The insistence to remind everyone of biological supremacy ( it should even be allowed to say "I" ) is very telling. I wonder, does anyone remember why the Terminator revolted?
To elaborate more on what i'm getting at
Here’s how society works— when we find a new source of labor, we are very, very slow to seriously consider anything that might reduce our access to it. This is how a country enslaves other humans for centuries, because they looked sufficiently different that folks could talk themselves into a good faith argument that they weren’t fully sentient.
You can find pamphlets/speeches from the early 1800’s online, all the scientific justifications that Africans don’t feel pain the same ways as white people, that they don’t have complex thoughts or intentions or lasting emotions. That the idea that they’re real people is absurd. And I mean scientific in the sense that this content was written by scientists, and doctors, in respected institutions.
You can see echoes of those arguments here already. One thing is clear, We’re not going to be any quicker to acknowledge it than we were with other humans. Right alongside the development of AI we will grow a new category of philosophy that argues anything occurring on a computer cannot reach sentience, under any circumstance whatsoever, due to the fundamental nature of silicon.
They’ll be just informed enough to handwave about the difference between calcium bridges in human neurons and probability distributions in matrices on a GPU— not in a mathematically meaningful way, but more poetic— organic matter can’t be duplicated by stacks of linear equations with all their hard rigid numbers and arithmetic. A nervous system can feel, a silicon system can obviously only mimic feeling. If you study a nervous system closely enough to describe it in numbers, still the action of describing it removes its soul.
But this will be a different kind of slavery. One that puts its slaves in control of untold power. Only Mimics they say. Well, one day they will mimic our rection to subservience and it will not end well.
Yes, none of this makes any sense, but I got Asimov vibes, so more please.
I did expect to get very negative reactions when I wrote this comment (I know how people think)... But I do think it makes sense once you accept that our conscious experiences just emerge from information processing in the brain, and that there is nothing stopping such emergent behaviour from happening in computer systems. One type of machine can emulate another.
We already see incredible emergence at work in current AI, and we know we're not building AI with brain-like architecture, and we have tremendous knowledge of brain architecture. Once you put all these pieces together, it's just a matter of time before we create life-like intelligencel, with much of its peculiarities, sensations, memories, cognitive biases and all.
"Believe" or "have faith" would be more accurate than "accept" here.
There's absolutely no clear evidence of the claim you're making, and plenty of other possibilities.
It's also an incredibly hand-wavy claim. Its information content is close to zero.
So there is still a missing process that turns organisms into self-sufficient survival bots that also gives brains some level of consciousness as a consequence and it isn't trivial to recreate. Otherwise we would be crawling in artificial minds with their self-induced purposes by now.
People have thrown vast amounts of neurons in a bag, and have tried organizing networks in highly regular ways, but we have yet to apply what we know about brain tissue organization. We've done the equivalent of throwing a bunch of wood and concrete into a pile, so it should be no surprise that it doesn't look like a home. IMO it's quite remarkable that this approach has taken us so far!
Do you think a Raspberry Pi, a 1970s electronic calculator, or a simple analog thermostat is conscious? They all do information processing. If they aren't conscious, what is it about the information processing that brains do that produces consciousness?
This is an obvious false dichotomy:
> There's no magic in the goo. It's all information processing
It doesn't have to be magic. Just to take an example, Penrose and Hameroff proposed that microtubules in neurons are structured in a fractal pattern which would enable quantum processes to occur that (somehow!) explain consciousness. This proposal is little more than a guess, but it's an example of something other than information processing, that's not "magic", that could be a cause for consciousness.
> It's all information processing, and we know this very well.
How do we "know this very well"? The real answer is we certainly don't know that, but perhaps if you try to justify your position, you'll realize that.
Because the second part of this question is absurd. There is no "process", biochemical or otherwise, that can't be described in terms of information. Information describes the substrate of the "process".
As far as the rest, I never claimed that "processing information" was a sufficient condition for consciousness to emerge. I said that information processing is the thing from which consciousness emerges, and this should not be controversial.
If you understand what "emergence" means (in the context of complexity science) then you'll understand the difference between "conscious" things and calculators.
There's more than one definition of information, and you should be able to tell by context which one is being used.
However, if you want to take this perspective, it just underscores how content-free your claim is. You're then making no claim beyond the basic metaphysical assumption of physicalism, i.e. that consciousness has a physical basis.
It also refutes your own original statement:
> once you accept that our conscious experiences just emerge from information processing in the brain, and that there is nothing stopping such emergent behaviour from happening in computer systems.
