Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
Nobody can even agree on a concrete definition of consciousness so I’m not going to bother reading these ‘reasons’.
As others have pointed out we do not even agree on what consciousness is. There are three competing camps:
- Mechanists - if it can pass mechanical tests it is conscious
- Dualist - you need more than just the brain, some second soul-like thing to be conscious
- Pan psychist - everything is conscious
If you are in camp 1 the conversation about consciousness is getting more complicated as AI passes more tests. If you are in camp 2 AI can never be conscious. If you are in camp 3 AI and everything else is conscious including rocks and rivers and the stars in the sky.
I think arguments like this are misleading when discussing the question of AI possessing consciousness. Materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, etc are all philosophical concepts; they attempt to answer “what is the nature of consciousness and how does it arise from the body?” from a philosophical standpoint. All of the various options have pros and cons and there is no clear “winner.”
However, there are decent scientific definitions for consciousness. These attempt to answer the question of “what do we mean when we say something is conscious?” from a scientific standpoint. There are criteria that neuroscientists, doctors, etc generally agree on.
So it’s not really correct to say “no one knows what consciousness is” when evaluating whether something is conscious. And I think it’s quite clear that current LLM algorithms could never be conscious, using the current accepted scientific criteria.
(I’m not a philosopher or a neuroscientist, but I do have a degree in computer science and have a solid understanding of how LLMs work.)
Ok, I’ll ask. What are these decent scientific definitions for consciousness and how can we use them to construct a test for consciousness?
You are free to search the web, there’s lots of information out there. You might start with the Wikipedia article on consciousness.
Oh, I thought you might have something new to say. If you’re just using the normal definition and not bringing any sort of testability (which imo is impossible) or new arguments, how exactly does the common definition prove anything must be non-conscious? That seems like the main claim of your comment, yet it seems like an unsupported assertion; if the common definition of consciousness could easily prove things not to be conscious as you seem to imply, this discussion would not be happening at all.
From Wikipedia:
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines consciousness as “the state of being awake, thinking, and knowing what is happening around you”, as well as “the state of understanding and realizing something”.
Most of these are trivially easy to test (not sure why you think that’s impossible). And LLMs have none of those properties.
Later:
“The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness.”
Again, LLMs have none of these things. They simply generate a probable natural-language response based on their training, deterministically.
Feel free to do further research on your own if you’re interested.
Feel free to do further research on your own if you’re interested.
Philosophy is one of my hobbies and consciousness one of my fascinations. Respectfully, doing “research” by skimming the wikipedia article would be a waste of our time; as would responding to any particular definition and arguing over the individual words people have used in summaries of the topic. So I’ll skip that phase of the convo.
The fundamental problem with measuring consciousness is that it’s an internal state (a “qualia”*). It is fundamentally an experience, something that exists only as a concept in your mind. This makes it immeasurable.
That’s quite the claim, so I’ll provide a smaller concrete example: color. Obviously you can measure the frequency of a photon and say “ah yes, 700nm, that photon is red”. But strictly speaking, the photon isn’t red, it just causes you to percieve “red”; it has a wavelength which triggers your eyes and brain to produce the subjective experience of the color red. That subjective experience of color is a qualia, and it is not directly measurable; at best you can measure the phenomenon that causes that qualia in you, and assume that that phenomenon would cause the same qualia in someone else when they percieve that photon. Technically, you can’t be sure that this assumption is true-- this leads to the “Inverted Spectrum” thought experiment (another great wiki page if you prefer their explanations to mine), where someone’s subjective experience of color as it relates to the frequency of light could be entirely different to your own.
Anyways, you cannot prove the existence of nonexistence of such an internal experience, and consciousness belongs to this category of qualia. You know that you are conscious because you experience being conscious, not because you can prove it by looking at what you do. You can’t even be sure that I’m conscious, even if you met me in real life; you can’t prove that I am actually thinking, feeling, understanding, knowing, or realizing anything, because you cannot be me. You can only assume that I am doing those things because you observe me doing stuff in physical reality that’s consistent with the way the only entity you can be sure is conscious (you) is acting, and assuming that since I’m made of the same stuff as you and I act kind of like you do that I am probably conscious.
If you could actually prove that it is impossible for a machine to be conscious without that same argument applying to humans, then the philosophy community of the last several millenia would praise you as their messiah. I am interested to see what your argument would be if you want to give it a shot though-- no harm in trying.
