I don’t know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises. To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don’t believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
I could maybe get behind the idea that LLMs can’t be sentient, but you generalized to all algorithms. As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
Even if we find the limit to LLMs and figure out that sentience can’t arise (I don’t know how this would be proven, but let’s say it was), you’d still somehow have to prove that algorithms can’t produce sentience, and that only the magical fairy dust in our souls produce sentience.
so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here’s my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don’t even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as ‘illusory’ - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this ‘something’ would be the ‘consciousness’ or ‘sentience’ or to put it in your oh so smug terms the ‘soul’ that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from ‘what are qualia’ to ‘what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving’. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human’s normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term ‘philosophical zombie’ comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be ‘aware’ of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
all matter contains some kind of (inhuman) sentience, including computers, that can sometimes coalesce into human-like sentience when in certain configurations (animism)
nothing is truly sentient whatsoever and our self reports otherwise are to be ignored and disregarded (self-denying mechanistic physicalist zen nihilism)
there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it’s most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It’s not absolute proof, but there’s nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, why is the idea that it can’t be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it’s possible?
and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
this is not true. for example, take the example of a radio, presented to uncontacted people who do not know what a radio is. It would be reasonable for these people to assume that the voices coming from the radio are produced in their entirety inside the radio box/chassis, after all, when you interfere with the internals of the radio, it effects which voices come out and in what quality. and yet, because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of the radio, and a lack of knowledge of how radios are used and how radio programs are produced and performed, this is an entirely incorrect assessment of the situation.
in this metaphor, the ‘radio’ is analogous to the ‘brain’ or ‘body’, and the ‘voices’ or radio programs are the ‘consciousness’, that is assumed to be coming form inside the box, but is in fact coming from outside the box, from completely invisible waves in the air. the ‘uncontacted people’ are modern scientists trying to understand that which is unknown to humanity.
this isn’t to say that i think the brain is a radio, although that is a fun thought experiment, but to demonstrate why correlation does not, in fact, necessarily imply causation, especially in the case of the neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness definitely impinges upon or depends upon the physical brain, it is in some sense affected by it, no one would argue this point seriously, but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Having done some quick reading, I can see that qualia are definitionally subjective, but I would question how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence. Certainly not enough confidence to structure an argument around. The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
This might be going too far into the analogy, but I think the problem with a comparison to a radio is that if you examine the radio down to its smallest part, and then assemble a second radio, that radio will behave in the same as the first.
Presumably as well, with enough examination, it would come to be understood that the voices coming from the radio are produced somewhere else, and there would be no reason for anyone to think that the voices themselves are appearing from an intangible and inherently subjective origin. If consciousness is essentially a puppeteer for the physical human body, that doesn’t preclude consciousness existing physically somewhere else, and that the “broadcaster” isn’t something capable of examination or imitation.
The whole argument seems to boil down to “maybe consciousness doesn’t work the way science would currently suggest it does.” but doesn’t present any evidence that the consciousness is somehow unsolvable.
but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
(Reading this back, this feels quite confrontational. I don’t intend it to be, but I lack the ability to word it in the tone that I would prefer.)
how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence.
The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.
the claim is not that consciousness is ‘unsolveable’, but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.
This might be going too far into the analogy
correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand
Yet they also seem to be claiming that the source of the voices is not just unknown, but unknowable, and they cannot explain even conjecturally how it might be that the voices are transmitted. When there is observable activity inside the radio that might seem to be creating the voices, but our group does not yet understand the details of how it works, it might not be insane, but it’s not particularly rational to focus on the transmission theory.
the voices in this analogy are not claimed to be unknowable full stop, merely irreconcilable with some or all of their previous understanding of the world. in non-analogical terms i am not saying we cannot explain subjectivity at all, but that we cannot explain it with our traditional ways of thinking (i am against dualism as much as physicalism). back to the analogy, it may be perfectly ‘rational’ to dismiss the transmission theory, but it would be rationally incorrect, rationally ignorant, and would prevent exploration of alternative routes of inquiry that could hypothetically lead to the truth.
If what you’re saying is true for human consciousness though, then it means that there are other undiscovered factors (invisible non EM airwaves, astrology, aliens etc) which influence our mood and state of being. Which I’m not even arguing against, but it would be a revolution in science
even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.
there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
This is just wrong lol, there’s nothing magical about vertebrates in comparison to unicellular organisms. Maybe the depth of our emotions might be bigger, but obviously a paramecium also feels fear and happiness and anticipation, because these are necessary for it to eat and reproduce, it wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t feel good
The discrete dividing line is life and non-life (don’t @ me about viruses)
central nervous systems are so far the only thing we almost universally recognize as producing human-like subjectivity (as our evidence is the self report of humans), so i restricted my argumentation to those parameters. for all i know every quark has a kind of subjectivity associated with it, it could be as fundamental to reality as matter. and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience. we don’t really understand how subjectivity is produced well enough to isolate it for empirical study in humans, let alone mammals, let alone microbes - but i personally think it is plausible that all life if not all matter has some kind of subjectivity.
and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience
unicellular organisms have been shown to learn. It’s literally the same thing as a vertebrate, just less complex
I don’t find that obvious at all. I agree there is nothing special dividing vertebrates from unicellular organisms, but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc. I do not see at all how paramecium could experience something like that. What part of it would experience it? Emotions in humans seem to be characterised by particular patterns of brain activity and concentrations of certain molecules (hormones, etc). I really cannot see how a unicellular organism has any capacity to experience emotions as we do. I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define. As you say, viruses are a good example but there are many others. Eg. a pregnant mammal. The foetus does not fill the classical, basic conditions of life that are taught in school (MRS H GREN, or whatever acronym) but does it really make sense to say that it is not alive? How many organisms are there when we look at a pregnant mammal. It is not clear.
but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc.
okay, so when a scallop runs away from you it doesn’t feel fear?
and when a paramecium is being ensnared by a hydra or some weird protist on your microscope slide, and it’s struggling to get away, it doesn’t feel fear? lol
Obviously every moving living thing can feel fear, that’s why they’re moving living things and that’s why they run away from predators
I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define
With a few exceptions like viruses, it’s pretty obvious. Rocks don’t make more rocks, nor does water
I’m not sure if scallops can run…
But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I’m not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.
Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
just youtube it, they can
and if they can do that, then of course they can feel fear too
When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no.
wild
I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from.
replace the hydra with a tiger and the amoeba with a deer, how is it any different apart from the number of cells? The deer prey could maybe have conscious thoughts/sorrow about its children during the last seconds of its life, but other than that the fear is fundamentally the same, it’s just more complex/scaled up
By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
sure glad we don’t have any of those
Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive?
Uh, I’m not an expert but I would suspect they’re in the process of dying if you do that. They just don’t die immediately, because nothing does (even a person who gets shot stays alive for a few minutes afterward). Can you feed this cell jelly its normal food and have it sustain itself like usual? If not then I would say it’s only alive on technicality, just like a person who’s been shot in the head and can still talk for the next few seconds–they’re technically also alive! But the person will die once the last few bits of brain oxygen run out due to the mechanical reality of their heart not beating, and the cell-jelly-in-a-bucket will also die after some time due to the mechanical reality of their vacuoles or whatever not being able to properly absorb food (I’m guessing, anyway. But this isn’t really relevant to the central point)
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
This is a disjoint coutnerexample, the point is not that a brain in a jar can’t replicate itself, but that the original organism that brain comes from, can. A man who gets a vasectomy is still alive, because his default state is being able to reproduce.
Rocks however, can NEVER reproduce. There is not A SINGLE rock that can reproduce. Therefore rocks are not alive.
It seems by your periodically hostile comments (“oh so smug terms the ‘soul’”) indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don’t ignore self-reports of sentience. I’m closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don’t totally understand biological life, but just saying there’s something “special” is wild. We’re a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there’s no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.
i think it is plausible to replicate consciousness artificially with machines, and even more plausible to replicate every information processing task in a human brain, but i do not think that purely information processing machines like computers or machines using purely information processing tools like algorithms will be the necessary hardware or software to produce artificial subjectivity.
by ‘special’ i meant not understood. and again, i submit not that it is impossible to make a subjectivity producing object like a brain artificially out of whatever material, but that it is not possible to do so using information processing technologies and theory (as understood in 2023). I don’t think artificial subjectivity is impossible, but i think purely algorithmic artificial subjectivity is impossible. I don’t think that a purely physicalist worldview of a type that discounts the possibility of subjectivity can ever account for subjectivity. i don’t think that subjectivity is explainable in terms of information processing.
here’s a syllogism to sum up my position (i believe i have argued these points sufficiently elsewhere in the thread)
Premise A: Qualia (subjective experiences) exist (a fact supported by many neuroscientists as per one of my previous posts wikipedia quote)
Premise B: Qualia, as subjective experiences, are fundamentally irreducible to information processing. (look up the hard problem of consciousness and the philosophical zombie thought experiment)
Premise C: therefore consciousness, which contains (or is identified with or consists of or interacts with or is otherwise related to) Qualia, is irreducible to information processing.
Premise D: therefore the most simplistic of physicalist worldviews (those that deny the existence of Qualia and the concept of subjectivity, like that of Daniel Dennett) can never fully account for consciousness.
thats it, nothing else i’m trying to say other than that. no mysticism, no woo, no soul, no god, no fairies, nothing to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities. just stuff we don’t know yet about the brain/mind/universe. no assumptions, just an acknowledgement that we do not have a Unified Theory of Everything and are likely several fundamental paradigm shifts in thinking away in many fields of research from anything resembling one.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don’t mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the “physicalist” model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a “Unified Theory of Everything”, do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided “physicalist” way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don’t think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a ‘unified theory of everything’ may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don’t think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
i know this is necroposting but i have to clarify.
one of the major premises of the p-zombie thought experiment is that there is nothing about information processing (AS WE CURRENTLY UNDERSTAND IT***) that entails or necessitates subjectivity. Information processing has zero explanatory ability for subjectivity. You cannot just assume that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ without proving it somehow, that’s not how science or philosophy work. Making a positive claim like ‘information theory can account for and explain subjectivity’ requires proof. and since no proof has been provided we must assume the negative claim, that subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory. If subjectivity is information processing (the way we currently understand information processing), prove it! Show your work. If you think information theory only needs trivial modifications to account for subjectivity it should be easy to elucidate what kinds of modifications those could be and what kinds of experiments we can conduct to test those modifications.
***For if information processing theory requires substantial revision to account for subjectivity, which i think is at least plausible if not obviously true at this point in history, then the claim that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ becomes vague and meaningless - we do not know what this hypothetical revised information theory looks like, what it claims and assumes as logical axioms or empirical truths, so making any statements about this hypothetical future information processing theory is completely pointless and meaningless.
You had a small fallacy in the middle, when you said “assume the negative claim”, you then made a positive claim.
“subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory” is a positive claim, but you said it was negative. I know it has the word “not” in it, but positive/negative doesn’t have to do with claims for or against existence, it has to do with burden of proof. A negative “claim” isn’t actually a claim at all.
The negative claim here would be “subjectivity may not be explained by information processing theory”. People usually have more understanding about these distinctions in religious contexts:
Positive claim: god definitely exists
Positive claim: god definitely doesn’t exist
Negative claim: god may or may not exist.
The default stance is an atheistic one, but it’s not “capital A” atheist (for what it’s worth I do make the positive claim against a theological God’s existence). Someone who lacks a belief in God is still an atheist (e.g someone who has never even heard of a theological God), but they’re not making a positive claim against his existence.
So the default stance is “information theory may or may not account for subjectivity”, we don’t assume it does, but we also don’t discount the possibility that it does as necessarily untrue, like you are.
If you notice, you made another mistake, you misread what I was saying. I never made a positive claim about subjectivity being information processing. I only alluded to the possibility. You on the other hand did make a positive claim about subjectivity definitely not being information processing.
I’m no philosopher, but at lot of these questions seem very epistemological and not much different from religious ones (i.e. so what changes if we determine that life is a simulation). Like they’re definitely fun questions, but I just don’t see how they’ll be answered with how much is unknown. We’re talking “how did we get here” type stuff
I’m not so much concerned with that aspect as I am about the fact that it’s a powerful technology that will be used to oppress
Actually, yeah, you’re on it. These questions are epistemological. They’re also phenomenological. Testing AI is all about seeing how it responds and reacts just as much as they are about being. It’s silly. When it comes to AI right now, existing is measured by reaction to see if it’s imitating a human intelligence. I’m pretty sure “I react therefore I am” was never coined by any great, old philosopher. So, what can we learn from your observation? Nobody knows anything. Or at least, the supposed geniuses who make AI and test it believe that reaction measures intelligence.
Yeah, capitalists will use unreliable tech to replace workers. Even if GPT4 is the end all (there’s no indication that it is), that would still displace tons of workers and just result in both worse products for everyone and a worse, more competitive labor market.
You seem to be getting some mixed replies, but I feel like I know what you’ve been trying to convey with most of your comments.
A lot of people have been dismissing LLMs as pure marketing hype (and they very well could be) but it doesn’t change the fact that companies will eventually decide that they can be integrated into other business processes once they reach a point of an “acceptable” percent of errors. They are really just statistical models at the end of the day. Right now, no C-suite/executive worth their salt would decide to let something like GPT write emails, craft reports, code/generate scripts, etc because there is bound to be some nuance it can’t quite grasp. Pragmatically, I view it in the same way as scrap on an assembly line, but we all know damn well that algorithms can perform a CEO’s role just as well as any other computer-based job (I haven’t really thought about how this tech will be used with robotics but I’m sure there are some implications for that too).
This topic is one that has been deeply fascinating ever since I took an intro cognitive science class on a whim in college lol which is why I have many thoughts (some of which are probably kinda dumb admittedly).
This also just coincides sooooo well considering the fact that I’m just about to finish Bullshit Jobs and recently read a line about how Graeber describes the internet ( a LLM’s training set)- “A repository of almost all of human knowledge and cultural achievement.”
I don’t know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises.
It’s exactly the fact that we don’t how sentience forms that makes the acting like fucking chatgpt is now on the brink of developing it so ludicrous. Neuroscientists don’t even know how it works, so why are these AI hypemen so sure they got it figured out?
The only logical answer is that they don’t and it’s 100% marketing.
Hoping computer algorithms made in a way that’s meant to superficially mimic neural connections will somehow become capable of thinking on its own if they just become powerful enough is a complete shot in the dark.
The philosophy of this question is interesting, but if GPT5 is capable of performing all intelligence-related tasks at an entry level for all jobs, it would not only wipe out a large chunk of the job market, but also stop people from getting to senior positions because the entry level positions would be filled by GPT.
Capitalists don’t have 5-10 years of forethought to see how this would collapse society. Even if GPT5 isn’t “thinking”, it’s actually its capabilities that’ll make a material difference. Even if it never gets to the point of advanced human thought, it’s already spitting out a bunch of unreliable information. Make it slightly more reliable and it’ll be on par with entry-level humans in most fields.
So I think dismissing it as “just marketing” is too reductive. Even if you think it doesn’t deserve rights because it’s not sentient, it’ll still fundamentally change society.
The problem I have with this posture is that it dismisses AI as unimportant, simply because we don’t know what we mean when we say we might accidentally make it ‘sentient’ or whatever the fuck.
Seems like the only reason anyone is interested in the question of AI sentience is to determine how we should regard it in relation to ourselves, as if we’ve learned absolutely nothing from several millennia of bigotry and exceptionalism. Shit’s different.
Who the fuck cares if AI is sentient, it can be revolutionary or existential or entirely overrated independent of whether it has feelings or not.
I don’t really mean to say LLMs and similiar technology is unimportant as a whole. What I have a problem with is this kind of Elon Musk style marketing, where company spokespersons and marketing departments make wild, sensationalist claims and hope everyone forgets about it in a few years.
If LLMs are to be be handled in a responsible way, it to have honest dialogue about what they can and cannot do. The techbro mystification about superintelligence and sentience only obfuscates that.
What assumptions? I was careful to almost universally take a negative stance not a positive one. The only exception I see is my stance against the existence of the soul. Otherwise there are no assumptions, let alone ones specific to the mind.
