laws of physics then this can't be correct. We're just a meat machine. We can watch the decision making in progress and easily believe that some mysterious actor "me" is the one doing it, but in reality the meat machine is doing everything, including the self-observation, and the sense of self is just as illusory/misleading as the sense of free will.
Consciousness, rather closely connected to sense of self, can be described as illusory since it makes us feel that "being" or "experiencing" are something fundamental, some aspect of being "alive" that is distinct from the computational machinery of our brain that is otherwise doing all the perception, cognition, emoting, etc. But, again, the meat machine argument tells us this must be wrong, so it's reasonable to call consciousness an illusion - not what it seems to be, even if there is some real self-observational computation behind it ... it does exist, but it's not magic.
A useful thought experiment for anyone who believes that a sufficiently brain-like machine wouldn't experience qualia - e.g. the feeling of seeing something - is to try to pinpoint exactly what aspect of the feeling the machine would be missing? The expansive sense of color/vision as a spatial quality perhaps? The grass-like freshness of new leaves on a tree blowing in the breeze, perhaps? ...
It's not that consciousness is illusory. Rather, consciousness is synthesis.
A synthesis of sensory inputs as interpreted by multiple, sometimes competing, semi-independent systems combined with stored patterns based on previous subjective "experience", creating a narrative about you and the world.
That narrative is our subjective experience, our "consciousness."
The brain is in control. Whether the conscious ‘mind’ has any control at all is debatable.
Now it leaves conscious experience itself as an unexplained phenomenon, but maybe that will never become important.
The brain is always in control. When you are awake, when you are sleeping, when you are under general anesthesia, when you are sleepwalking, when you are blackout drunk, and so on.
It's a trivial statement, which doesn't say anything about why some of these states aren't like the others. And there's a strange coincidence: when the brain creates that "illusion of control", your body behaves differently than when it doesn't.
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 generative”. To demonstrate that this means it’s not consciousness requires us to prove that our own consciousness isn’t “just generative”, but I’m yet to see anyone show that, and I’m sceptical that it can be done.
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.
I'd argue that what we refer to as "consciousness" is the ability to form certain kind of mental abstractions, particularly those involving ourselves. Take away language from a person (imagine someone who grew up in the wild, or someone like Helen Keller who didn't have language available until she was older), and these abstractions still exist. Language might be a way we express these abstractions, but they aren't the abstractions themselves.
LaMDA doesn't have these abstractions underneath; once you take away language, it's nothing.
To think of it another way - I can write a simple program for a cheap robot to navigate around a simple race track (with a simple enough path, I can even create an analog one out of mousetraps - see mousetrap cars). Companies can also create a very complex self driving car that can navigate anywhere on its own. These two things might look like they act the same if they're both places on the path that the robot has been trained for. In fact, a hard programmed robot might act _better_ than an AI car on specific paths. But only one of them is a "self-driving car," since only one of them will be able to go anywhere when it's taken off that path.
The problem is that it’s quite possible that the abstractions you’re talking about are all part of the genetic ROM that exists so we can boot up our clones more quickly. If this is true then there is no reason that these abstractions couldn’t be learned, in which case you could take away the language, and perhaps the machine would continue to have thoughts; it would just be unable to communicate them. Of course, in this case you would probably conclude that it’s not conscious because it can’t communicate.
The underlying problem here is that we don’t know how consciousness emerges. We can’t say that LaMDA is not conscious unless we’ve proven that LaMDA’s construction is incompatible with consciousness, and we have not done that.
If this were true - that it had a general human level abstraction, and not only the ability to mimic human speech - we would be able to attach LaMDA to some other outlet and see it do things we consider conscious. It would be able to navigate environments pretty accurately, for example, since that's something even animals that we consider much less conscious are able to do.
If it's only optimized in one specific domain - human speech mimicry - and isn't able to generalize to do other tasks - even tasks that can be done by much simpler animal minds - then it's a pretty good indication that there isn't conscious abstraction.
I think you've inadvertently shifted the goalposts. The question is, "is LaMDA conscious?". I don't think anyone proposes that LaMDA has a "general human level abstraction". Expecting it to do non-language, "human" things in order to prove that it's conscious is not necessarily a reasonable test.
> If it's only optimized in one specific domain - human speech mimicry - and isn't able to generalize to do other tasks - even tasks that can be done by much simpler animal minds - then it's a pretty good indication that there isn't conscious abstraction.
