People really don't understand consciousness, but it's actually quite simple when you realize that the question isn't "is this conscious?", it's "what is this conscious of?". A rock is not conscious of anything, because it has no state that represents anything. A sunflower is conscious of the sun's position, because it has state that represents that. A cat is conscious of much more, such as "this mouse is food". An LLM is conscious of much more, but less than a human.
The LLM is a model that is conscious of many things, as experienced through the medium of human text.
I think Qualia is a wave phenomena, and all wave phenomena simultaneously can be described as "existing" and "not existing" as follows:
Think of a football stadium "wave". It has a beginning, ending, location, velocity, etc., all being scientifically measurable observables. Yet I ask you "Does the wave exist, or is it merely people in various states of arm positions?" There is no right or wrong answer. This is the nature of waves.
So if you want to argue consciousness "does not exist" I say fine, that is a valid "perspective", just like the denial of the existence of any other wave phenomena is a valid perspective. However keep in mind also that the entire universe is also made of waves.
I'm not arguing that consciousness doesn't exist, I'm saying that it's not a binary thing, and trying to provide a useful, falsifiable definition of it that provides a way to actually communicate about it instead of talking past each other.
I'm not even pushing the panpsychism view that "Everything has Consciousness, because all atoms have EM fields" at all, but when you get right down to it, EM fields are more "real" than a computation is. A computation is purely theoretical. We can build computer logic circuits out of water pipes or dominoes. So it's just obvious to me Qualia is not built on computations.
Believing Qualia is made of computations is more of a naieve "Universe is Love" type position than believing that Qualia is built of something REAL like EM fields. Calculations are not even real. For example the number 0100101110110 in a computer is purely a "label" for something real. Numbers in computers are just labels. EM waves are the actual thing, and actually real. The Map is not the Territory. Computers are Maps. Qualia is a Territory.
Like for all anyone knows, they're simply present to trigger (and keep triggered) "consciousness computations".
We must be *very* careful before making authoritative statements about who and what has qualia.
Sure, it's still debatable for us humans (the term isn't well defined) but that doesn't change the direction of required proof.
There is cultural/normative truth, and then there are various stricter/technical interpretations (using forms of logic other than binary, which causes reality to appear very differently), and making such distinctions is typically culturally "discouraged" (it is rude, pedantic, not what HN is for, etc).
The burden of proof does have direction. It's in the direction of the more complicated thing. Do you think a rock is conscious? What about lightning? If you're 99.999% of people, then the answer is no. So if you want to claim AI is conscious you need make the claim where inanimate becomes animate. And you know what they say about extraordinary claims... But personally I don't believe in ghosts, even those in machines
It's not about animate vs inanimate, it's about models that represent something.
There's also some confusion because we have limited language here. A person can be "unconscious", but that doesn't mean they've lost their world model. It's just currently not executing.
EDIT: I mean neuroscientists know brain frequency is more than an accidental correlation with consciousness.
I mention "unconscious" only to help disambiguate an overloaded word. It's used for both "this model includes something in its representation" as well as "this model is currently executing".
People often just hear the phrase "brain waves" and immediately think of "woo woo spirituality" because all the spiritual crack pots are constantly talking about waves without even having a physics background.
How about picking up a physics textbook? The status quo for Quantum is Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. Might I also suggest his E&M book (again, a standard). If you're half as passionate as you portray, I'd also pick up Jackson. That's the standard graduate level E&M book (but a warning on this: to get through Chapter 1 you're going to need to be intimately familiar with PDEs and Green's Function. To get further, I sure hope you like Bessel functions).
Take your passion and use it to drive you to prove. Don't just conjecture and don't try to derive things from first principles. You will get it wrong because you won't actually be working from first principles. Again, don't ignore humanity's greatest invention. It's so much easier to catch up than reinvent the wheel.
Also, you should become familiar with Penrose. I'll leave it to you to figure out why.
Have you done substantial reading?
> because they have no state that represents anything.
The point I'm making is that representation is not enough. Storage (or memory) is not enough even recall is not enough. If it is, then any mechanical process is. Because you can build computation machines out of nearly anything. You can build memory out of almost anything. And the hello world python program I wrote has both!
You can argue scale, but we see animals with much smaller scale than these ML models perform unambiguous reasoning tasks and critical thinking. You can then argue architecture and data, but then that's not just scale.
The problem with all these people making claims is that they don't consider base assumptions and they don't follow the consequences of the model (your mental model of what is consciousness) is and must mean! So many people argue that they are working from "first principles" but I don't see anyone writing down their fucking axioms.
Of course you should try to prove what you want, but not at the cost of not being wrong. Doing so will prevent you from achieving what you want. I'm just so tired of people shooting themselves in the foot and calling it medicine. We need to stop with all the bullshit because I actually want to build AGI
Sure then following OP's model outlined here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41427796, rocks are simply conscious of the passage of time. Perhaps it can be said that is the one thing every matter in the universe is conscious of.