As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
is an incredible claim, loaded with more assumptions than I have space for here. Human thought is a lot more than an algorithm arriving at outputs for inputs. I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
Edit: also wanna share this piece about generative AI here. The part about trading the meaning of things for the mean of things resonates all throughout these artificial parrots, whether they parrot text or visuals or sound.
I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I think it’s a huge reach to call cloning “AI”. We created a funny way to make a genetically identical copy of an organism that still has to be implanted into a womb. It’s entirely natural and you’re not creating something by copying it. It’s not even remotely close to building a sentient machine from scratch.
But semantics aside the question is whether a glorified chatbot is actually sentient, which is what the vast majority of people refer to as “AI”.
I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
How do you know?
How can you know that live emotions, thoughts and dreams cannot and do not arise from a system of algorithms?
because fundamentally subjective phenomena can never be explained entirely in terms of objective physical quantitites without losing important aspects of the phenomena.
Honestly, at the end of the day I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s on anyone claiming that it is, to provide any proof whatsoever for their assertions. I don’t know for sure, but for the time being, I’m operating under the assumption that fancy statistics is insufficient to describe reconstitute the entirety of human subjectivity.
Just to be clear, the claim is that human thought is qualitatively different than an algorithm, I just haven’t been convinced of the claim. I chose my words incredibly carefully here, this isn’t me being pedantic.
Anyway, I don’t know how you’ve come to the definitive conclusion that somehow emotions aren’t information. Or that thoughts and dreams are somehow not outputs of some process.
Nothing you’ve outlined is necessarily impossible to derive as an output of some process. It’s actually quite possible that they’re only derived as an output of some process, unless you think they’re spawned into existence without causes, which I think religious people do believe (this is the essence of a free soul). I’m not religious.
“some process”, sure, but not every process is an algorithm. My digestion is a complex process with outputs, I wouldn’t describe it as algorithmic though. You might want to do so, and you probably can, but I’d argue you’re just flattening an incredibly complex, species-spanning process into a mathematical representation for ideological reasons at that point.
Yea, I think we might agree there but I don’t think that supports the original assertion that human thought is nothing but an (exceedingly complex) algorithm. You can also represent human thought as a system of hydraulic pressures, that’s what early psychology did, and how we got words like repression. But just because you can do that, and maybe even gain some useful knowledge from it - doesn’t mean actual human thought is actually made up of a complex system of pressures/valves - or algorithms. Your map may seem useful, but it ain’t the territory, is what I’m trying to get at, I guess.
To be clear, I don’t think AGI/ASI is an impossible idea, but I’m pretty confident that current approaches will not even get us in the ballpark, because they are fundamentally not the right tool for the job. Any allusion to having built the “almost AGI, swear, we’re this close this time” seems, to me, to be little more than marketing hype for silicon valley products and tech stocks. Maybe some day gluing enough of these products together will get you something indiscernible from AGI, but I really do doubt that whole premise. A text transformer won’t become sentient just by throwing more text at it and telling it to process, that’s just a hand-wavy sci-fi premise at best.
An algorithm does not exist as a physical thing. When applied to computers, it’s an abstraction over the physical processes taking place as the computer crunches numbers. To me, it’s a massive assumption to decide that just because one type of process (neurons) can produce consciousness, so can another (CPUs and their various types of memories), even if they perform the same calculation.
To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don’t believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn’t mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That’s trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that’s still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.
I could maybe get behind the idea that LLMs can’t be sentient, but you generalized to all algorithms. As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
Any algorithm, by definition, has a finite number of specific steps and is made to solve some category of related problems. While humans certainly use algorithms to accomplish tasks sometimes, I don’t think something as general as consciousness can be accurately called an algorithm.
Also, people created math and computers and not vice versa. It’s weird to call an organ a ‘meat tool’ of a any sort. Your brain isn’t a meat computer, your fingers aren’t meat pliers, your liver isn’t a meat Brita filter. We make tools based on our meat bits quite often. Computers are the same. Our brains aren’t based on computers cause computers are products of our brains meant to do some of the jobs of a brain, so I guess unlike a hammer it’s easier to trick yourself into believing it’s thinking cause it’s a machine made to handle some of the load work of thinking.
It seems you’re both implying here that consciousness is necessarily non-algorithmic because it’s non-finite, but then also admitting in another comment that all human experience is finite, which would necessarily include consciousness.
I don’t get what your point is here. Is all human experience finite? Are some parts of human experience “non-categorical”? I think you need to clarify here.
The steps in an algorithm are also specific and guarantee that you will get the same result every time you follow those steps provided you’re operating on the same data. The result you’re pursuing is unambiguous: if you’re using Djikstra you’re trying to get the shortest distance between a source node and every other node in a graph, for instance.
Compare this with consciousness in general: if it is an algorithm, what goal is it being used to achieve? What would the steps even be?
Regarding the point on finitude, “discrete” might have been a more appropriate word. What I’m trying to get at is that people in this thread are playing so fast and loose with the word “algorithm” that the use of the word becomes incoherent '.
So I take it you’re not a determinist? That’s a whole conversation that’s separate from this, but you should know there are a lot of secular people who don’t believe in free will (e.g having a will independent of any casual relationships to physical reality). Secular people are generally deterministic, we believe that wills exist within physical reality, and that they exist in the same cause/effect relationship as everything else.
With enough information of the present, you could know everything a human will do in their lifetime, there’s no will that exists outside of reality that is influencing reality (no will that is “free”). Instead, will is entirely casually linked, like everything else.
Put another way, you’re guaranteed to get the same result every time you put a human in exactly the same situation. Even if there is true chaos in the universe (e.g pure randomness) that’s a different situation every time you get a different random result.