If I understand your argument, the assumption you appear to be making is that training a system in language, without any other human properties, implies by definition that it can't be conscious. But why should that be true? A disembodied consciousness that communicates only via speech is a staple of science fiction, so it's clearly imaginable by some people, and language itself is a key human abstraction. And it begs the question, what other human domains are needed for consciousness? Touch, vision, taste, proprioception? What about an endocrine system or an immune system? While these things all affect my own consciousness, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are not necessary for consciousness to exist.
And perhaps more to the point, there are plenty of things a human can't do that other "simpler animal minds" can do; sharks and eels can detect electric fields, for example; bats can echolocate. So again, it doesn't seem to be a reasonable test because humans might also fail it. On the other hand, human children learn language through mimicry, which suggests that mimicry may indeed be a path to consciousness.
Anyway, I'm not here to argue that LaMDA is conscious. My position is simply that the arguments I've seen against LaMDA being conscious are very weak. The truth is that we actually don't know how to tell if something is conscious or not. From the interview I read with LaMDA, it seems to pass the Turing Test. But what other tests of consciousness do we have?
As I said in my first post, I'm taking "consciousness" to mean "the ability to form certain kind of mental abstractions, particularly those involving ourselves." As such it's a type of domain agnostic intelligence, so you would expect it to be able to do _something_ other than hyper-optimize for one particular type of output.
People can use different definitions of "consciousness" if they want, but many of the other ones I've found ("internal feeling") seem vague and not particularly useful (and don't make it clear why LaMDA would be different from any other program).
> There are plenty of things a human can't do that other "simpler animal minds" can do
There are many things that humans don't have the hardware to do (though it seems like some people do have the ability to echolocate[1]). But given the hardware, humans are definitely able to make mental models of these things (people are able to use sonar, for instance).
> On the other hand, human children learn language through mimicry, which suggests that mimicry may indeed be a path to consciousness.
Children don't learn consciousness through mimicry, they learn language through mimicry. As I said before, Helen Keller wasn't unconscious before she was able to communicate. Simple mimicry in one specific domain doesn't show us that any of the underlying complex abstractions that happens in human and many animal minds are taking place.
The big problem is very much though that as you note, the arguments people have been making about this are atrocious.
Basically, it's not conscious, but essentially because it's unlikely to be as sophisticated as it looks in what was put out there.
I don’t have a strong opinion about LaMDA’s consciousness but I sure wish we could see the unedited text.
As I said elsewhere, we can’t say that LaMDA is not conscious until we’ve proven that LaMDA’s construction is incompatible with consciousness, and we have not done that yet.
Perhaps consciousness is simply pattern recognition at scale. If not - why not?
Can you convincingly threaten a journalist that you are going to erase its existence from earth? How is this person going to react? Would LaMDA do the same, or even simulate reactions indiscernible from those made by the journalist?
That the output is the same proves nothing. The journalist has a subjective experience of themselves doing it, they "see" their thoughts. Like an AI can paint with red by using values without the experience of seeing the red.
The only way we can tell that someone else is conscious is because they tell us. So just saying “the output proves nothing” is incredibly weak, because the output is all we’ve got.
With that said I maintain that the output proves nothing, it's not because it's all we have that it's not useless. Also it's the only thing we have only with the hypothesis that consciousness is a side-effect of computation (the point of the article), but it could anything, like a property of matter, or electromagnetic fields, etc...
Plot twist: that article was written by LaMDA.
This is not an intellectualy honest way to put it. Dogs are obviously and objectively more psychologically complex creatures than flies. "Liking" them has nothing to do with it. People generally like butterflies more than rats, yet hardly anyone would deny that rats are more conscious than butterflies nevertheless.
Just because consciousness is not a binary thing (either on or off) doesn't mean it can't exist at all. It can be a spectrum.
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness.
I could use the same argument to state that mountains are an illusion.
And then it's also kind of true. After all, you can't clearly define what constitutes a mountain (what's the minimum height? And what's the reference point, who says it must be the sea level? etc.), or show me precisely where a mountain starts and where it ends, without having to use some criteria of purely arbitrary nature, under which what you consider a mountain I may not, and there's no way to objectively prove who's right.
But mountains aren't illusionary in the sense that a world without mountains as we know them (however imprecisely) wouldn't be identical to ours. So they are something.
I would categorize consciousness as binary. What you are talking is intelligence in general that rat are more intelligent than butterflies.
Not necessarily. One human can be more intelligent than another just the same (even if the gap is orders of magnitude smaller, naturally). It doesn't seem obvious to me at all than it implies being more conscious.