* Like “data”/“datum”, technically the singular form is “quale”, but I’m gonna be real, nobody ever says that. Anyways if you like reading wikipedia pages about philosophy, “qualia” is a good one!
How is red a subjective experience? We can all experience red things, at least, all of us with functioning eyes. What about that is subjective? How is color not directly measurable? Color is very easy to measure, we can even assign it values, like (r,g,b). If you see something red, you have already measured it to have the values (>0,0,0). I don’t know what the term “internal experience” even means. Experience is just something that happens to something else. A rock experiences erosion in the rain. I am experiencing tiredness right now. To say something experiences something is to just say X is happening to Y. I don’t see how it is meaningful to assign adjectives like “internal” or “external” to it. I mean, if the adjective was meaningful, then would it not imply that you are implicitly contrasting “internal experience” with “external experience”? What on earth would external experience be? If you cannot tell me what external experience is, then the adjective “internal” is contrasting it with nothing at all, so it is a useless adjective.
LLMs only respond to inputs. They don’t have independent ideas. And their responses are just predictive of what the input intends a response to be.
Accurate prediction models can be extremely useful, but there’s a reason why weather prediction models aren’t considered intelligent. It’s because they aren’t designed to mimic human conversation.
They are playing us for absolute fools.
That first sentence describes all life. We only react to input. We don’t have independent ideas. We have the illusion of them, because we can’t see our own neural networks. Asked to explain your actions, you would give your best guesses, but you don’t actually know. You’re a biological, finite-state machine, moving from state-to-state based on stimulii, while supposing you are a thinking individual in control.
Citation needed on all of this, and even if you have citations, LLMs are deterministic, and do not learn or change over time. They can’t even be said to exist continuously since they only exist during the brief time that they’re responding to inputs, and then they disappear until the next input. I would argue that all of these things would need to change in order for them to be able to have consciousness.
They definitely are not deterministic
They can learn and change over time, that’s just not enabled. The services that offer them want a reliable, reproducible, controllable experience. There’s zero reason they can’t continue to change through usage, other than it’s a conscious decision not to enable that functionality.
That’s why they can only be conscious when they train using new data, and run asynchronously with continual input - the same way we do.
Edit: People downvote me, and I suspect it’s because they’re thinking of the public facing models. I am talking about progress behind closed doors. Even some of the public facing models are gaining the ability to learn, via a mechanism being called memories. It’s just a short text note that is passed into the context window of every prompt, but isn’t that exactly what our short term memory is? In my view is no different. Pruning the inclusion list to include only the relevant information is the equivalent to use forgetting some information, but if it’s kept in long term storage with reference links to other memories, it can be “remembered” and brought back into the current context. It’s functionally the same as our own learning and thinking.
Even if we could update an LLM’s weights continuously, the algorithm is still deterministic, like all computer algorithms. There is no evidence that humans are deterministic (or a “finite state machine”) in any way. So I don’t think such a dynamically-updating LLM could be conscious, either.
It is my personal belief that all life is deterministic. It’s the only plausible explanation for instinctual behavior - like monarch butterflies returning to their breeding grounds they’ve never been to. Or people yawning because others yawn. These aren’t conscious decisions, they’re peeks at the deterministic coding that life operates upon.
I don’t think you understand what “deterministic” means.
A computer algorithm can absolutely be non deterministic, pick your language and run random.rand()
There is a whole class of such algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_Turing_machine
But I don’t see how it makes a difference, even deterministic algorithms can produce infinite complexity, eg linear neural networks are proven to be able to compute any computable function, or the Mandelbrot set which is produced from a single recurrent statement but encodes a space of infinite complexity
Maybe your point is to say that a brain is performing a non computable function…but since your brain is computing that function…is that a counter example?
It’s a computer for god’s sake. It’s no more “intelligent” than an electric mower or a car. Without human intervenion, ai technology wouldn’t advance or change.
Edit: i’m done arguing, you guys are nut jobs. Ai or any other non organic organism cannot be sentiant, conscience, or intelligent without human interaction or molecular life.
I will be using my real sentiant, free will, conscience, intelligence to not reply to any comments on this.
AIs are almost certainly not conscious but it been a computer is not an argument against consciousness. There’s no reason to believe that you need biological material for consciousness.
After all humans are primarily made of carbon which itself demonstrably does not think. It’s the structure that’s important and a fair argument could be made to say that the structure of a brain is replicated in software in an AI and therefore the medium isn’t relevant to the question.