The rejection of your thesis that consciousness is an algorithm is not a rejection of determimism. I have no doubt that all that exists is only material and the properties that emerge from it. The word algorithm makes no sense without a goal for it to be used to reach. Taking your paragraph about being able to predict everything a human will do in their lifetime with sufficient information (possible in principle, but intractable), what outcome would I be trying to achieve with this information? Is there some clear end state that the consciousness algorithm is optimized to reach?
Well, my (admittedly postgrad) work with biology gives me the impression that the brain has a lot more parts to consider than just a language-trained machine. Hell, most living creatures don’t even have language.
It just screams of a marketing scam. I’m not against the idea of AI. Although from an ethical standpoint I question bringing life into this world for the purpose of using it like a tool. You know, slavery. But I don’t think this is what they’re doing. I think they’re just trying to sell the next Google AdSense
Notice the distinction in my comments between an LLM and other algorithms, that’s a key point that you’re ignoring. The idea that other commenters have is that for some reason there is no input that could produce the output of human thought other than the magical fairy dust that exists within our souls. I don’t believe this. I think a sufficiently advanced input could arrive at the holistic output of human thought. This doesn’t have to be LLMs.
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Replace “magical fairy dust” with [insert whatever you think makes organic, carbon-based processing capable of sentience but inorganic silicon-based processing incapable of sentience].
I haven’t seen anyone here (or basically anyone at all, for that matter) suggest that there’s literally no way to create mentality like ours other than being exactly like us. The argument is just that LLMs are not even on the right track to do something like that. The technology is impressive in a lot of ways, but it is in no way comparable to even a rudimentary mind in the sense that people have minds, and there’s no amount of tweaking or refining the basic approach that’s going to move it in that direction. “Genuine” (in the sense of human-like) AI made from non-human stuff is certainly possible in principle, but LLMs are not even on that trajectory.
Even setting that aside, I think framing this as an I/O problem elides some really tricky and deep conceptual content, and suggests some fundamental misunderstanding about how complex this problem is. What on Earth does “the output of human thought” mean in this sense? Clearly you don’t really mean human thought, because you obviously think whatever “output” you’re looking for can be instantiated in non-human systems. It must mean human-like thought, but human-like in what sense? Which features are important to preserve, and which are incidental or parochial to the way humans do human-like thought? How you answer that question greatly influences how you evaluate putative cases of “genuine” AI, and it’s possible to build in a great deal of hidden bias if we don’t think carefully and deliberately about this. From what I’ve seen, virtually none of the AI hypers are thinking carefully or deliberately about this.
The top level comment this chain is on specifically reduces GPT by saying it’s “just an algorithm”, not by saying it’s “just an LLM”, which is implicitly claiming that no algorithm could match or exceed human capabilities, because they’re “just algorithms”.
You can even see this person further explicitly defending this position in other comments, so the mentality you say you haven’t seen is literally the basis for this entire thread.
That’s an unfalsifiable belief. “We don’t know how sentience works so they could be sentient” is easily reversed because it’s based entirely on the fact that we can’t technically disprove or prove it.
There’s a distinction between unfalsifiable and currently unknown. If we did someday know how sentience worked, my stance would be falsifiable. Currently it’s not, and it’s fine to admit we don’t know. You don’t need to take a stance when you lack information.
The same could be said to you? Or the people insisting that these AI chatbots are sentient. It’s a blatantly dishonest statement because they don’t actually know. And it’s rather unlikely.
To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience.
How is that plausible? The human brain has more processing power than a snake’s. Which has more power than a bacterium’s (equivalent of a) brain. Those two things are still experiencing consciousness/sentience. Bacteria will look out for their own interests, will chatGPT do that? No, chatGPT is a perfect slave, just like every computer program ever written
chatGPT : freshman-year-“hello world”-program
human being : amoeba
(the : symbol means it’s being analogized to something)
a human is a sentience made up of trillions of unicellular consciousnesses.
chatGPT is a program made up of trillions of data points. But they’re still just data points, which have no sentience or consciousness.
Both are something much greater than the sum of their parts, but in a human’s case, those parts were sentient/conscious to begin with. Amoebas will reproduce and kill and eat just like us, our lung cells and nephrons and etc are basically little tiny specialized amoebas. ChatGPT doesn’t…do anything, it has no will
I don’t know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises. To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don’t believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
I could maybe get behind the idea that LLMs can’t be sentient, but you generalized to all algorithms. As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
Even if we find the limit to LLMs and figure out that sentience can’t arise (I don’t know how this would be proven, but let’s say it was), you’d still somehow have to prove that algorithms can’t produce sentience, and that only the magical fairy dust in our souls produce sentience.
That’s not something that I’ve bought into yet.
so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here’s my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don’t even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as ‘illusory’ - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this ‘something’ would be the ‘consciousness’ or ‘sentience’ or to put it in your oh so smug terms the ‘soul’ that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from ‘what are qualia’ to ‘what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving’. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human’s normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term ‘philosophical zombie’ comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be ‘aware’ of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it’s most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It’s not absolute proof, but there’s nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, why is the idea that it can’t be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it’s possible?