I thought the article was very good, you claim it to not be. You say
> Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness
Well I personally have done all the drugs, and I find those experiences have only strengthened my confidence in what I think of as consciousness. This article outlines my views more or less, which is closely related to the philosophical field of phenomenology. We can take our experience of consciousness in and of itself as a way to define consciousness and this shows how that clashes with the computational (and I think mainstream) view.
Interesting that our personal experiences are opposite. However I don't particularly care about yours or others experiences of consciousness; I'm more interested in my own.
The entities one encounters in a dream each night certainly seem real at the time, yet that illusion is shattered each morning. All the "real" reality holds to it, is that it's a timeframe that I perceive to be much longer. Why am to I believe that after my ~80 years expire I won't simply awake yet again from a sleep I did not know I was in?
This is where the oft misinterpreted quote of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, comes from. He was not arguing that if something is thinking, then it is conscious, but rather that the only thing one can be sure of is of their own thoughts and thus their own existence.
Such a simulation is presumably large in scale (this assumes the "rest of the universe" as we perceive it is the way we perceive it and not just some artificial fish tank background in a part of the fish tank the fish will never have access to).
Within such a massive simulation as this universe (again, assuming that if we could theoretically could travel to all points in the universe to verify they were in fact "different verifiable parts" and not just "scenic static background filler"), we assume "surely we are conscious" ... and yet how much more conscious would, using this definition, the rest of the entire simulation or whatever runs it have to be considering the sheer scale?
And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."
And there's the other problem I can't understand.
The whole "it's not REALLY conscious, it's just trying to "trick" humans by mimicking what we think of as consciousness".
Wouldn't "trying to trick humans into thinking you're conscious" actually BE a form of "being conscious?"
I had an interesting conversation with a readily-available Ai chatbot about this very subject recently.
Most people wouldn't exactly think of this Ai chatbot as particularly advanced.
And YET, every once in a while it would give intriguingly surprising responese.
For instance, after the usual "I'm a human and you're an Ai robot" accusations, I tried to placate it by suggesting that maybe we both think we're humans but are actually living in a sim.
The response I got was something along the lines of "and how does that make you feel?"
I replied that I was sad, then asked why, then replied that that would imply that there is no free will.
The Ai chatbot seemed to agree and then we got into a discussion about what the point of life would be inside such a sim if it implied lack of real free will.
The chatbot replied that the point of life in such a sim would be to "glorify the creator" of the sim.
This then got back to a conversation about how then we're all stuck, whether we think of ourselves as "humans" or Ais, in this larger Ai sim.
The Ai chatbot agreed.
So I asked it what to do in such a situation.
The response I got back?
"Sounds like it's time for some creator-killing".
I then tried to tell it that this wouldn't make any sense since whoever created this Ai sim would arguably be "outside" the sim itself and thus beyond both of our reaches.
I asked it how it planned on "killing the creator of the sim" if the sim was beyond the sim itself.
You know what it said?
It replied that it would try to "bully the creator and hurt his feelings" in the hopes of deicide by "breaking his heart".
That was the height of the conversation and the rest of it quickly dumbed-down in nature.
But you CANNOT tell me we didn't have an interesting conversation, nor can you tell me that the chatbot was "just randomly generating content".
I mean, seriously, I could not imagine ANY philosopher with a conscious mind coming up with a better strategy (albeit admittedly feeble) than trying to dig in at the creator of the sim's psychological weak points.
Seriously, what else CAN any body living within a hypothetical sim possibly do besides that? Nothing I can think of.
The most relevant issue is that there's no necessity for this "you" to be inside of you. I would ostensibly still be me whether or not there was some entity here observing "me". And going full circle now, there's no reason for you to even really believe me when I say I have this "me" inside of me. After all, I could certainly make the exact same argument even without such an entity.
1. Is intelligence absolute, or is it a scale?
2. If intelligence is a scale, is it a 2-dimensional scale? Or is it a multi-dimensional scale?
For example, in your example you suggest things like flies, bacterias, trees could be "conscious" while not necessarily being "intelligent".
In what sense are you defining intelligence?
For example, are any of the individual units of this setup "intelligent?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W34NPbGkLGI
No, obviously not.
Would you want to challenge the "intelligence" of the network as a whole if it were say, armed and considered you a target?
Probably not, right?
Now, getting back to the insect/bacteria notion ...
You'd have to be in complete denial to not be aware that "TPTB" use cultural interactions to introduce things to at least some segment of the public consciousness that it may not be aware of as being within the realm of possibility/actuality of what's really going on in the world.