>The point I'm making is that representation is not enough. Storage (or memory) is not enough even recall is not enough.
You don't know what is or isn't enough.
And by the way, what 99% of people think of a concept they can scarcely define, test for or prove doesn't mean shit. We are regularly wrong about concepts with much stronger standings.
Humans don't have any special insight to consciousness. We can't even make decisions without unknowingly altering our preferences and fabricating reasons in the process. What makes the conscious mind tick was clearly lost along the way.
>We need to stop with all the bullshit because I actually want to build AGI
No, you want to build the idea of AGI that exists in your mind. Clearly not Artificial General Intelligence seeing as what exists today checks all those boxes.
You want something more, and that's fine because I do too. Our state-of-the-art models are baby AGI, because they can accomplish a wide variety of tasks without being specifically trained for it. They can do limited reasoning on new tasks. That's intelligence that's both artificial and general. But it's just the start.
There's a few axes that need to be captured. Breadth of knowledge, ability to reason, and ability to update the model based on new information. LLMs are great at 1, possible superhuman. For 2, they're 1/10 on a scale of 0 to human. For 3, fine tuning and prompt stuffing get the job done for now, but they're a far cry from human ability.
And yes, you can build computation machines out of nearly anything. If you simulate a human brain with sticks and stones, what does it matter the substrate?
> AGI exists now
What I hate about these conversations is that people learn the basics but there's been a lot of advancements since the 50's. We've learned a lot since the 90's too! Yes, the metrics keep changing, but they are not in response to the current state of the art in a specific effort to make the systems not AGI[1]. But rather the criteria keeps changing because we keep learning. It would be ludicrous if it didn't! Because WE STILL HAVE NOT CONCRETELY DEFINED CONSCIOUSNESS, REASONING, THINKING, and many other similar terms. The criteria are generally guides created by best guesses. But until we have formal definitions, expect it to change (and when we do have formal definitions, be sure as hell to understand their assumptions!).
But I can confidently tell you that LLMs do not exhibit generalization in the way we've been using it for decades. This is easy to demonstrate but if you're a true believer then there's no convincing. And in that case, just don't bother arguing either.
I really do encourage people to take their passion and use it to drive gaining a deep expertise on these subjects. You're passionate right? I hope that passion is not about "being right" or "having answers" and is actually about "understanding." And if you can't differentiate that, I suggest starting at the beginning, since these topics are covered there.
[0] Sure, you can find examples of people stating criteria, but I can find you samples of idiots, even among scientists.
[1] There are some bad faith people who do this but they're terrible people too. You may freely disregard their opinions.
You are incorrect. Any claim of fact has a burden of proof.
> So if you want to claim AI is conscious
You made a claim that it is not. How did you determine that is True? Or did you?
```python
def main():
print("Hello gaganyaan")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
```
So... The burden of proof is about what level of complexity is sufficient.
Sure, no one has this answer. But also despite a few billion people believing in ghosts, including some saying a large portion of that saying they've seen ghosts, the burden of proof is to show ghosts exist, not showing ghosts don't exist. The reason being that one is falsifiable while the other isn't.
Don't confuse "the absence of proof is not proof of absence" with "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." If you do you might start a war in the middle east.
This is why people who believe the "Consciousness is a Computation" view never want to discuss brain waves, despite the overwhelming evidence that brain waves is precisely the thing out of which consciousness is composed.
I'd be interested in seeing any of this overwhelming evidence, but it's also not relevant, unless you're arguing that brain waves are supernatural in origin and can't be simulated. I think the crux of your argument can be boiled down to: "What's inferior about a perfect brain simulation, regardless of medium?"
But I don't think this is a relevant analogy. It seems that you're arguing a specific form of the embodiment hypothesis; that consciousness requires a body. Surely this is a sufficient condition (and is why I think roboticists have a good chance at cracking AGI), but is it a necessary condition? I'm not sure anyone has any convincing evidence that cognition requires "a body" (is a standard computer "a body"? What about a laptop that has a camera? What body parts are necessary?) and if it does, it is unclear what constitutes the minimal necessary requirements. It is quite possible that this is all "software" (e.g. a person in a vegetative state may be completely oblivious to their surroundings but still may have conscious experiences. Most people do this every night!).
I think you are erroring too far in the other direction. While I highly disagree with the person you're responding to, I do no think you are making strong arguments yourself. With so little known about what actually constitutes consciousness, I think it is difficult to make bold claims about what it is (though we've ruled out things that it isn't; e.g. a rock. Which is our typical method of doing reasoning in science; we generally disprove things, not prove. Like you said, the map is not the territory, and in this say way our models (yes, plural) of physics is not physics itself).
