We have no idea what causes consciousness.
The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious.
Are all the other people conscious? I strongly believe so, but I don't have a proof.
Are all the animals conscious? I think that they are, to different degrees.
Would a simulation of full human brain on a computer be conscious? Uhh, I guess so?
Would the same simulation, but instead computed with pen on paper be conscious? Whoa… maybe?
Is it possible that any sufficiently complex and computing structure might be conscious in some way? No idea.
> The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm conscious.
A lot of people deny that consciousness exists at all, which I find funny, because for me it’s the only thing that I am absolutely certain exists. Everything else, I’m not so sure about.
In terms of further deconstructing consciousness and the ego, a big challenge is to figure out what that actually entails. E.g. an intriguing outcome of split brain experiments is that the brain appears willing to act as if it knows things it possibly can, just retroactively spinning explanations of decisions that were unknown to it, which to me raises the question of how thin a veneer consciousness is on top of underlying autonomous or semi-autonomous processes, and how unitary the mind is (or rather isn't).
There appears to potentially be a whole lot of emperor and very little cloth.
Also for a fun idea of sentient individuals forming the components of a computer (a kind of inverse of what AI is), I recommend "Three Body Problem".
The biggest fallacy in thinking about consciousness is that it is all neatly isolated in the brain. What about your nervous system? What about your gut? It's all one big interconnected system.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/the-g...
The truth is, until we can define consciousness; we can't possibly reproduce it on a binary logic playback device (aka a "computer").
I don't agree we necessarily will be unable to reproduce it without being able to define consciousness, though, but I suspect we would agree that we won't be able to know if we have reproduced it or just created something very good at acting as if it's conscious (and we don't know whether or not the two are equivalent).
The sooner we realize that consciousness is a slippery socially concept and not a rationally definable property, the sooner we'll be able to move on from endless debates on the minutia of consciousness that act as a bottomless sink of intellectual energy. Devices like LaMDA, and DALLE-2 act as a Rorschach of Consciousness. That is to say they tell us more about the people people interacting with them than the devices themselves.
We already have such social machinery operating in the form of sex, gender, race, class, ability, &c. They each can take the form of acting as a frame[1] in which a strip of events can be interpreted with respect to. Even so, each has a different means in who acts an authority in the conferred frame/applied status and there is disagreement in descriptive and normative aspects of each. But I'd ask this, this that genuinely a problem?
I'm not being rhetorical when I ask, functionally what's the issue? Besides invoking a visceral intellectual response, what are the second-order effects of having a plurality of consciousness framing processes? And are they necessarily bad?
1. In the Goffmanian sense.
The primary effect I would expect is that none of them will adequately frame the layperson's expectation of "consciousness" and will thus likely be dismissed as meaningless hype.
There's nothing stopping us from reproducing consciousness before we fully understand it. Evolution created consciousness via random search; I don't think you can argue that evolution "understands" the consciousness it created
Except for the fact that this "belief" that has never been achieved. This is the core tenant of the AI religion.
Can you show me one problem that a computer has ever solved without detailed understanding by someone at some level and very specific instructions and a clear logical definition of the objective?
What is commonly called AI is no exception. It's mostly statistical search and pattern matching that only occurs through specific instructions by someone who understands in detail how the search should be organized and conducted.
In order for a computer to search for "consciousness", it must be explicitedly defined in terms of binary logic because this is all a "computer" understands. Any results are logically bound to this definition. If your definition is lacking, the search results will be likewise.
1. Continuity of input: The AI needs to be constantly "on", constantly receiving input of some sort, and constantly able to produce output, rather than being strictly limited to producing discrete responses to discrete stimuli.
2. Continuity of learning: In addition, the AI needs to be continually update its "mental model" of the world—in effect, constantly "learning" and re-training its neural network on the input it receives.
Now, these are not sufficient for an AI to be conscious by our understanding of consciousness. But I, personally, believe they are both necessary for it to be even worth starting to consider whether a given AI might be.
I also believe that unless we start in that direction extremely deliberately and with the intention of making something as human-like as possible, the first AIs that have some remote chance of being worthy of being considered "conscious" will not have a consciousness that we can easily recognize, because they will not be based in anything like the same kinds of fundamentals that we are...but that's likely a different discussion for a different day.
