5 ms·

I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousn

by N_Lens 1mo ago

I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).

TheHardProblem 1mo ago
As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong. Rather, how much of it is just language. We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English. I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.
- txrx0000 1mo ago
  If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
  - TheHardProblem 1mo ago
    Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience. I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation. I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself. > If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it. This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer. If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on. There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality. If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space. So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
    - N_Lens 1mo ago
      How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.
      - txrx0000 1mo ago
        This one is relatively easy to answer. There are things we can say about what death feels like: 1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing. 2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.
    - txrx0000 1mo ago
      I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied. I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain. Exactly what the neurons do to cause this is unknown, but we do have some leads like general anesthesia or split brain experiments. If you remove your brain cells one at a time, or even half a brain in some surgeries, you would also not die, but this is not sufficient to say that the part removed isn't a part of what constitutes your consciousness. In fact the definition of "you" is probably changing from moment to moment as brain cells die, regen, or reorganize, ship of Theseus style. One possible explanation is that information processing is distributed all over your neurons, and certain patterns or sequences of information gives rise to consciousness. And neurons are mostly concentrated in the brain, that's why it's responsible for most of your consciousness and it's no big deal when a small part dies/disconnects because enough of the processing is still happening. What does "feeling" mean in the thinking/feeling distinction you made? It seems to me that it means whether information is being received from the rest of the world, such as via eyes over the optic nerve. If we give images/video/audio to an LLM, that would meet the same criteria besides the fact that the sensing mechanism is not biological. You claim that "thinking", as in, processing information in a certain way, is an unconscious phenomena because LLMs can do that too. This requires the assumption that LLMs are not conscious, even though this axiom is the very thing we're trying to question by considering that information processing could be precisely what gives rise to consciousness. Entertaining this possibility does not require the assumption that things exist without an observer. But it does require the idea that mutually observable patterns exist between oneself and other apparent observers in the same apparent universe, which is pretty close to what most people mean when they say "objective" in day-to-day conversation. This can be shown easily: you and I would not be able to communicate at all if there's no common understanding of language between us. That common understanding is the objective part, and it is as you say, not a 1:1 correspondence because your definition of "apple" is based on all of the apples you've seen while mine is based on all the apples I've seen, and we've not seen the same apples. But the correspondence must be close enough in order for communication to work. We need this idea of practical objectivity because it's required to talk about anything at all. Now, onto the reason why you'd think anything else is conscious at all, besides yourself. Why do you think that I am conscious? If you ponder that question for a while, I think you would see why computer consciousness is not so easily dismissed. But I'm happy to discuss further if you think there's an answer that points to the contrary.
- ElFitz 1mo ago
  Or words, and language, just provide a sort of sensory input, which provided an environment and a selective pressure can shape an organism or neural network into predicting and producing the kind of reaction or output required for its continued existence. And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.
mjd 1mo ago
That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically. You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.
- TheHardProblem 1mo ago
  Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field. It might be right. My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is. Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
- bonoboTP 1mo ago
  A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts. Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient. I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
  - OkayPhysicist 1mo ago
    You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.

by N_Lens 1mo ago

TheHardProblem 1mo ago

As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong. Rather, how much of it is just language. We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English. I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts. It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.

txrx0000 1mo ago
If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
- TheHardProblem 1mo ago
  Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience. I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation. I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself. > If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it. This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer. If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on. There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality. If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space. So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.
  - N_Lens 1mo ago
    How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.
    - txrx0000 1mo ago
      This one is relatively easy to answer. There are things we can say about what death feels like: 1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing. 2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.
  - txrx0000 1mo ago
    I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied. I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain. Exactly what the neurons do to cause this is unknown, but we do have some leads like general anesthesia or split brain experiments. If you remove your brain cells one at a time, or even half a brain in some surgeries, you would also not die, but this is not sufficient to say that the part removed isn't a part of what constitutes your consciousness. In fact the definition of "you" is probably changing from moment to moment as brain cells die, regen, or reorganize, ship of Theseus style. One possible explanation is that information processing is distributed all over your neurons, and certain patterns or sequences of information gives rise to consciousness. And neurons are mostly concentrated in the brain, that's why it's responsible for most of your consciousness and it's no big deal when a small part dies/disconnects because enough of the processing is still happening. What does "feeling" mean in the thinking/feeling distinction you made? It seems to me that it means whether information is being received from the rest of the world, such as via eyes over the optic nerve. If we give images/video/audio to an LLM, that would meet the same criteria besides the fact that the sensing mechanism is not biological. You claim that "thinking", as in, processing information in a certain way, is an unconscious phenomena because LLMs can do that too. This requires the assumption that LLMs are not conscious, even though this axiom is the very thing we're trying to question by considering that information processing could be precisely what gives rise to consciousness. Entertaining this possibility does not require the assumption that things exist without an observer. But it does require the idea that mutually observable patterns exist between oneself and other apparent observers in the same apparent universe, which is pretty close to what most people mean when they say "objective" in day-to-day conversation. This can be shown easily: you and I would not be able to communicate at all if there's no common understanding of language between us. That common understanding is the objective part, and it is as you say, not a 1:1 correspondence because your definition of "apple" is based on all of the apples you've seen while mine is based on all the apples I've seen, and we've not seen the same apples. But the correspondence must be close enough in order for communication to work. We need this idea of practical objectivity because it's required to talk about anything at all. Now, onto the reason why you'd think anything else is conscious at all, besides yourself. Why do you think that I am conscious? If you ponder that question for a while, I think you would see why computer consciousness is not so easily dismissed. But I'm happy to discuss further if you think there's an answer that points to the contrary.
ElFitz 1mo ago
Or words, and language, just provide a sort of sensory input, which provided an environment and a selective pressure can shape an organism or neural network into predicting and producing the kind of reaction or output required for its continued existence. And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.

mjd 1mo ago

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically. You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

TheHardProblem 1mo ago
Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field. It might be right. My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is. Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything
bonoboTP 1mo ago
A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts. Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient. I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
- OkayPhysicist 1mo ago
  You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.