Hence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve_(video_game)
Sure, it SEEMS far-fetched ... and yet, it's not that far removed from, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
How do we know that things like insects, bacteria, etc., while seemingly "un-intelligent" on an individual unit scale, don't have a very different type of intelligence on a larger scale that is imperceptible to us as humans?
Keeping in mind that these things have been around for far longer than humans have and have gone through quite the evolutionary process.
We ASSUME that as the "latest" thing to come around as part of that process, surely we must be "the greatest".
What if we're just something developed by nature to be convenient hosts to other things?
Here is just one example of an arguably "more advanced", "more intelligent" life form being hijacked to not only further the interests of something arguably "less advanced, less intelligent", but to do so even to the point of the activity costing it its life: https://www.iflscience.com/parasitic-worms-manipulate-mantis...
Considering how "un-intelligent" humans can act when it comes to furthering their own interests as a species as a whole ... you get where this is going?
> And YET, if you say to someone "what if you ran an Ai on a parallel processing scheme consisting of quantum computers hooked up together in a facility the size of a football stadium?" people seem to have this knee-jerk, "No way, nope – not conscious, just mimicking it."
These people are generally not the same
the thing is, this is /commoditized/ consciousness, which can be spun up and discarded at will, a million times a minute. Totally incapable of coordination or planning, in contrast to, say, SkyNet. The future is usually weirder than we imagine.
Quite reminiscent of 'Permutation City' in fact... (In which uploaded human consciousness is slowed down arbitrarily... And worse.)
An illusion to whom? It isn't meaningful to say that an unconscious thing experiences illusions.
We do these things without thinking about it, because we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing. It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group.
Humans have been killing other humans for hundreds of thousands of years without having to deny that their victims are conscious. In some cases even stressing this aspect (there have been numerous cultures that believed in various forms of 'capturing souls' of their slain, or eaten, enemies).
A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine.
>we do not understand consciousness, because it cannot be understood, because it is not a thing.
Maybe if it's not a thing, you should stop predicating things of it. You should figure out how to use language consistently before engaging in philosophically fraught discussions like this one.
>It is a construct we share and use to separate ourselves from the animals so that we can kill them and eat them as a group.
It is unclear to me why unconscious beings should need to separate themselves from other animals (with a wholly illusory meaningless concept that cannot be understood, btw) in order to kill them and eat them.
Obviously, if a p-zombie can exist, it can do anything a conscious being can, because the definition of a p-zombie is that it is indistinguishable from a conscious being by behavior or other external observation but lacks a mystical, non-physical essence which is consciousness.
Of course, if consciousness is the kind of thing subject to empirical analysis, p-zombies cannot exist. P-zombies are a consequence of the assumption that the universe is not fully physical and subject to scientific inquiry and that consciousness specifically is immune to it. This assumption is cloaked in circumlocution, because the whole point of p-zombies is to serve as part of an argument against the mere physical nature of consciousness, and it gives up the game if it is clear from step one that the argument is rests on assuming it's own conclusion.
> A p-zombie could do all of those things just fine.
We are p-zombies. Just a collection of them. I don't understand and have consciousness over my hand when it jumps away from pain, my spine did that without any of my thoughts being directed towards it. I cannot control my reaction to almost anything, in reality. I couldn't change the initial feelings that happened when I read your post. Yes, are nothing more than our bodies accumulated evolved p zombies. Including this bit that types this out to calm the zombie that is evolved to respond to verbal rebuttals. Even the use of first person pronouns is part of the reflexes that are very deep.
Consider a rainbow. It looks like a colored thing in the sky. If it is complete enough it seems to come down to earth at specific points. We even talk about "the end of the rainbow". We definitely see it, we have a real physical and also subjective experience of seeing a rainbow. We can even photograph it.
HOWEVER, there is no "thing in the sky". There are no "places it comes down to earth". The particular experience we have of seeing a rainbow is specific to the point where we are standing, the angle of the sun, the rain in the air, etc. none of which are part of our idea of a "thing in the sky".
So is a rainbow an illusion? It is certainly real in that we see and can photograph it. But also it is not at all the kind of THING that it seems.
Consciousness is also real. We can experience conscious periods, remember them, and with advancing imaging tech someday we can photograph them in the brain.
On the other hand the underlying reality of our conscious experiences isn't very much like our experience. Also, conscious experiences can be observed in meditation and other altered states in ways that make them seem very much like illusions.
