6 ms·

I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a

I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a substance/field we aren't yet aware of. Or something along those lines. Maybe consciousness isn't in the mind per se. The mere fact that general/special relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct in their respective domains, yet mutually contradictory, makes me wonder if perhaps closing the gap between the two theories would lead to more understanding of consciousness once closed. Or maybe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour of sufficiently complex systems, and there is no underlying substance. But if that's the case, that just leaves me with more questions. Does consciousness emerge from any sufficiently complex system? If so, what's the threshold? Does it matter what materials the system comprises of? Do certain mechanisms need to be involved for such a property to emerge, or is just general complexity that's required, no matter the function? Does that make flora conscious since they're large complex (perhaps neural) networks in real life? Is a car conscious, since it's a complex system of complex sub-components? All of the questions I have seem to lead me in the direction of believing that any purely digital system cannot be conscious, but I don't have any hard reasoning as to why not.

ews 27d ago
The antenna theory is intriguing but always bugged me. Where do we get that idea that consciousness lives outside the body/brain? Where did it come from?
- mandolingual 27d ago
  It's just Consciousness of the Gaps. Quantum mechanics are mysterious and are a frontier of science, so surely consciousness must dwell there.
  - GPerson 27d ago
    The answer to what consciousness is does not come from anything yet known so it is natural to hope it exists somewhere just beyond what we know well. There is nothing wrong with this.
    - thrance 27d ago
      > There is nothing wrong with this. I would say it is, you shouldn't make unsubstantiated claims based on gaps in our shared knowledge, that's very unscientific. Just because we don't understand something very well, doesn't mean we can just attribute other unexplained phenomena to it. As for quantum effects in the brain being responsible for consciousness, there is very good reason to think it is false, no matter how much Penrose insists.
      - GPerson 26d ago
        I’m not sure why you willfully misinterpret my post. What’s unscientific is to positively assert unsubstantiated claims, not to posit a theory. You also inserted Penrose out of thin air so I’m not sure you’re even engaging with anything I’ve written.
- thrance 27d ago
  That's just another name for dualism, wikipedia has a history section about it, if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism
threethirtytwo 27d ago
Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it. Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any word and attribute a bunch of vague features to the definition to give it the same vibe. The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.
- GPerson 27d ago
  Consciousness is not just a word just because you cannot find space for it in your reductive philosophy. The honest scientific principle would be to observe that language, reason, and science, in dealing with external representations only, may be limited, not to get frustrated and assert that everything is equal to their representations.
- captainbland 27d ago
  Yeah this is it for me. What we're really interested in most of the time is whether something can suffer based on observed behaviour. We don't really believe LLMs can suffer so they don't need rights. We believe many animals can suffer so many people try to support animal rights; even if we eat them they should die quickly at least for example. We definitely believe humans can suffer and so we abhor things like torture. But while consciousness is sometimes upheld as a necessary prerequisite for suffering, it is so much more poorly defined and understood that it doesn't really hold up beyond being some abstract idea of humanness which we hope makes us special in a kind of sleight of hand self referential way. And nevertheless suffering can be observed and defined in ways which don't necessarily require a definition of consciousness.
  - pixl97 27d ago
    I've heard someone else talking about the concept of moral agency. Can an LLM have, or do LLMs have moral agency? We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days. In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway. This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating. Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want. I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.
GPerson 27d ago
The idea that consciousness is emergent, substrate independent, and depends only only a very complex arrangement or perhaps some kind of self referential system etc etc makes no sense at all. Then everything about the system is entirely equivalent to its external interpretations, but arbitrary external interpretations can be put onto anything. I can just throw a bag of bits on the ground and read a conscious mind out of it if I stare hard enough.
- pixl97 27d ago
  Why does this bother you? Is it an internal sense of ego that seems to be ingrained in our complex set of bits? Really this is why it took humanity 100,000 years to reach the space age. We cannot look at things emotionally and irrationally and expect to receive rational answers. Consciousness emerges and we can see a gradient of it across different bags of meat. There are also some studies that show signs that plants can show conscious signalling behaviors, at a much reduced set of functionalities than animals. Maybe this is just the wake up call humanity needs to know that consciousness is not that unique to us? Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox , when does a pile become a heap?
  - GPerson 27d ago
    I doubt it bothers me in the sense you have in mind. What bothers me is the desire to actually understand it and always see all the smart people stuck on a non-starter. And it’s the first idea most smart people have about what consciousness must be. I also thought this when I was a teenager and after reflecting on it for many years decided it does not work. I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may have some kind of qualia so also may have it, so your charges against me seem misdirected. If an AI system happened to have qualia I believe it would depend on its substrate (which might be something we don’t understand yet), not because of how intelligent (how complicated it’s processing). And I believe a different substrate running the same processing may not have qualia. I don’t think we randomly chose the right substrate in the 60s-70s. And I don’t argue against the idea that concepts like heaps are emergent. You’re making a logical error in assuming you know what consciousness is and thus I don’t know what emergence means. No, I do not think consciousness is emergent in the sense of a sand pile. And before the army of false dichotomists show up, my position is not biological chauvinism or whatever your LLM has told you about.
hn_submit 27d ago
You, I and everyone else simply don't know. I'm personally open to the fact that a digital consciousness could arise sometime in the future. Maybe it isn't anything special at all. Insects seem to be conscious too and we don't hestitate for one moment to kill them. Idem livestock.
colingauvin 27d ago
I absolutely positively believe that consciousness is tuning into something else. Some specific arrangement of information and neurons allows it to be received.
euroderf 27d ago
I suspect that the nervous system acts as a distributed antenna for "picking up" other antennas.