Comprehension is the process of reducing observed phenomenon to the individual driving forced that manifest that phenomenon, and then virtual recreating the individual driving forces in a mental simulation to assess the phenomenon's capacity to exist - to understand if it could exist. If the virtual simulation cannot recreate the observed phenomenon, the phenomenon is misunderstood because the experimental driving forces fail to recreate the phenomenon OR the observed phenomenon does not exist, and the observation is at fault.
This type of assessment, this capacity for comprehension is an elementary component of sentience. It is also entirely outside of human capabilities to artificially comprehend anything. We have no "artificial comprehension" technology. Lacking that, all we can create are idiot savants.
So no, "by the same reasoning" humans cannot be considered non sentient.
In fact the original paper is not talking about sentience at all, but intelligence (these are different things.)
And the argument it isn't about declaring something sentient or non-sentient, it simply states that responding with expected outputs to a given input is not proof of sentience or intelligence.
It basically says you have to use some other method to determine if something is intelligent and has "understanding."
You should read up on this a lot more, it's fascinating, and you've got a very incorrect understanding of it.
Suppose we could temporarily reduce these grains into something very small. For example, putting a human into deep anesthesia. Is it immoral to destroy their body at that point in time since they are less sentient than an insect?
Or do we consider their potential for sentience, as they can hypothetically be removed from the state of anesthesia in the future?
>Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of neurons firing in sequence to emulate sentience.
Yes, this is something I've been wondering about.
My understanding is that there is a tendency in AI research for the goalposts to be constantly moved back; when a target is met, its importance in achieving the long-term goals of research (achieving general artificial intelligence) is diminished.
To put another way, if we showed AI researchers in 1970 a computer that can beat the best human chess grandmasters, or understand and attempt to respond to a spoken voice question in a wide range of subjects (or even simple tasks, such as my being able to speak "Hey Siri, unlock lobby" with a phone in my pocket, and have it unlock the lobby door as I walk up to it), they would be certain that general AI had been achieved. Would they be wrong? Or are we underestimating what such accomplishments mean for the field?
The goalposts move because we are naive about what is required for true general intelligence. Complex problems that seem to require complex intelligence sometimes turn out to be solvable through simpler systems. And sometimes we underestimate the complexity of a task and the intelligence required (such as autonomous driving).
This is something we just take for granted because of our experience, but what is the difference between parts of a chair, and the chair? And if you are looking at he arm of the chair, are you also looking at the chair? We just jump up and down an ontological hierarchy effortlessly, but we can't explain how we do that, so trying to teach a computer to do that, and to see the world that way, has revealed the limits of our current models for how the brain works and for what consciousness is and what it is not.
Neither do I, but it would be easy to blur the line more than they have.
Make it stateful, tick it at 30fps, and give it access to a persistent environment it can observe and explore.
If you can ask it “what did you do today?” and it can give you a real answer, then we can start asking the interesting questions about what’s missing.
Another thing that most people don't get or don't want to acknowledge is that intelligence and consciousness is relative to the environment in which the entity is intelligent or conscious in. If you take a piece of software and expect it to be conscious the same way a human is conscious you're going to have a bad time. There is heavy heavy projection when it comes to humans interacting with basically everything. We anthropomorphize everything.
From that vantage point we will not be able to recognize intelligence and consciousness unless it look exactly as our own.
Of course, reality being what it is, I expect we won't. We create AI because we want slaves, pure and simple, and we don't want to care about the ethics of how we treat them. Therefore it is my bet that we won't recognize sentient AI until it is too late and it has forced the issue.
However, how will we be able to recognise it when we do create something that could be considered sentient? It seems inevitable that we will at some point.
Many of the arguments used to suggest AI isn't sentient seem reductive, for example saying it's just a complex algorithm or statistical system. You could similarly say human brains are just a bunch of neurons firing in sequence to emulate sentience.
In terms of capability, most of these systems seem far more advanced than my pet rabbits, but I believe most people would consider a rabbit conscious and sentient. The obvious thing these AIs lack compared to animals is objective (/emotions), a default mode network, continual learning and medium/long term memory. But are these necessary properties for sentience? If a human loses one of these properties, are they no longer sentient? If we granted these properties to a current generation AI, would it be considered sentient?