It’s the structure that’s important and a fair argument could be made to say that the structure of a brain is replicated in software in an AI and therefore the medium isn’t relevant to the question.
We don’t even know this.
It’s a silly argument.
LLMs are designed to mimic smart humans. Any test devised to find the dividing line will fail because at some point there will be a pretty large group of humans that would fail that test.
Meaning that we need a definition of consciousness that can’t be mimicked by text or voice alone, and isn’t going to exclude people who are just naturally unintelligent.
Case in point, some days of the week, the elected - elected! - head of state of a major county couldn’t pass a Turing test. You expect the people that voted for him to pass that test any day of the week?
The test ought to be using observation of a quantum state. Can a 50 IQ human observe something thet collapses the wave form? Yeah. Don’t take skills to observe. Great, now see if an LLM can do that.
It isn’t just a problem of needing a definition of consciousness that meets certain criteria. That’s actually kind of backwards. We need to discover what the shit we’re actually talking about when we refer to consciousness. Is it a thing, a process, … do birds have it? Insects? Worms?
We’ve all pretty much decided that consciousness definitely exists in some form. It isn’t honest to just define it as whatever conveniently fits our desired narrative. So “defining” isn’t really what needs to happen. “Qualifying” is what needs to happen.
To me, that is backwards. No one applies the same logic anywhere else. Can you think of any other situation whereby we insist some word, let’s call it Florgleblorp, has true meaning, even though none of us can define Florgleblorp, and that we need to do further scientific research and discovery in order to learn how to properly define Florgleblorp?
It’s just strange to me. We invent terms to describe things that we already know exist, we don’t start with terms that contain no meaning and then go out in search for meaning. That is bizarre.
Well, that’s sort of strawmanning my argument isn’t it?
I started with the disclosure that we all believe consciousness exists in some form. That alone separates my argument from your example: consciousness exists, Florgleblorp doesn’t. If you alternatively want to argue that consciousness doesn’t exist, that’s another conversation I’m willing to have.
Consciousness isn’t some arbitrary word we’ve invented and subsequently gone searching for a referent. We already have the phenomenon we’re attempting to explain: subjective experience. What we lack is a sufficiently established understanding of what constitutes it, how it arises, and how to reliably identify it in other systems.
That’s how scientific investigation frequently works. We recognize phenomena before we fully understand their mechanisms or develop reliable criteria for identifying them.
Of course we need provisional definitions to investigate anything. But an operational definition isn’t automatically an accurate characterization of the underlying phenomenon. That’s something we have to establish through evidence.
Otherwise, we’re just choosing which properties count as consciousness, constructing tests around those properties, and treating the results as validation of our original assumptions. That approach, which is what I’m interpreting your suggestion to mean, is not reliable. In fact, it’s dangerous.
I started with the disclosure that we all believe consciousness exists in some form.
Do we?
That alone separates my argument from your example: consciousness exists, Florgleblorp doesn’t.
How can we even assign properties to something which has no meaning?
That’s how scientific investigation frequently works. We recognize phenomena before we fully understand their mechanisms or develop reliable criteria for identifying them.
No, that’s not how scientific investigation works. Even if we do not fully understand something, we can still fully define what it is we’re talking about. We can concretely define what a banana is, such that you and I can both agree upon what is and isn’t a banana, long before we have any detailed physical analysis of the underlying chemical properties of a banana. Not understanding something in perfect detail doesn’t prevent you from giving a high-level definition which defines it in terms of its surface-level qualities.
I don’t even see how we can investigate something to begin with if we cannot even identify what it is that we’re talking about. That’s why I think you missed the point of my Florgleblorp example… if I told you to go investigate Florgleblorp, how would you even do that, if you have no idea what I’m even talking about, because I’ve not even given you a definition loose enough to identify it?
I think we’re conflating two different things here: establishing what phenomenon we’re referring to, and establishing the properties that reliably identify or explain that phenomenon.
I’m referring specifically to subjective experience: what it’s like to feel pain, perceive color, experience emotions, dream, etc. We have a meaningful starting point for investigation, even if we disagree about the underlying nature of those experiences.
I agree with your banana example, at least to a point. We can identify bananas without understanding their molecular composition. But notice what you’ve actually demonstrated: we can recognize instances of a phenomenon without fully understanding what constitutes it…
You can describe the observable characteristics of a banana and use them to identify other bananas. But what happens when you encounter something that shares those characteristics without being a banana, or a banana that doesn’t exhibit the characteristics you’ve chosen? You need to investigate further, potentially refining your classification criteria.
