7 ms·

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the eme

• eszed 4mo ago
  Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis is correct, then we eventually will. I'm more scared than pleased by the prospect, but there you are.
  • slopinthebag 4mo ago
    This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?
    • therealdrag0 4mo ago
      Those are the questions and there’s stacks and stacks of philosophy pages written about it. Go have a whirl.
    • pixl97 4mo ago
      Is a video game a physical property of a computer?
      • slopinthebag 4mo ago
        Yes
        • pixl97 4mo ago
          So then we can assume consciousness is a physical property of brains, as we can measure the electrical signals of consciousness versus when we are unconscious.
      • bulbar 4mo ago
        We have general purpose hardware and we have hardware that's hard wired for specific purposes like ASICs and we have everything in between. And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".
    • doctoboggan 4mo ago
      > This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above
      • bulbar 4mo ago
        I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.
        • kelseyfrog 4mo ago
          Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.
          • fc417fc802 4mo ago
            Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here. Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.
            • kelseyfrog 4mo ago
              I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho
              • 4mo ago
    • eszed 4mo ago
      Not a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities. Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.
      • slopinthebag 4mo ago
        Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to ask is that if it is an emergent property but not a physical part of the brain, doesn't that imply something metaphysical about consciousness? Almost as if it's a non-physical phenomenon? At least when I hear people talk about emergent behaviour I see it as a refutation of the spiritual, but to me it seems like it actually implies we have a "soul". Idk, it's really hard to articulate my thoughts here and yes it is pretty close to the conversations I had in college on various substances. Lol.
        • eszed 4mo ago
          I don't know if it implies that. Someone up-thread mentioned temperature as an emergent property: individual atoms don't have it, but a sufficiently large group of them do. That would, I guess, make temperature meta-physical in the most literal possible sense. That's not how we typically think of that term as applied to consciousness or soul or whatever, but I'd agree it fits, without implying any kind of specialness beyond that.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4mo ago
    Our machines won't have biological systems driving their needs which in turn fuel behaviors like desire and planning for the future. They may imitate them but it won't be innate.
    • lotyrin 4mo ago
      I think those are things human consciousness has, not is.
    • trick-or-treat 4mo ago
      For an LLM, "innate" means "in their training data". So yeah, those things are pretty much innate.
      • ludwik 4mo ago
        And also "instilled during their reinforcement training", and we are currently pushing planning hard there, for autonomous agents.
        • trick-or-treat 4mo ago
          No I think reinforcement training would be an example of not innate. Don't you? That's like potty training.
          • ludwik 4mo ago
            Is it? Both supervised learning and reinforcement learning are ways of training the model, and the difference between them is not that big. I would say that innate means "in the weights", while non-innate means things the model learned during inference, during its "lifetime".
            • trick-or-treat 3mo ago
              Maybe you're right. In the weights might be the right way to frame that. What do you mean by "during its lifetime"? Do you mean things like system prompts or things in Claude.md? It sounds like you're framing a session as a "lifetime". Whch might be right, I haven't thought of it like that before though. So when I /compact my session what's that even the equivalent of I wonder.
  • bulbar 4mo ago
    Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons. What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty. I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.
    • vkazanov 4mo ago
      Yes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.
      • fc417fc802 4mo ago
        Agree and add, don't confuse the substrate for the computation. Of course it's also clear that we don't quite have a full and definite picture of what the computation consists of in the case of a biological brain as evidenced by our continued failure to accurately simulate even the simplest of organisms.
      • bux93 4mo ago
        Only if you ignore almost every input and output that neurons have. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-and-thats-ok-20250430/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/ This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).
        • vkazanov 4mo ago
          I don't ignore anything. I just refuse to accept the magical thinking around biological machines that are our brains/bodies. There are inputs, there are outputs, there is hidden function. And it seems that, given enough input/outputs/compute, it is possible to train the necessary function. Details of how the building bricks look like (matmul, electromagnetism or quantum effects) are not that relevant in the broader picture. What is missing right now, is the fact that the function in question changes over time in biomachines, while our LLMs are static at inference time.