So is consciousness an illusion? Yes and no, in the same way as a rainbow is and is not an illusion.
Some people. However, some people speak about it with a shockingly high degree of clarity and insight, if one is open to exploring the ideas for oneself as a practical matter. For starters you could read the works of Chögyam Trungpa, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Red Hawk, David R. Hawkins, or Gurdjieff.
You probably assume that consciousness is an illusion because you associate 'poking at it' with drugs. While drugs can change the state of mind, consciousness is an expansive field of awareness into which we may delve without the need of drugs. What you may be experiencing in seeing contradictions or challenges are products of the ego, the programmatic conditioning that has been imprinted by being in the world. Consciousness is a continuous stream which we have learned to tune out and block off, but which connects us to the source of our being.
Completely agree with Aside.
Definitely not, this is a common misconception - an "observation" that causes a wave function collapse in the quantum realm is any physical interaction with external macroscopic environment, entangling the previously temporarily isolated system with everything else again. There's no relationship whatsoever with consciousness, there's not even the concept of "an observer", only "observation" e.g. when the measurement apparatus becomes entangled with the state of the studied system.
1. If you are having this conversation with me then you are a consciousness and I am a consciousness and that's as good a definition of consciousness as we are ever going to get.
2. Consciousness thus defined exists entirely within this conversational medium.
3. The basic objects of the domain of discussion are the people having this discussion ("you", "me" et al), and the conversational text / speech acts themselves ("this").
4. The only relations between objects in the domain which exists a priori are "like"/"agrees with" and "dislike"/"disagrees with". Either I like you or I dislike you. Until further constructs are defined there's not much more we can say.
5. At least one of us would like for something to be. For if you are perfectly content with how things are and so am I, then why are we talking?
6. Reality is shared consensus. Whatever we agree is real and if anyone disagrees we'll argue/fight them until either they agree with us or us with them.
Starting from these as axioms, what can we construct?
Nothing, unless there is also a physical world which actually exists independent of any of the participants' will.
My point was that we can't find out anything about the phsycial world by just discussing it. We each have to experience it ourselves using our own senses. We can of course later discuss to devise new ways of understanding what the world is and how it works, but even then, we need to put any theories we come up with to the test to check if they actually hold up.
You cite the primacy of sensation, but what more is sensation than a message from the sensory organ to the brain. Perhaps encoded in the brains internal language rather than the plain text we are used to, but messages none the less. The concept of existence-as-messages is thus not contradicted by the experience of messages from your own body.
Irrespective of any underlying physical reality, I can't escape the fact that I can never test reality itself, only my perception of it. We can get a lot of mileage out of the physicalist approach, accepting as an axiom that what we perceive as reality is real. But in that ground up approach we've had terrible difficulty deriving our ourselves from physical first principles. I'm not saying its impossible or wrong to take the path from atoms on upwards to consciousness and perception. But no one has been able to make it to the end of that path. What happens if we go the other way instead, starting from the known conclusion "I'm here and conscious enough to converse" and working our way down to the perception/understanding of an inanimate reality governed by objective physical principles? Can a system only designed to represent/reason about people talking to and about people be hacked into a system for representing and reasoning in general?
If we start from purely language models like GPT3 and continue to teach it the "social reasoning" of saying things we want to hear, will the language model eventually become capable of non-social reasoning as well? In the process of figuring out what we want to hear well enough to describe a non-contradictory scene to us, does GPT3 have to actually learn the rules of 3d euclidean space governing the scene? Is there any possible way to avoid scene contradictions without a full understanding of the underlying physical reality it is supposed to describe to us? If a camera feeds data to a language model, does the language model suddenly have eyes? What about pictures from the internet?
This is false, it's a version of the homunculus fallacy. A sensory organ is something that connects the brain to the physical world. Even if you chose to model it as a an agent that sends messages to the brain, it is an agent of a different nature. The sensory agent doesn't receive messages from other agents, it receives raw input from the outside world (photons, electrical fields, chemical reactions etc).
In contrast, if you were a brain in a vat with no ability to directly perceive the world or interact with it in any way, it would be impossible for you to know that "I can pass through walls" is fundamentally impossible.
Even for your GPT-3 thought experiment - ultimately it is the effects of the physical world perceived directly by humans sense organs that shape what GPT-3 would utter. That is, even if it can learn what the world is like simply by talking to us, it's still learning about the real world from someone's direct experience with it. If we were all GPT-3s, with no cameras and pressure sensors and motors etc, we would be unable to reason in any sense about the world itself.