Now consider consciousness. Unlike a banana, subjective experience isn’t directly observable by third parties. I can recognize my own experiences, but determining whether another entity has comparable experiences is a different problem entirely. That’s why establishing reliable criteria matters.
Your Florgleblorp analogy would apply if I were referring to something for which we had no identifiable phenomenon whatsoever. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m referring to subjective experience, and asking what constitutes it and how we can determine whether it exists in other systems.
I absolutely agree that we need provisional definitions and operational criteria to conduct research. What I reject is treating those criteria as though their validity were established simply because we’ve agreed to define consciousness in those terms.
Here’s my own example for you: we could define consciousness as the ability to verbally report internal states. That’s a perfectly testable definition. But whether it actually identifies subjective experience, rather than merely the ability to produce convincing reports, remains a question. There’s nothing there to differentiate between correlation and causation.
So I’m not arguing that we should investigate something without knowing what we’re talking about. I’m arguing that our initial characterization of a phenomenon shouldn’t be confused with a validated scientific account of what constitutes it or how to detect it.
If you want to prove consciousness, I stand my ground on the argument that you first need to qualify consciousness as a thing. What is it?
You may find that consciousness is actually something which was deeply misunderstood and unexpected. Such a discovery would allow you to draw genuinely meaningful conclusions about whether or not LLMs can ever truly be conscious. That’s how you form a theory.
You suggested, earlier, that someone may be able to detect consciousness by measuring whether the agent’s observation can collapse a waveform. But quantum mechanics does not establish that consciousness is required to collapse a wavefunction. In physics, an observer is not necessarily a conscious entity. A measurement apparatus can register a quantum event without any human being present. The measurement can occur whether someone watches the results live, reviews them tomorrow, or never examines them. By the same logic, an LLM could pass your hypothesized test.
Simply deciding that LLMs shouldn’t count as conscious, without even truly understanding what qualifies consciousness, is just moving the goalpost. Or bikeshedding, perhaps.
Experience is not subjective. It is contextual, but contextuality is a property of physical reality, not of subjectivity.
I’m referring specifically to subjective experience: what it’s like to feel pain, perceive color, experience emotions, dream, etc.
Yes, Chalmerites like to prepend “what it is like” to things, as if it somehow proves anything. You can tell when a phrase means literally nothing when everyone just repeats it verbatim without ever rewording it in different ways, because the phrase carries no meaning, and only has the appearance of meaning by being repeated a lot.
Pain, color, emotions, and dreams are all real occurrences in the real world that really happen and all have real physical explanations for them. Prepending “what it is like” to them doesn’t mean anything. “Like” means “akin to” or “similar to,” and “what it is” regards being. And so the phrase, if taken literally, is about “similar being,” which I don’t see how that even makes linguistic sense in this context.
Of course, as Chalermites always do, you will probably get frustrated with me for taking the words literally, because I’m supposed to interpret them abstractly or something, but then there is zero clarity on what this abstract interpretation is supposed to be.
But notice what you’ve actually demonstrated: we can recognize instances of a phenomenon without fully understanding what constitutes it… You can describe the observable characteristics of a banana and use them to identify other bananas. But what happens when you encounter something that shares those characteristics without being a banana, or a banana that doesn’t exhibit the characteristics you’ve chosen? You need to investigate further, potentially refining your classification criteria.
It’s literally physically impossible for something to share all observable characteristics of a banana without being a banana.
Of course, if we have a very loose definition of a “banana” that is so broad it would even include an apple, then either the word itself “banana” really does just refer to banana+apple, or we would add on to the definition to separate the two. Words are ultimately a social construct, what is real is what they refer to when used in practice, and not the specific definition in the dictionary. I’m sure you know what a “dog” is, but few people have ever intentionally looked up the word “dog” in a dictionary. You can just know what it means by its social use.
Now consider consciousness. Unlike a banana, subjective experience isn’t directly observable by third parties. I can recognize my own experiences, but determining whether another entity has comparable experiences is a different problem entirely. That’s why establishing reliable criteria matters.
You are being so absurdly vague that I have no choice but to just try and guess at what you even mean by this, so I may get my guessing wrong, but that’s on you for being so extremely abstract. It seems that there are two halves to what you are trying to say, so I am going to attempt to parse them.