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
this is not true. for example, take the example of a radio, presented to uncontacted people who do not know what a radio is. It would be reasonable for these people to assume that the voices coming from the radio are produced in their entirety inside the radio box/chassis, after all, when you interfere with the internals of the radio, it effects which voices come out and in what quality. and yet, because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of the radio, and a lack of knowledge of how radios are used and how radio programs are produced and performed, this is an entirely incorrect assessment of the situation.
in this metaphor, the ‘radio’ is analogous to the ‘brain’ or ‘body’, and the ‘voices’ or radio programs are the ‘consciousness’, that is assumed to be coming form inside the box, but is in fact coming from outside the box, from completely invisible waves in the air. the ‘uncontacted people’ are modern scientists trying to understand that which is unknown to humanity.
this isn’t to say that i think the brain is a radio, although that is a fun thought experiment, but to demonstrate why correlation does not, in fact, necessarily imply causation, especially in the case of the neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness definitely impinges upon or depends upon the physical brain, it is in some sense affected by it, no one would argue this point seriously, but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
Having done some quick reading, I can see that qualia are definitionally subjective, but I would question how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence. Certainly not enough confidence to structure an argument around. The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
This might be going too far into the analogy, but I think the problem with a comparison to a radio is that if you examine the radio down to its smallest part, and then assemble a second radio, that radio will behave in the same as the first.
Presumably as well, with enough examination, it would come to be understood that the voices coming from the radio are produced somewhere else, and there would be no reason for anyone to think that the voices themselves are appearing from an intangible and inherently subjective origin. If consciousness is essentially a puppeteer for the physical human body, that doesn’t preclude consciousness existing physically somewhere else, and that the “broadcaster” isn’t something capable of examination or imitation.
The whole argument seems to boil down to “maybe consciousness doesn’t work the way science would currently suggest it does.” but doesn’t present any evidence that the consciousness is somehow unsolvable.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
(Reading this back, this feels quite confrontational. I don’t intend it to be, but I lack the ability to word it in the tone that I would prefer.)
its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.
the claim is not that consciousness is ‘unsolveable’, but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.
correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.
no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).
Yet they also seem to be claiming that the source of the voices is not just unknown, but unknowable, and they cannot explain even conjecturally how it might be that the voices are transmitted. When there is observable activity inside the radio that might seem to be creating the voices, but our group does not yet understand the details of how it works, it might not be insane, but it’s not particularly rational to focus on the transmission theory.
the voices in this analogy are not claimed to be unknowable full stop, merely irreconcilable with some or all of their previous understanding of the world. in non-analogical terms i am not saying we cannot explain subjectivity at all, but that we cannot explain it with our traditional ways of thinking (i am against dualism as much as physicalism). back to the analogy, it may be perfectly ‘rational’ to dismiss the transmission theory, but it would be rationally incorrect, rationally ignorant, and would prevent exploration of alternative routes of inquiry that could hypothetically lead to the truth.
If what you’re saying is true for human consciousness though, then it means that there are other undiscovered factors (invisible non EM airwaves, astrology, aliens etc) which influence our mood and state of being. Which I’m not even arguing against, but it would be a revolution in science
even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.
Sounds like a made up word
God damn what a good post
This is just wrong lol, there’s nothing magical about vertebrates in comparison to unicellular organisms. Maybe the depth of our emotions might be bigger, but obviously a paramecium also feels fear and happiness and anticipation, because these are necessary for it to eat and reproduce, it wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t feel good
The discrete dividing line is life and non-life (don’t @ me about viruses)
central nervous systems are so far the only thing we almost universally recognize as producing human-like subjectivity (as our evidence is the self report of humans), so i restricted my argumentation to those parameters. for all i know every quark has a kind of subjectivity associated with it, it could be as fundamental to reality as matter. and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience. we don’t really understand how subjectivity is produced well enough to isolate it for empirical study in humans, let alone mammals, let alone microbes - but i personally think it is plausible that all life if not all matter has some kind of subjectivity.
unicellular organisms have been shown to learn. It’s literally the same thing as a vertebrate, just less complex
I don’t find that obvious at all. I agree there is nothing special dividing vertebrates from unicellular organisms, but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc. I do not see at all how paramecium could experience something like that. What part of it would experience it? Emotions in humans seem to be characterised by particular patterns of brain activity and concentrations of certain molecules (hormones, etc). I really cannot see how a unicellular organism has any capacity to experience emotions as we do. I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define. As you say, viruses are a good example but there are many others. Eg. a pregnant mammal. The foetus does not fill the classical, basic conditions of life that are taught in school (MRS H GREN, or whatever acronym) but does it really make sense to say that it is not alive? How many organisms are there when we look at a pregnant mammal. It is not clear.
okay, so when a scallop runs away from you it doesn’t feel fear?
and when a paramecium is being ensnared by a hydra or some weird protist on your microscope slide, and it’s struggling to get away, it doesn’t feel fear? lol
Obviously every moving living thing can feel fear, that’s why they’re moving living things and that’s why they run away from predators
With a few exceptions like viruses, it’s pretty obvious. Rocks don’t make more rocks, nor does water
I’m not sure if scallops can run… But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I’m not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.
Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
just youtube it, they can
and if they can do that, then of course they can feel fear too
wild
replace the hydra with a tiger and the amoeba with a deer, how is it any different apart from the number of cells? The deer prey could maybe have conscious thoughts/sorrow about its children during the last seconds of its life, but other than that the fear is fundamentally the same, it’s just more complex/scaled up
sure glad we don’t have any of those
Uh, I’m not an expert but I would suspect they’re in the process of dying if you do that. They just don’t die immediately, because nothing does (even a person who gets shot stays alive for a few minutes afterward). Can you feed this cell jelly its normal food and have it sustain itself like usual? If not then I would say it’s only alive on technicality, just like a person who’s been shot in the head and can still talk for the next few seconds–they’re technically also alive! But the person will die once the last few bits of brain oxygen run out due to the mechanical reality of their heart not beating, and the cell-jelly-in-a-bucket will also die after some time due to the mechanical reality of their vacuoles or whatever not being able to properly absorb food (I’m guessing, anyway. But this isn’t really relevant to the central point)
This is a disjoint coutnerexample, the point is not that a brain in a jar can’t replicate itself, but that the original organism that brain comes from, can. A man who gets a vasectomy is still alive, because his default state is being able to reproduce.