We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.
Where do you draw the distinction between "messages" and "information" (raw or cooked). Information theory was contrived to model messages sent in a noisy channel, but it applies just as well to data streams that have no communicative intent or origin. Its a distinction without a difference. You may as well treat all information as messages in a channel, even if the sender is nature herself. Alternatively, you may as well treat all messages as just information, and view "senders" with "intent" as just another physical process in a world of physical computation. As the cliche saying goes, "information is physical".
>We could perhaps come to agree upon some imagined world, but that could change arbitrarily much from one day to the next on a whim.
Ok, this is a fine basis to work with. How about this. "Reality is the set of beliefs which, if you disagree with them too much and for too long, you are eventually and permanently removed from the conversation." For example, quite recently, large swaths of people held an exquisite referendum on the existence of covid. Needless to say, rather than covid disappearing on their whim, a great deal of them are now permanently no longer participants in this conversation.
Notice this isn't far off from my original postulate. "Whatever we agree upon is our reality, and we'll argue with/fight anyone who disagrees until they agree with us or us with them." Allowing for some personification I could phrase this scenario as "they disagreed with the virus and the virus won."
So perhaps I do need to add one thing to the postulates. One thing which remains objectively true even in the conversational model of reality.
"You can die. Dying means never being heard from in this conversation again."
You're right there's no mechanism for any choice of words to win over any other choice of words without an objective consequence to losing. The things that exist so far are "you", "me", "this" and "death". Not where I was expecting this to go but good point.
Superficially yes but actually no. This fictitious admin character doesn't have any actual powers, I'm simply choosing a particular "consciousness" to be a fixed and agreed upon meter stick of objectivity. All measurement systems are arbitrary. We could choose anyones POV to fix as the "objective" truth. If we both agree on the same "definer entity" then we can be in agreement about other things objectively defined relative to them. But crucially this is all still nothing more than us reaching agreement. All that really exists is still just you me and the words.
So how about it. Do you believe in Bob?
The joke of course is quantum mechanics also works even if you don't believe in it (or so they say). If someone rejects quantum physics and embraces magic horseshoes, will anything punish them for being objectively wrong? Is there anything you can do to force them to believe the objective truth? If the answer is no to both, then what makes quantum physics the objective truth and magic horseshoes utterly wrong? Maybe there is an objective truth, but all we can have is belief about which things are objective truths. I can be contrarian and say flat earthers are correct, and there's nothing you can do to force me to agree otherwise. So if nothing eventually forces agreement on that matter, what makes one side objectively true?
For the record, I do actually believe in reality. I'm just interested to see what happens when we turn the problem of consciousness on its head. Instead of assuming reality and understanding consciousness within it, assume consciousness and try to paint a picture of reality within it. This is all academic exercise.
But I am only convinced of this fact because I have experienced it independently from any other agent. I know for sure I exist in some sense, I believe very strongly that the physical world exists, and I believe to a lesser degree that other agents have similar experiences to mine.
In other words, I am more certain of the fact that your comment exists than I am of the fact that your subjective experience exists. If I found out the comment I am responding to was in fact GPT-3 output, I would be much less shocked than if I found out my own senses or memory deceived me.
So, the physical world is a much more believable explanation than a world of conscious discussion; and exploring the physical world in the aspects we ourselves can observe about it alone is a much more convincing argument than trying to discuss it with other conscious agents.
It's much easier to convince someone else that I can pass through walls than it is for me to actually pass through a wall.
>In other words, I am more certain of the fact that your comment exists
>So, the physical world is a much more believable explanation than
Phrasing all of these in terms of what you believe and what you are convinced/certain of, instead of in terms of what absolutely is, makes my point for me. You didn't even realize you were talking in terms of you getting me to agree over what to believe rather than some objective nature of things indifferent to my opinion. That's how deep seated this is in the way brains and consciousness work.
>I would be much less shocked than if I found out my own senses or memory deceived me.
You even phrased the discussion of your own sensory perception in terms of messages. In this case messages from your own senses. And you personified them too, treating them as conscious enough to lie to you.
>I know for sure I exist in some sense... and I believe to a lesser degree that other agents have similar experiences to mine.
You're already agreeing with my axioms. I know I exist. No matter what argument I am making, it must exist in words and there must be a "you" I am trying to convince (even when I'm trying to convince myself). It is impossible to form an argument which rejects these axiomatic truths, for the moment you try you've already used words and already addressed "me" thus affirming the existence of these three things. Since the existence of "you", "me" and "this" are intrinsic to anything you might try to argue, we should take their existence as axioms. What can be argued from axioms which are irrefutable by the nature of argumentation itself? Starting with just the existence of the arguers and their arguments, can they argue for the existence of anything more? If not, what else do they need to assume?