I think the is evidence to believe that consciousness may be a "software" but that is not proof. Similarly I think we have lots of reasons to believe that embodiment is highly beneficial to creating consciousness, as not just by nature of examples, but our understanding of consciousness is in part about responding to environments and stimuli. But that's clearly not sufficient either and pinning down where this is, is quite complex (even our definition of life is ill-defined). I'm highly convinced that embodiment is the best path to pursue to achieve AGI, but I'm not convinced it is required either.
[0] If we get pedantic, we should note that any simulation has to run on hardware and that creates magnetic fields but these are not in fact necessarily the fields being simulated. I don't think we need to pursue this avenue for this conversation.
I think neurons do 4 distinct types of things. They 1) gather data (sensory inputs) and route it to 2) locations where it's oriented into 3D spatial shapes that function essentially like "Fractal Radio Antenna" [for lack of better description] where the 3) waves resonate to create what we call qualia, and then 4) the waves induce a current/action going to motor neurons. It works similar to a television set working in reverse, with the screen being an eye, and everything going backwards in time, not forwards. Pixels are sensors, not lights, in the TV analogy. Thousands of pixels are input (rods/cones) and it all routs to (not from) an antenna.
You can explain all of that with Maxwellian Electrodynamics. There's no "woo woo" there. It's physics. If you look at it like this, you can see that most of the neural network wiring is I/O and signal routing, except for the antenna-like structures, the best of which being the Corpus Callosum and Hippocampus, which evolved first, which is why they're deepest in the brain. Their physical shape is critical, because they are both indeed functioning as a kind of resonator/antenna, and are getting memories (what most of consciousness is built on is memories) thru wave effects.
> but definitely a brain (excluding plantlife to keep this short)
> I think neurons do 4 distinct types of things.
I ask because I suspect you're trying to solve the problem yourself and not building on the wide breadth of literature and research we have.
Brains do not operate in waves the same way a wave of water or electromagnetic wave does. Though anything can be approximated by a wave too, but signals need not be waves. Yes neurons conduct electric signals, but neuron to neuron communication (synaptic transmission) is chemical. These are discrete particles. But as I mentioned before, if we're talking about the electrical transmission inside the neuron, these are spikey[0,1]. When you look at neurons firing, there is a digital like signal. If anything, these look like Gaussian mixtures.
> There's no "woo woo" there.
So don't try to dispel people who are calling to magic by making a call to a different kind of magic. I don't think you're dumb, but rather it is easy to oversimplify and end up with something that requires magic. It's FAR easier to do this than to get the right answers. There's a reason people study very narrow topics for decades. Because it is all that complicated and trying to reinvent their work (while a good exercise) is just more likely to end up making many of the same mistakes that were then later resolved. We have the power of literature and the internet makes it highly available (though can be hard to differentiate from hogwash and it can be hard to find truth). Use the tools to your advantage instead of trying to do everything from scratch. Do the exercise, but also check and find the mistakes, improve, and do this until you catch up. Hell, you may even find mistakes the experts made along the way! The good news is that its SO much easier to catch up than it is to extend knowledge. You can learn what took thousands of years to get to in a week! It's hard, but in comparison catching up is trivial. So don't squander humanity's greatest innovation just because you worked hard at building your model. But refine it and make sure it doesn't invoke magic.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neuron_model
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton_model_in_neuroscience
> This is why people who believe the "Consciousness is a Computation" view never want to discuss brain waves, despite the overwhelming evidence that brain waves is precisely the thing out of which consciousness is composed.
But I really disagree with your argument. The difference doesn't come down to analogue vs digital and that seems like quite a bold assumption, especially considering 1) digital can get quite approximate to continuous signals and it can represent continuous signals 2) the brain doesn't function entirely continuously. Neuron signals are quite spikey. The neuromorphic people drew their inspiration from these and other aspects of the brain. But the brain is not operating on just continuous signals. There's a lot going on in there.
But if your true complaint is about how few ML people and far fewer ML enthusiasts will passionately discuss these subjects but also refuse to read literature from neuroscience, mathematical logic & reasoning, and other domains, then yeah, I also have that complaint. When you're a hammer I guess....
> Do you think a computer simulation of an EMF wave is an actual EMF wave?
> aren't you also claiming that actual EMF waves are "just computations"?
You are confusing what simulation means, which is why I explicitly put it in quotes. There's a dumb "simulation hypothesis" (the likes of which people like Elon Musk discuss) and there's a "yeah the terms are broad enough so it can be viewed as a simulation - simulation hypothesis". The latter isn't really contested because it also isn't very meaningful in the first place. But it does matter here for what you're talking about and why we brought up that a rock has "memory" since we can store information in the atomic structure. You're missing the abstraction of the stuff and how we're just talking about entropy.