ews 27d ago

The antenna theory is intriguing but always bugged me. Where do we get that idea that consciousness lives outside the body/brain? Where did it come from?

mandolingual 27d ago
It's just Consciousness of the Gaps. Quantum mechanics are mysterious and are a frontier of science, so surely consciousness must dwell there.
- GPerson 27d ago
  The answer to what consciousness is does not come from anything yet known so it is natural to hope it exists somewhere just beyond what we know well. There is nothing wrong with this.
  - thrance 27d ago
    > There is nothing wrong with this. I would say it is, you shouldn't make unsubstantiated claims based on gaps in our shared knowledge, that's very unscientific. Just because we don't understand something very well, doesn't mean we can just attribute other unexplained phenomena to it. As for quantum effects in the brain being responsible for consciousness, there is very good reason to think it is false, no matter how much Penrose insists.
    - GPerson 26d ago
      I’m not sure why you willfully misinterpret my post. What’s unscientific is to positively assert unsubstantiated claims, not to posit a theory. You also inserted Penrose out of thin air so I’m not sure you’re even engaging with anything I’ve written.
thrance 27d ago
That's just another name for dualism, wikipedia has a history section about it, if you're interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

threethirtytwo 27d ago

Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it. Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any word and attribute a bunch of vague features to the definition to give it the same vibe. The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.

GPerson 27d ago
Consciousness is not just a word just because you cannot find space for it in your reductive philosophy. The honest scientific principle would be to observe that language, reason, and science, in dealing with external representations only, may be limited, not to get frustrated and assert that everything is equal to their representations.
captainbland 27d ago
Yeah this is it for me. What we're really interested in most of the time is whether something can suffer based on observed behaviour. We don't really believe LLMs can suffer so they don't need rights. We believe many animals can suffer so many people try to support animal rights; even if we eat them they should die quickly at least for example. We definitely believe humans can suffer and so we abhor things like torture. But while consciousness is sometimes upheld as a necessary prerequisite for suffering, it is so much more poorly defined and understood that it doesn't really hold up beyond being some abstract idea of humanness which we hope makes us special in a kind of sleight of hand self referential way. And nevertheless suffering can be observed and defined in ways which don't necessarily require a definition of consciousness.
- pixl97 27d ago
  I've heard someone else talking about the concept of moral agency. Can an LLM have, or do LLMs have moral agency? We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days. In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway. This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating. Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want. I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.

GPerson 27d ago

The idea that consciousness is emergent, substrate independent, and depends only only a very complex arrangement or perhaps some kind of self referential system etc etc makes no sense at all. Then everything about the system is entirely equivalent to its external interpretations, but arbitrary external interpretations can be put onto anything. I can just throw a bag of bits on the ground and read a conscious mind out of it if I stare hard enough.

pixl97 27d ago
Why does this bother you? Is it an internal sense of ego that seems to be ingrained in our complex set of bits? Really this is why it took humanity 100,000 years to reach the space age. We cannot look at things emotionally and irrationally and expect to receive rational answers. Consciousness emerges and we can see a gradient of it across different bags of meat. There are also some studies that show signs that plants can show conscious signalling behaviors, at a much reduced set of functionalities than animals. Maybe this is just the wake up call humanity needs to know that consciousness is not that unique to us? Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox , when does a pile become a heap?
- GPerson 27d ago
  I doubt it bothers me in the sense you have in mind. What bothers me is the desire to actually understand it and always see all the smart people stuck on a non-starter. And it’s the first idea most smart people have about what consciousness must be. I also thought this when I was a teenager and after reflecting on it for many years decided it does not work. I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may have some kind of qualia so also may have it, so your charges against me seem misdirected. If an AI system happened to have qualia I believe it would depend on its substrate (which might be something we don’t understand yet), not because of how intelligent (how complicated it’s processing). And I believe a different substrate running the same processing may not have qualia. I don’t think we randomly chose the right substrate in the 60s-70s. And I don’t argue against the idea that concepts like heaps are emergent. You’re making a logical error in assuming you know what consciousness is and thus I don’t know what emergence means. No, I do not think consciousness is emergent in the sense of a sand pile. And before the army of false dichotomists show up, my position is not biological chauvinism or whatever your LLM has told you about.

hn_submit 27d ago

You, I and everyone else simply don't know. I'm personally open to the fact that a digital consciousness could arise sometime in the future. Maybe it isn't anything special at all. Insects seem to be conscious too and we don't hestitate for one moment to kill them. Idem livestock.

colingauvin 27d ago

I absolutely positively believe that consciousness is tuning into something else. Some specific arrangement of information and neurons allows it to be received.

euroderf 27d ago

I suspect that the nervous system acts as a distributed antenna for "picking up" other antennas.