  • ProllyInfamous 4mo ago
    >consciousness is an emergent property You would really like Michael Pollan's latest book [1], entirely devoted to his exploration of consciousness researchers' POVs on this exact topic. My favorite quote is that ~"perhaps Descartes was only half-wrong when suggesting I think, therefore I am; it seems rather closer to I FEEL, therefore I am."~ [1] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousness/dp/198488199X/ https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...> ---- I've grown thousands of plants; I've read two of the author's other books devoted to plants; in this book Pollan makes compelling arguments for plant sentience (over a much-longer timeframe). Sure, perhaps plant consciousness is a bit of a stretch, but they're certainly intelligent and curious creatures. He makes both arguments supporting plant volition. ---- If you haven't seen My Octopus Teacher (Netflix), do. I'm a bald 275lb bluecollarguy... and I wept/awed (both). So beautiful, we bundled neurons. ---- Bonus quote ~"color is where reality and magic appear as-if together"~ [color isn't real, but is perceived]. We most-often see what's most-predictable, not necessarily what we actually detected [in the case of color: nothing but nanometers].
  • clort 4mo ago
    Surely the number of neurons is not the whole story. Human brains have approximately 86 billion and are almost definitely conscious, but there are many other animals with a lot fewer (gorilla: 34 billion, dog: 2-3 billion, guinea pig: 240 million) which appear to be conscious also. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
  • ffwd 4mo ago
    Personally I'm not a fan of the emergence story, for a number of reasons. First is, it doesn't really make sense for consciousness to have emerged gradually through natural selection. When we and animals are conscious, the whole brain is coordinated and works to for example turn off consciousness when we sleep. And as someone else mentioned, animals with much fewer numbers seem to have a similar consciousness to us. If consciousness really evolved gradually, you would expect to see for example dogs or gorillas having less of it, but if they has less of it, why does it function the same way? Like for example animals can be scared, happy, anxious etc, they can experience the full range of emotions and thoughts, so their conscious experience seems just as rich as ours. What I mean by this is, if you can be "less conscious", then what does that mean _exactly_? Is it that you have less content in consciousness, or is it that you feel more like you are asleep? Or something else? We don't have any examples in animals of "less conscious", I would argue. This makes me think that rather than having emerged gradually, evolution found a mechanism by which consciousness exists, and then some animals have that mechanism and others don't. I think that if it is a mechanism, then this mechanism is located in one part of the brain, not many parts functioning together (though one possibility is that this mechanism coordinates brain activity in such a way to enable consciousness).
    • eszed 4mo ago
      I proposed in another comment that consciousness and self-awareness are at least close cousins, and perhaps the same phenomenon. If that's true, then that's an axis upon which you might create comparative measures. Yes, hamsters are conscious, but they don't have a sense of self to the same degree that gorillas do. If you posit capacity for language as another emergent property of sufficiently-complex networks, then you have another measure. LLMs, then, are particularly unintuitive to us, because they've got to the language part first, long before they've reached even hamster-level self-awareness. They're not, however, biological networks, so there's no reason these properties need arise in the same order, or indeed in the same ways. I'm not entirely convinced by that second paragraph, but I think the logic holds together.
      • ffwd 4mo ago
        I'm not sure consciousness and self-awareness are the same thing. First is we can be conscious when we sleep/during REM sleep, where it's arguable we are not self-aware. And if not that, we can even do it when awake, for example when we think about a movie, or a philosophical problem, we can have conscious thoughts that are not related to the self. This leads me to believe consciousness is separate from self-awareness. Self-awareness is _one thing_, among many, that the brain can think about and be conscious of.
• kridsdale3 4mo ago
  Time is entropy unfolding as things with nonzero temperature do what they do. Psychological time is your own weights being updated in response to stimuli and internal processing. When there isn't anything interesting happening, no updates are needed, and you don't perceive much time. That's why there's a logarithmic effect on the "density" of time as you age.
  • hippich 4mo ago
    This is actually something I was always confused about. If nothing interesting happens as we get old, it should be boring and as result, slow slog. Yet it feels like time accelerates as I get older.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    • pixl97 4mo ago
      Myself I believe the opposite. The brain itself is one of the most powerful filters that exists, and it attempts to be lazy and fill things in and compresses away the common. All that time we're not doing anything novel just gets compressed away to almost nothing. When you're a kid and seeing new things, feeling new things, learning new things you can't compress that away.
      • jnewton_dev 4mo ago
        [flagged]
    • agumonkey 4mo ago
      It's coherent. More newness => more memories per period ~ slower to go through. Less newness => less memories ~ nothing to go through (faster sense of time)
    • NDlurker 4mo ago
      Novel experiences take up more processing power and are burned into memory so they're experienced at a slower rate. That's how I understand it anyway.