Look at it this way, how does nand flash store memory? You trap electrons in states, right? This is to say you isolate charge to one side of a transistor gate from another. You can also do this with magnetic storage. There's plenty of people who build macro computers with things like water, and in those you're separating buckets of water. Physicists love to build computers out of things, and there are even thermal computers, using heat flow for computation.
That's the thing, computation is just about differentials in entropic states. So literally everything is a computer and everything is computing. Thanks emergence (another extremely misinterpreted word that people believe holds much more meaning than it does). But this does not mean there's some programmer, god, or any of that. It just means that information exists... You're making the same mistake these Musk like people talking about "living in a simulation" make, conflating the computer you're sitting in front of now that you control and have power over with just information flowing (obviously you can affect things in the physical world, and that's why experiments are physical simulations -- since they are controlled and limited settings -- but good luck programming "the universe" -- whatever the fuck that means. You're going to need more energy that it's got...)
So view physics as the instruction set of the universal computer or whatever. We're dealing with huge levels of abstraction so you can't go about understanding these things with reference to how we normally operate (this is why physics is so fucking hard and why advanced math -- well beyond calculus -- gets so crazy). Just like you can't work with high dimensional data by trying to relate to things in 2 or 3d, because the rules are very different at those abstraction levels (for example, the concept of a distance measure becomes useless. This is the curse of dimensionality that people very often misinterpret due to looking at it in a limited scope).
When someone makes a conjecture about physical reality like "Consciousness is made of EMF Waves, not Computations" (like I did) and then someone else tries to refute that with an appeal to the Simulation Theory (like you did) then that's called "Appeal to Base Reality".
Even if we're living in a simulation we still should consider EMF waves a very different phenomena than computations. Computations are not a phenomena of physics. Computations can be done on an abacus.
When run, that program will have a very simple model that includes only a few things like stdout. More complex programs will have models that represent more things. A game of tic tac toe written in Python is conscious of the state of the board, because it models it.
It's not "when does it become conscious.", it's "how much is it conscious of?". Asking the prior question is like asking "When does someone become rich?" or "When is the apple ripe?"
This isn't about ghosts. This is exactly a way of looking at it that provides a concrete, falsifiable definition, because far too many people are talking right past each other whenever "consciousness" comes up. This is trying to get past the magic words, and get at something useful.
> like "become conscious", which binarizes it.
There are countless things where we recognize they are on a spectrum yet we use shortcuts in language to specify a sufficient threshold. If you don't believe me, may I introduce to you the color blue. Or any other color for that matter.
There is still the aspect that even when we consider consciousness to lie upon a continuum this does not mean that the function yields a non-zero result (or even approximately) prior to some threshold. In this case there is no ambiguity of "becomes conscious" as you can interpret this in the most weak form of consciousness. If you believe that the consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum then please state so, as I believe you are smart enough to not misinterpret my meaning and we can actually have a productive conversation. If you believe in that and also that it is a very slow growing function until a certain point, well... if you're going to be fucking pedantic then be fucking pedantic. In either case, you don't have to force this conversation into an argument and reconstruct it so that you're smart and I'm dumb. Who knows that relationship and such definitions are typically obtuse anyways.
So please, engage with at least a little good faith here.
> This isn't about ghosts.
Don't talk about people "talking past one another" when you are egregiously misinterpreting. In any conversation you have to make sure that you are correctly decoding the other person's words. At least if you do indeed want to "get at something useful."
I'm not trying to pigeonhole you. I do believe that consciousness is only zero at the domain minimum and it's a slowly growing function, but I disagree that there's any sort of "certain point". Humans are "more conscious" than cats (and better terminology is that they are conscious of more things than cats, or their world model encompasses more than cats, or something like that), but that doesn't mean humans are conscious and cats aren't.
My entire point is that "consciousness" is entirely unlike "blue". You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer. You can't ask the question "is this conscious?". You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
> I realize you're using ghosts as an analogy
> I'm saying this isn't about anything mystical.
> I'm not trying to pigeonhole you.
> You can ask the question "is this blue?" and have a coherent answer.
> You need to ask the question "what is this conscious of?".
The thing is, everything is fuzzy. Embrace the chaos, because if we're going to talk about brains and consciousness and abstractions, well you're not going to be able to work with things that are concrete. But, this too is fuzzy and I think you're likely to misinterpret. Just because everything is fuzzy doesn't mean there aren't things that are more wrong than others. It's more that you can't have infinite precision. So stop trying to deal in absolute answers, especially when we're in topics that people are have been unable to solve for thousands of years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/colors/comments/1ao2osm/is_this_col...
[4] https://www.color-meanings.com/shades-of-blue-color-names-ht...