Rocks however, can NEVER reproduce. There is not A SINGLE rock that can reproduce. Therefore rocks are not alive.
It seems by your periodically hostile comments (“oh so smug terms the ‘soul’”) indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don’t ignore self-reports of sentience. I’m closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don’t totally understand biological life, but just saying there’s something “special” is wild. We’re a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there’s no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.
i think it is plausible to replicate consciousness artificially with machines, and even more plausible to replicate every information processing task in a human brain, but i do not think that purely information processing machines like computers or machines using purely information processing tools like algorithms will be the necessary hardware or software to produce artificial subjectivity.
by ‘special’ i meant not understood. and again, i submit not that it is impossible to make a subjectivity producing object like a brain artificially out of whatever material, but that it is not possible to do so using information processing technologies and theory (as understood in 2023). I don’t think artificial subjectivity is impossible, but i think purely algorithmic artificial subjectivity is impossible. I don’t think that a purely physicalist worldview of a type that discounts the possibility of subjectivity can ever account for subjectivity. i don’t think that subjectivity is explainable in terms of information processing.
here’s a syllogism to sum up my position (i believe i have argued these points sufficiently elsewhere in the thread)
Premise A: Qualia (subjective experiences) exist (a fact supported by many neuroscientists as per one of my previous posts wikipedia quote)
Premise B: Qualia, as subjective experiences, are fundamentally irreducible to information processing. (look up the hard problem of consciousness and the philosophical zombie thought experiment)
Premise C: therefore consciousness, which contains (or is identified with or consists of or interacts with or is otherwise related to) Qualia, is irreducible to information processing.
Premise D: therefore the most simplistic of physicalist worldviews (those that deny the existence of Qualia and the concept of subjectivity, like that of Daniel Dennett) can never fully account for consciousness.
thats it, nothing else i’m trying to say other than that. no mysticism, no woo, no soul, no god, no fairies, nothing to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities. just stuff we don’t know yet about the brain/mind/universe. no assumptions, just an acknowledgement that we do not have a Unified Theory of Everything and are likely several fundamental paradigm shifts in thinking away in many fields of research from anything resembling one.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don’t mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the “physicalist” model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a “Unified Theory of Everything”, do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided “physicalist” way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don’t think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a ‘unified theory of everything’ may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don’t think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
Premise B is where you lost me.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
i know this is necroposting but i have to clarify.
one of the major premises of the p-zombie thought experiment is that there is nothing about information processing (AS WE CURRENTLY UNDERSTAND IT***) that entails or necessitates subjectivity. Information processing has zero explanatory ability for subjectivity. You cannot just assume that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ without proving it somehow, that’s not how science or philosophy work. Making a positive claim like ‘information theory can account for and explain subjectivity’ requires proof. and since no proof has been provided we must assume the negative claim, that subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory. If subjectivity is information processing (the way we currently understand information processing), prove it! Show your work. If you think information theory only needs trivial modifications to account for subjectivity it should be easy to elucidate what kinds of modifications those could be and what kinds of experiments we can conduct to test those modifications.
***For if information processing theory requires substantial revision to account for subjectivity, which i think is at least plausible if not obviously true at this point in history, then the claim that ‘subjectivity is information processing’ becomes vague and meaningless - we do not know what this hypothetical revised information theory looks like, what it claims and assumes as logical axioms or empirical truths, so making any statements about this hypothetical future information processing theory is completely pointless and meaningless.
You had a small fallacy in the middle, when you said “assume the negative claim”, you then made a positive claim.
“subjectivity is not explained by information processing theory” is a positive claim, but you said it was negative. I know it has the word “not” in it, but positive/negative doesn’t have to do with claims for or against existence, it has to do with burden of proof. A negative “claim” isn’t actually a claim at all.
The negative claim here would be “subjectivity may not be explained by information processing theory”. People usually have more understanding about these distinctions in religious contexts:
Positive claim: god definitely exists Positive claim: god definitely doesn’t exist Negative claim: god may or may not exist.
The default stance is an atheistic one, but it’s not “capital A” atheist (for what it’s worth I do make the positive claim against a theological God’s existence). Someone who lacks a belief in God is still an atheist (e.g someone who has never even heard of a theological God), but they’re not making a positive claim against his existence.
So the default stance is “information theory may or may not account for subjectivity”, we don’t assume it does, but we also don’t discount the possibility that it does as necessarily untrue, like you are.
If you notice, you made another mistake, you misread what I was saying. I never made a positive claim about subjectivity being information processing. I only alluded to the possibility. You on the other hand did make a positive claim about subjectivity definitely not being information processing.