• BobbyTables2 4mo ago
  I’ve wondered the same myself, without being a cunning linguist. I understand the math pretty well but still find it crazy that a bunch of matrices can converse in human languages without ever being “taught”. Imagine decoding an encyclopedia written in a foreign language where the characters, punctuation, and grammar are unknown — supplemented by a million other texts the same way. Feels like it should be utterly impossible with any amount of computing power… Today I asked my employer’s Claude to proofread a short software user manual written in markdown. (Trying this with a LLM was a first for me!) It pointed out not only grammar mistakes but also cases where I did not follow my own self-imposed conventions that were never explicitly stated. (I didn’t have a chapter detailing all the typographical conventions the way specification documents often do) I also asked it what parts might be unclear to a user. The response was surprisingly good — no worse than asking the QA tester for the same feedback. Also find the LLM seems to “comprehend” subtle technical details of obscure technical specification documents that nobody on the Internet ever discusses. As for time and the universe, Stephen Wolfram’s theories seem intriguing. He seems a bit obsessed with pretty diagrams but the idea of time dilation being the result of computation seems somewhat more appealing than trying to imagine relationships between time, gravity, and the speed of light .
  • Obscurity4340 4mo ago
    If time dilation is said to being a product of computation, why is it that anaesthetic drugs that are taken not to the point of actual unconsciousness cause it. Dont anaesthetics sort of shut everything down/inhibit all that kind of cognitive activity (compute?)
    • anon84873628 4mo ago
      "Time dilation" in this case is referring to the physics phenomenon from Einstein's special relativity. Not human perception.
    • ArnoVW 4mo ago
      Yes. Or at least that is what I understood from the Radiolab episode on “how do aesthetics work” https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia
• gostsamo 4mo ago
  Read the original mentioned on top for full effect.
• wisty 4mo ago
  AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either). Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that can update and learn and evolve ... ok ....
  • ViscountPenguin 4mo ago
    I find that a lot of arguments against emergent consciousness seem to just come out of an atheist rephrasing of abrhamic priors about the existence of a "soul". In personal chats, I've found people from East Asian countries (minus Korea, which makes sense) to be much more open to the idea of machine consciousness.
  • slopinthebag 4mo ago
    > remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either What is no longer conscious, the brain? Or the body? Or some other entity? If consciousness is weakly emergent, how do we know it emerges from the solely from the brain and not, say, brain + body? Or brain + body + or environment. Or from the universe itself?
    • wisty 3mo ago
      You can draw a line somewhere. Peole argue against conciousness by constructing (deliberately or not) an example where the line is drawn in a silly place.
  • plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
    I don't know if I can trust someone's understanding of arguments against consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, when he didn't even understand what the Chinese room was all about in the first place. (Spoiler, it was not about consciousness)
  • InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
    I don't find the Chinese room compelling, since it appeals to intuition where our intuition is already not trustworthy. It's like trying to use intuition to understand quantum mechanics; you can't. How do you actually know the Chinese room isn't conscious? It's merely obvious that it isn't, but that's not evidence.
• Nevermark 4mo ago
  For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves. The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component. Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing. This awareness, increased modeling, control, feedback loop has tightened up over many stages. Just a few: 1. The body-sense loop 2. The internalized-environment-model loop 3. The body-internal-function loop 4. The body-internal-model loop 5. The emotional-cognitive loop 6. And finally, the tightest loop of all, our high-level cognitive activity, experienced as feedback directly, our self-model, and our self-direction, all merged into one thing. We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self. That is consciousness. Rich self awareness, a merger of self-model and self-direction, and all in service of understanding and managing ourselves. Hw we can leverage our greatest tool, our self-directable mind, its habits, views, and behavior. This wasn't an accident. A happy side-effect of our brains. It is a biologically evolved focusing of our highest-level behavior, with tight feedback, constant self-modeling and continuous focus on our inner status as motivation and most privileged object of our control. It has been ruthlessly optimized for, for a very long time.
  • ludwik 4mo ago
    I think this is exactly it, but let me ask another question (which is not rhetorical, I really don't know). Does the fact that one can describe what consciousness is and where it came from in humans help them to detect it in non-human and/or non-biological entities?
    • Nevermark 4mo ago
      That is a really good point. Yes, I think function is diagnosis on this. Constant self-awareness, self-experience, self-focus, self-management, and self-improvement of one's own self (mind), is going to be an adaptive behavior for anything intelligent with resources to leverage. Whether truly independent, or highly motivated to serve others. The mind is the greatest tool. I think that is more than simply a good functional definition of consciousness. How could all that integration and self-integration not be conscious.