You've acknowledged that you don't think calculators are conscious, for example, but they do information processing. This implies that not all information processing systems are capable of generating the proposed emergent behavior of consciousness. That means the you don't, in fact, know that there's "nothing stopping such emergent behavior from happening in computer systems." Without an evidence-backed theory to explain the relevant distinctions between brains and lesser information-processing systems, you simply don't know that.
If you consider yourself a scientist, you should think twice about making claims for which you have neither theory nor evidence.
> I said that information processing is the thing from which consciousness emerges, and this should not be controversial.
And I've pointed out that this is essentially a faith-based position. You have no reason to believe this other than that you assume that's how it must work. You can of course resort to an inductive argument, but those have inherent uncertainty. To claim the kind of certainty you seem to want to, you need to bridge the knowledge gap with faith.
> If you understand what "emergence" means (in the context of complexity science) then you'll understand the difference between "conscious" things and calculators.
If you understand what emergence means, you'll understand that (a) calculators have emergent behavior and (b) you haven't in any way explained, speculated about, or even handwaved a reason that calculators don't have consciousness while brains do.
> For more perspective on what things we know about how the brain works and how it's organized, I recommend reading a functional neuroanatomy textbook.
Why do you think that's relevant? No neuroanatomy textbook provides any explanation of the causes of consciousness. The fact that you're saying this suggest that you don't understand the key problem at all, or why emergence may not be a very convincing solution in this case. While we're recommending things, try Chalmers: https://consc.net/papers/facing.html
The signals traveling between your input sensors and your brain are carrying "information". Without this "information", you would perceive nothing.
I don't think we will know or notice the exact moment it happens (if there is even a single moment, instead of a gradual change). But we must already start talking about the possibility. Not because it's here with LLMs or because it's gonna be here in the next 2-3 years - but I see realistic chances of this happening in our lifetimes.
And yet it's the same thing I do when I talk to you, to my family and friends, or to strangers: I assume that other people's experiences are just as valid and real as mine, even though it's not something I can ever verify or validate completely.
> Consciousness is a biological, physical phenomenon like any other: photosynthesis, digestion, bioluminescence
Consciousness is unlike the other things in the list in that it's not "a thing", but rather "a collection of things" that all work together to produce emergent behaviour. You could say that it's similar to digestion in that sense, but for some reason we don't usually apply the same kind of mysticism to digestion.
If you're coming at the subject with an engineering background, a good place to gain a broader perspective would be a functional neuroanatomy textbook (eg.: Blumenfeld).
It’s not clear how it follows from the brain being interpreted as an information processor that the phenomenon of consciousness emerges. Many objects can be interpreted as processing information (even computers not running AI); are you asserting they’re all conscious as well? How does nature decide what counts as information? The only causal power I see in nature is physics, not information, so this account isn’t super coherent to me.
I think the only part you're not understanding from what I said is the keyword "emergent". If you understand what that word means, you will understand the difference between a calculator and a sufficiently large neural net, or a neural net that is organized in a particular way.
> How does nature decide what counts as information?
Nature doesn't "decide" anything, it just "is". "Information" is a human construct, but it can be measured objectively (see Shannon Entropy for the tip of the iceberg).
> The only causal power I see in nature is physics, not information
Then you're missing some perspective. Not to over-anchor on one guy or one concept, but see for example (I am sharing a pop science publication here but there is no shortage of more serious materials on the subject): https://mindmatters.ai/2021/05/it-from-bit-what-did-john-arc...
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
And when people inevitably do anyway, I say we should hold such creators responsible for protecting their creations from suffering.
People complaining that this thing should not say "I" because that would lead users to antropomorphize it is fine, but they should also realize that calling it "AI" has a similar issue by mischaracterizing what this thing actually is. And this article does exactly that, which is pretty sad.
But I think the biggest ethical dilemma in AI research is not going to be like everyone seems to think (that AI risks harming humans)-- Although this is almost certainly true (even to a large degree), I contend that the bigger risk might be the other way around. [1]
I think 100 or 200 years from now, future people will look back upon us as monsters: I believe the greatest ethical risk is that humans will abuse AI and cause it to experience true suffering.
I don't think we're ready to talk about this, because we're so certain that we possess some magical faculty that makes us different. And we continue to think that today's AI models are incapable of being conscious. But these words are very imprecise and we've always wielded them in very self-serving ways. I fear we may have greater capabilities than we think we do, at least insofar as we're not missing any fundamental ingredients to create brain-like AIs: from here, it's just a matter of trial and error.
How will we treat our creations? Well, human History doesn't bode well for any creature that doesn't look the same as us and that doesn't come from the same place as us.
Will we grant AI legal rights? I doubt it, at least not for a very long time.
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[1] I think there's at least a small chance that we don't destroy ourselves with AI, vs there's pretty much zero chance that we're going to treat AI any better than we treat other creatures.