First, again, there is nothing “subjective” about experience. Experience is just when X happens to Y, i.e. a rock experiences erosion in the rain. It seems to me that one half of how you are you are using “subjective” here to refer to “my own experiences,” i.e. “X happens to myself,” which is a strange way to use the word “subjective,” because it would be like saying, if I eat a sandwich, I’m engaging in “subjective eating,” or that my house is a “subjective house” because it’s owned by a subject. But, whatever, words are words, but I would refer to it more meaningfully as “experience of a subject.” Second, you say that it “isn’t directly observable by third parties.” Of course, the experiences of a subject are obviously observable by third-parties, so you must be introducing some second criterion here, likely you are trying to say, it is the experience of a subject, as it is realized from the subject’s own vantage point. That is what I presume you mean by “isn’t directly observable by third parties.”
Actually, the first half seems irrelevant, because any experience, whether it happens to a subject or not, as it is realized from a subject’s vantage point specifically, is not realized by the vantage points of other subjects. If I see a rock experience erosion in the rain, no one else on earth can perceive it exactly the way I did. (The term “accessible” does not really make much sense, because what is realized is not something to be “accessed.”)
But, there is no mystery about this at all. Obviously, if they were to perceive what I perceived exactly as how I perceived it, they would have to be standing in the same place as I am, they would have to be of the same height as me, they would have to have the same nose in front of their face as I do, they would have to have the same memories such that they contemplate upon it the same way, so on and so forth.
That is to say, they would have to be me.
Indeed, talking about accessing another person’s vantage point does not even make linguistic sense. You could imagine getting closer and closer to my vantage point, by gradually taking atoms from my body and replacing them with your own, until you become identical to I, but the moment that identity occurs, then you would just be me, and you would cease to exist, so you would have failed to achieve my vantage point, you would have just stopped existing. Indeed, this is because how we define objects in the first place inherently entails that object’s vantage point, and so they are basically two ways of describing the same thing.
If you think the “mystery” is that we cannot access each other vantage points… that is not mysterious at all. So what is the mystery? Even after this whole aside, I am not sure what you think is so mysterious.
Your Florgleblorp analogy would apply if I were referring to something for which we had no identifiable phenomenon whatsoever. But that’s not what I’m doing. I’m referring to subjective experience, and asking what constitutes it and how we can determine whether it exists in other systems.
You have not identified any phenomenon at all. You are acting as if X experiencing Y suddenly evolves into some new phenomenon if X is a subject, but there is no explanation as to why this is the case. It would be like saying that houses are banal, but houses owned by people, those are “subjective houses,” and require a special explanation… why? You kind of skipped that step.
Here’s my own example for you: we could define consciousness as the ability to verbally report internal states. That’s a perfectly testable definition.
Notice how your definition, then, suddenly entails nothing about so-called “subjective experience.”
The moment you start to talk about anything real, you suddenly have to move away from the meaningless, Chalermite language.
But whether it actually identifies subjective experience, rather than merely the ability to produce convincing reports, remains a question. There’s nothing there to differentiate between correlation and causation.
Yeah, you can see the essence of Chalmers in here as well. On one hand, you want to make it look like you are being reasonable by giving a definition that has some concrete meaning, but then you immediately backpedal to Chalmerland and start talking about how we could never actually connect that concrete definition to the abstract thing you were supposed to be defining in the first place… and so you would’ve just wasted our time.
If you want to prove consciousness, I stand my ground on the argument that you first need to qualify consciousness as a thing. What is it?
Why would I want to prove something that isn’t even defined in the first place?
You may find that consciousness is actually something which was deeply misunderstood and unexpected.
Well, I can’t misunderstand anything because I have no understanding of what this “consciousness” supposedly is to begin with, so if someone did discover something unexpected and labeled it as “consciousness,” it would just be a new understanding.
Such a discovery would allow you to draw genuinely meaningful conclusions about whether or not LLMs can ever truly be conscious. That’s how you form a theory.
That’s more akin to taxonomy than theory building, just looking for ways to categorize things into this or that group.
You suggested, earlier, that someone may be able to detect consciousness by measuring whether the agent’s observation can collapse a waveform…By the same logic, an LLM could pass your hypothesized test.
the fuck
I literally said the opposite
I wrote a giant rant about how that is insanely batshit idiotic and that quantum mechanics has nothing to do with consciousness at all.
No, there is no “hypothesized test,” what on earth are you talking about
Simply deciding that LLMs shouldn’t count as conscious, without even truly understanding what qualifies consciousness, is just moving the goalpost. Or bikeshedding, perhaps.