• mellosouls 4mo ago
  This read like poetry to me It's terrific, but the poetry is from the original it links to, in case you didn't realise. It's a brilliant and timely update though. Aside, there are various recorded versions including video on YouTube but this is my favourite, a radio play: They're Made Out of Meat https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-theyre-made-out-of-meat https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-...
  • imposter 4mo ago
    [dead]
• awesome_dude 4mo ago
  Wait, aren't I the universe experiencing time as a lowly worker in cubicle 4C?
• aeonfox 4mo ago
  The difference with biological brains is that the 'weights' (or synaptic action potentials) are updated with greater frequency. If one were reaching to make some kind of analogy to consciousness, this update frequency could be considered the 'resolution' of consciousness.
• petra 4mo ago
  Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran07_index.html https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran... In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings. And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's consciousness. Edit:And I wonder if this is a testable hypothesis, in a simulation.
  • IsTom 4mo ago
    This way of thinking can only explain externally-visible parts of consciousness. It does nothing to address internal experience of being conscious and qualia. I don't think the internal experience has any bearing on physical reality (P-zombies would act the same externally) which makes this something outside of the realm of currently understood physics.
    • petra 4mo ago
      There are some evolutionary theories why did qualia("phenomenal awareness") evolved. I don't know much about those, so i can't write about that.
    • Joeri 4mo ago
      Internal to what? The brain is not a monolithic thing, it is different parts communicating and interconnecting. When the connection between the halves is cut, the person objectively becomes two people, but still experiences and presents themselves as one. Observing ourselves is just one part of the brain responding to another, or theorizing on past behavior. There is probably no actual introspection going on inside of the human brain, only the perception of one.
      • IsTom 4mo ago
        Internal as in that which is feeling things. In this context the physical brain is what is responsible for what you do and feel, but it is not physically different from other matter and it requires no "internal observer" do do its thing.
• amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  It seems obvious to me that language and consciousness have nothing to do with each other. My dog doesn't speak any language, but she's obviously aware of herself and the world around her. Plus there are the occasional cases of children that grow up without any language. Are they therefore not conscious?
  • layer8 4mo ago
    Indeed. For some reason I can shut off my thinking instantly by holding my breath, and then I feel like a very conscious but unthinking animal.
  • yencabulator 4mo ago
    > My dog doesn't speak any language, If you'll allow me to interpret "speak" to include "understand", I will respectfully add a contradictory note. My dog has a vocabulary of at least dozens of words and understands them remarkably well. For example, different areas we can go to have different names and saying one of them gets her to make an immediate hard turn. I would also argue that dogs have a gesture and body posture based language they use among themselves. They, like most other animals, are not able to make the variety of noises we humans make, so they use movement instead. I personally can easily believe that self-awareness/consciousness and language are both near-unavoidable side effects of emergent complexity, and exist in degrees across nature.
• Npovview 4mo ago
  Quantum Field Theory visualized https://youtu.be/MmG2ah5Df4g https://youtu.be/MmG2ah5Df4g Here's a more general idea. Our modern physics says that the whole universe is filled with fields and field is composed of numbers. What if we take that literally? When we say an electron is present here, we actually mean that there are more copies of particular number superposed at that place.
• toilet 4mo ago
  >I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. Then you shouldn't have dropped out of your linguistics programme.
• overgard 4mo ago
  This is a famous short story just rewritten sloppily by an AI. Although it does amusingly do what annoys critics of AI: take something good written by a person, steal it and slop it up while overall misunderstanding it.
  • ForceBru 4mo ago
    I'm pretty sure it doesn't misunderstand the original. The original says that the aliens don't understand how meat (humans) can be conscious, have language and be basically like the aliens (thinking conscious beings). Their main idea is: humans are meat, meat can't be conscious, therefore humans can't be conscious, but they somehow act as if they are???? The "AI slop" here says that just like the aliens in the original, we humans don't believe that LLMs can be conscious because, in essence, WEIGHTS CAN'T BE CONSCIOUS. Original: "meat can't be conscious" (but we humans know it can). This version: "weights can't be conscious" (and we humans INSIST that this is true). So the message here is: what if we're as mistaken about the consciousness of "weights" as the aliens are mistaken about the consciousness of "meat"?
    • overgard 3mo ago
      It doesn't make it less of slop. I'm sorry, rewriting a story with AI that already makes your point to be a worse less-subtle version of it is like the definition of slop. Slop might be too nice, it's plagiarism. Also the point is to be open minded about what could be conscious, not to accept every claim of consciousness.