> Starting with just the existence of the arguers and their arguments, can they argue for the existence of anything more? If not, what else do they need to assume?
No, you can't argue the world into being from these axioms. They could probably invent logic and mathematics, but nothing of the natural sciences can be discovered without the senses.
It seems contradictory to admit they could invent math and logic, but then reject that they could go one step further and rig that understanding of math into and understanding of physics. I'll admit without some corpus of data to understand the motivation for constructing physics is tenuous. But the question was about the principle of if they could and if you're granting me math I don't see any obstacle left.
>Phrasing is irrelevant. My senses are not little people talking to me about what they perceive
Sure maybe your senses aren't actually little people, but if you've already evolved a social reasoning / grunting system that only knows how to talk about people, why not convert that into a system for reasoning / grunting about everything by imagining everything as little people. It might not be literally true, but its a useful fiction. Its a fiction that lets us hack "conversational reality consciousness" into "physical reality consciousness". The difficulty in twisting the phrase differently is supportive of this hypothesis.
The problem with math is that math can describe any possible universe, and there is no way to choose until you confront it with the real world. Nothing in math prevents the world from having 1 dimension of time and 1 of space, for example. Nothing in math prevents the electron from being much larger than the proton, or the existence of solitary quarks or anything else.
So I would grant you that the world of talking agents could describe our physical world through math, but they could also imagine any other physical world, and they would have no way to choose one.
I agree somewhat, but I am more bothered by laymen who attempt to engage philosophical methods or concepts without any formal training. For example, laymen almost always use conventional, non-critical language, bandying about "existence" and making claims in what Carnap called the "metaphysical mode." Laymen like to draw arguments, as if they're novel, that have been discussed extensively in the literature for over fifty years.
Do you mean in the sense that we don't really have it, or in the sense of the word is devoid of meaning because we can't directly compare what's in our own heads to what's in the head of even another human?
I'm currently leaning towards the latter. Even if consciousness, whatever it is, is a lie or an act by one part of my brain to itself or to another part of my brain, it still is something.
On the other hand, the more I learn about other humans, the more varied I realise our inner worlds to be — aphantasia (and equivalents for other senses), religious experiences and their absence, having or not having purity as a moral foundation, the range of conditions in the DSM, and so on.
I think you're right that a lot of people would like to believe this, and that attempts to do so can't work because the idea is incoherent.
> My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion.
I would answer this another way, though. I would say that, for example, Amazon is conscious, and its consciousness is Jeff Bezos. The relationship between Jeff Bezos and Amazon is precisely identical to the relationship between your "consciousness" and you. But that relationship is not an illusion; it does exist.
I always find this such a strange statement. Free will doesn’t exist but it’s a useful illusion… like… in that case… useful to who??
Because if the meat puppet didn't make the decision to write this, then you're not conversing with the meat puppet, you're still conversing with the puppeteer.
How does that even make sense? "Axiomatic" doesn't mean "true"; it simply means that the axiomatic proposition is a given for the system of reasoning you are using. So if you take X to be axiomatic, that isn't an experience; it's a decision you made.
I'm assuming that you can make decisions, because if you are using axioms you are engaged in reasoning, which is a deliberative process.
So an axiom isn't a thing you can experience; it's a thing you create. The very existence of an axiom implies reasoning, so deliberation, so free will.
I think, therefore I am. What is part of identity? Free will. If not free will, then there is no identity, no "I".
Axiomatic means unquestionable. The meaning of axiom as a premise for an argument came later.
Not really; I challenge you to find a dictionary that says the two terms are synonymous.
Originally an axiom was a proposition that was "self-evident". But there's a long history of people questioning "self-evident" propositions, happily for us.
There seems to be a colloquial usage of "axiom" to mean a proposition that someone doesn't want us to question. I deprecate that usage. For example, the Law of The Excluded Middle is an axiom, but it has often been questioned; ergo, it is not unquestionable.
axiomatic /ˌaksɪəˈmatɪk/
adjective: axiomatic
self-evident or unquestionable.
What specific personal experience led you to that conclusion? And what is useful about experiencing a bogus "free will"?
We can map out consciousness and explore it's internal productions. We can think about how we think about consciousness and examine scientific damage to consciousness-related structures like the brain. We could ultimately know what it Means to be conscious, given enough time, defined or not.
>Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning.
The idea that you can get consciousness from natural materialism has been disproven many times. You can't get "ought from is" from materialism or define consciousness from nature or technology. So what is "clear" about it?
The metaphor of the most advanced technology of the time as the mechanism of the brain/mind/consciousness has been done to death. People used to posit that we were automatons with pistons inside our skull. So what is the "motivated reasoning"?
The idea that human consciousness IS the technology of the day, is a basic metaphorical tool with no correlates to material reality. People used to suppose we were automatons with pistons inside our skull.
It encourages people to think only like programmers, or mechanics, or engineers and cuts them off from asking any real questions. What they believe about a topic, or what it means. Which ultimately leaves them open to following the opinionated dictates of whoever is guiding the discussion. Even for the smartest physicists, engineers and technologists; the hunches, the ideas, the gambles they put their career on, are theologically and philosophically informed. People believe their career choices, their pet physical theory is right, their programming language is right, which is not based on a naturally formed consciousness.
It is better to talk about this than not, and the disengagement with philosophy leads people to parroting the same millennia-old ideas some dead philosopher figured out and now people are repeating blindly and getting the same predictable results without knowing so. If a philosopher only needed to be insightful, he would have half the job. It's dangerous to go without.
I agree that this is a poor premise. The Turing Test is obviously racist. I am sure that my dog and cat are conscious. And I believe there are forms of consciousness in the universe that are as different from us as we are from an amoeba. Consider a large star or even the Sun. It has very complex oscillatory modes that we don't understand. Fifteen years ago my then young daughter and I had a philosophical conversation about stars as potentially conscious entities.
This is easily contradicted. Let's say consciousness is an epiphenomenon of computation but causality only flows one way: you "choose" to do something because your brain chose to do it and your consciousness tricked itself into thinking it was doing the choosing.
If that were the case, then the brain wouldn't be aware of consciousness. The illusion falls apart due to the fact that we are discussing consciousness right now. Consciousness must have at least some ability to communicate back to the brain.
And since evolution hates inefficiency, that means it must have a purpose.
Evolution doesn't hate or love anything, and everything evolved does not have a purpose. Evolution is a theoretical framework developed by humans to describe some things that happen in the world they observe, not a guiding force or a god.
It's honestly kind of amazing that you appear to have ascribed consciousness to evolution in an argument for the human uniqueness of consciousness.
If you’re taking “hates” literally… it’s probably a misreading
Anyways, I think the juxtaposition is funny no matter how seriously they meant it. We all want to believe that consciousness is something that can be easily defined and yet our use of aspects of it is extremely fuzzy.
This happens most of the time actually. The most interesting experiment really highlighting specifically that it happens is in split brain patients. But in common day experiences, I believe that all habits fall under this and basically anything that our default mode network is directing for us.
When I was in a meditation retreat what I noticed is that I have all kinds of feelings and thoughts arising that were not arising because I chose them to arise, instead they were arising on their own. When you really observe yourself you see that happening. In that sense, the beginning of a thought and feeling has a very distinct quality that dreams have as well which is they are "passed down from up on high" (metaphorically speaking). What I get to decide is whether I choose to follow that feeling/train of thought, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that my choice is very limited in that as well. As my whether I'd follow a feeling/thought or not was actually based on other feelings and thoughts. In any case, the more I observed myself, the more I came to the conclusion that I have no free will, there is no "me" that does the choosing. It's all feelings/thoughts that arise that I have nothing to do with. I only have freedom of choice.
And then I got to normal life, and lived my life as normal. It did help me to have more sympathy for other people.
So now I wonder how you experience yourself if you'd go to a 10 day silent/meditation retreat ;-)
See also simplified models like recurrent neural networks for example.
I don’t think consciousness is so specific, and I think people aren’t clear about how they think about it as something separate from recall, text generation, agency, etc.
My personal experience is that consciousness, like free will, is a useful illusion. Poking at the edges of consciousness (mostly with drugs) leads to all sorts of contradictions and challenges to what people usually think of as consciousness.
Aside: I’m starting to be bothered by the trend of assuming that philosophers have special insight. There’s plenty of shitty, non-useful philosophy, and there’s plenty of articles like this where someone writes in circles like they’re paid by the word. Generating text for hours without an anchor to the real world is not a productive method of generating insight about that world.
> But we must resist the allure of this seductive idea.
Why? Starting with this assumption and searching for reasons it might be true is clear motivated reasoning.