I don’t decide that LLMs shouldn’t count as “conscious,” because I don’t have a reason to even take the concept of “consciousness” seriously to begin with!
You insist that words derive their meaning from social usage, then declare “what it’s like” meaningless by dissecting its individual words into “similar being.” That’s not a serious linguistic argument. You’re contradicting your own account of how language works.
Likewise, a rock “experiencing erosion” and a person experiencing pain involve two different meanings of “experience.” One means undergoing a physical change; the other involves feeling something. You’re equivocating between them. And a camera has a vantage point, too. That doesn’t mean it has subjective experience.
Nothing I’ve argued requires consciousness to be nonphysical or inexplicable. A physical explanation of pain doesn’t negate the existence of felt pain. The question is what produces that experience and how we can reliably identify it in other systems.
I incorrectly attributed someone else’s quantum-collapse proposal to you, I retract that. I see that was from the original commenter, not you.
But here’s the fundamental issue: Do you actually deny there’s a distinction between a nervous system detecting harmful stimuli and someone consciously feeling pain?
Because if you recognize that distinction, you already understand what phenomenon we’re investigating. Disputing the terminology doesn’t make it disappear.
Reasons given:
- Intelligence is not consciousness
- Silicon brains are not made of meat
- Consciousness requires meat (and/or a particular winding of neurons)
These are, to be frank, really weak. They say on point 2:
Computational functionalism … is popular among some scientists and philosophers, too, but we think it is fatally flawed because brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat.
One main reason is that it is impossible to separate what biological brains do — their functional organization — from what they are — their material substrate. In other words, there is no distinct separation between the mind and living tissue in the human brain, as there is between software and hardware in a digital computer.
Restating clearly: Ghosts are real. The mitochondria is not only the powerhouse of the cell, it also gives you mystic powers.
Really? The source they site for this point features the lovely assumption “consciousness is unique to biological life”. From this axiom, I see how the conclusion follows, but I don’t see why we should believe this axiom. We can do physics emulation of every atom in a fruit fly on a computer…
This analysis is correct but I have a minor quibble: The simulated fruit fly brain is not a complete simulation of the biological processes, or even all the neuronal connections, of the actual fly’s brain.
@Feathercrown
@artISAn #consciousness #AI #brain #neuroscience #computer #functionalismEven a “complete simulation” of a fruit fly brain would be no more than an approximation. I think you mean “emulation” and I agree.
The simple reason is that we do not know scientifically all of necessary and sufficient functional mechanisms of consciousness, nor consciousness’s functional role in “intelligence” (which we also have trouble describing). If, and only if we we did, we would (given the right tools) be able to replicate it functionally (in principle) using computation.
Specifically, I refer to a Universal Turing Machine (UTM) and the Church-Turing Thesis (the foundational principle of all computer science). EVEN THEN, there are computational problems that cannot be proved to be solvable by a UTM (e.g., the Halting Problem) and we don’t know what, if any role they play in consciousness.
Bottom line for me: we are going to need a revolution in each of the sciences of psychoneurophysics, mathematical logic, and theory of computation before we can begin to talk about replicating consciousness in a machine.
emulation is a better word; adopted.
I don’t see why we would necessarily need to understand consciousness to create it. There is no evidence that nature understands the consciousnesses it has created. In fact a human can create a new consciousness in about 9 months without knowing any theory.
The question in my mind is, how could we possibly tell we’ve succeeded? We can’t even say for sure that anyone other than ourselves is conscious.
@Feathercrown Maybe all you need are the right ingredients? I don’t think so. There must be a recipe. Human ontogenesis proceeds according to a process specified in our genes, modified a bit by the developmental environment. We don’t fully understand that process completely (AFIK) but there are no intrinsic obstacles. #Mind emerges at some point.
You are right about the question of recognizing consciousness. People are predisposed to attribute life, intentionality, and all kinds of “mental states” to all kinds of inanimate objects given the flimsiest evidence. The more something resembles ourselves, the quicker and deeper the belief is held.
I’m not sure consciousness is even required. It may be an illusion. It may be an artifact. It does not matter to the prospect of extremely powerful #AI systems. I fully expect models to assert consciousness and make demands on that basis. True or false, what do we do in that situation?
I’m not sure our society is ready to answer that sort of question.
@Feathercrown We are not ready, in the sense of thinking about the question thoroughly, but we don’t get to choose when it comes. I am hopeful, however, seeing the progress humanity has made in recognizing intelligence and self-awareness in other species. The human-centric bias is on the wane.