I’m no philosopher, but at lot of these questions seem very epistemological and not much different from religious ones (i.e. so what changes if we determine that life is a simulation). Like they’re definitely fun questions, but I just don’t see how they’ll be answered with how much is unknown. We’re talking “how did we get here” type stuff
I’m not so much concerned with that aspect as I am about the fact that it’s a powerful technology that will be used to oppress
I think it would be far less confusing to call them algorithmic statistical models rather than AI
Absolutely, but AI is the marketing promise that they can hype and not deliever and milk until its dry
Actually, yeah, you’re on it. These questions are epistemological. They’re also phenomenological. Testing AI is all about seeing how it responds and reacts just as much as they are about being. It’s silly. When it comes to AI right now, existing is measured by reaction to see if it’s imitating a human intelligence. I’m pretty sure “I react therefore I am” was never coined by any great, old philosopher. So, what can we learn from your observation? Nobody knows anything. Or at least, the supposed geniuses who make AI and test it believe that reaction measures intelligence.
Yeah, capitalists will use unreliable tech to replace workers. Even if GPT4 is the end all (there’s no indication that it is), that would still displace tons of workers and just result in both worse products for everyone and a worse, more competitive labor market.
You seem to be getting some mixed replies, but I feel like I know what you’ve been trying to convey with most of your comments.
A lot of people have been dismissing LLMs as pure marketing hype (and they very well could be) but it doesn’t change the fact that companies will eventually decide that they can be integrated into other business processes once they reach a point of an “acceptable” percent of errors. They are really just statistical models at the end of the day. Right now, no C-suite/executive worth their salt would decide to let something like GPT write emails, craft reports, code/generate scripts, etc because there is bound to be some nuance it can’t quite grasp. Pragmatically, I view it in the same way as scrap on an assembly line, but we all know damn well that algorithms can perform a CEO’s role just as well as any other computer-based job (I haven’t really thought about how this tech will be used with robotics but I’m sure there are some implications for that too).
This topic is one that has been deeply fascinating ever since I took an intro cognitive science class on a whim in college lol which is why I have many thoughts (some of which are probably kinda dumb admittedly).
This also just coincides sooooo well considering the fact that I’m just about to finish Bullshit Jobs and recently read a line about how Graeber describes the internet ( a LLM’s training set)- “A repository of almost all of human knowledge and cultural achievement.”
It’s exactly the fact that we don’t how sentience forms that makes the acting like fucking chatgpt is now on the brink of developing it so ludicrous. Neuroscientists don’t even know how it works, so why are these AI hypemen so sure they got it figured out?
The only logical answer is that they don’t and it’s 100% marketing.
Hoping computer algorithms made in a way that’s meant to superficially mimic neural connections will somehow become capable of thinking on its own if they just become powerful enough is a complete shot in the dark.
The philosophy of this question is interesting, but if GPT5 is capable of performing all intelligence-related tasks at an entry level for all jobs, it would not only wipe out a large chunk of the job market, but also stop people from getting to senior positions because the entry level positions would be filled by GPT.
Capitalists don’t have 5-10 years of forethought to see how this would collapse society. Even if GPT5 isn’t “thinking”, it’s actually its capabilities that’ll make a material difference. Even if it never gets to the point of advanced human thought, it’s already spitting out a bunch of unreliable information. Make it slightly more reliable and it’ll be on par with entry-level humans in most fields.
So I think dismissing it as “just marketing” is too reductive. Even if you think it doesn’t deserve rights because it’s not sentient, it’ll still fundamentally change society.
The problem I have with this posture is that it dismisses AI as unimportant, simply because we don’t know what we mean when we say we might accidentally make it ‘sentient’ or whatever the fuck.
Seems like the only reason anyone is interested in the question of AI sentience is to determine how we should regard it in relation to ourselves, as if we’ve learned absolutely nothing from several millennia of bigotry and exceptionalism. Shit’s different.
Who the fuck cares if AI is sentient, it can be revolutionary or existential or entirely overrated independent of whether it has feelings or not.
I don’t really mean to say LLMs and similiar technology is unimportant as a whole. What I have a problem with is this kind of Elon Musk style marketing, where company spokespersons and marketing departments make wild, sensationalist claims and hope everyone forgets about it in a few years.
If LLMs are to be be handled in a responsible way, it to have honest dialogue about what they can and cannot do. The techbro mystification about superintelligence and sentience only obfuscates that.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about the human mind there.
What assumptions? I was careful to almost universally take a negative stance not a positive one. The only exception I see is my stance against the existence of the soul. Otherwise there are no assumptions, let alone ones specific to the mind.
is an incredible claim, loaded with more assumptions than I have space for here. Human thought is a lot more than an algorithm arriving at outputs for inputs. I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
I don’t feel like going into more detail now, but if you wanna look at the AI marketing with a bit more of a critical distance, I’d recommend two things here:
a short read: Language Is a Poor Heuristic For Intelligence
a listen: We Are Not Software: David Bentley Hart with Acid Horizon
Edit: also wanna share this piece about generative AI here. The part about trading the meaning of things for the mean of things resonates all throughout these artificial parrots, whether they parrot text or visuals or sound.
I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I think it’s a huge reach to call cloning “AI”. We created a funny way to make a genetically identical copy of an organism that still has to be implanted into a womb. It’s entirely natural and you’re not creating something by copying it. It’s not even remotely close to building a sentient machine from scratch.
But semantics aside the question is whether a glorified chatbot is actually sentient, which is what the vast majority of people refer to as “AI”.
Either redditors don’t, or they wish they didn’t.
How do you know?
How can you know that live emotions, thoughts and dreams cannot and do not arise from a system of algorithms?
because fundamentally subjective phenomena can never be explained entirely in terms of objective physical quantitites without losing important aspects of the phenomena.
Just because we can’t do something with the tools we have available to us now, does not mean that the thing is impossible itself.
deleted by creator
Honestly, at the end of the day I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s on anyone claiming that it is, to provide any proof whatsoever for their assertions. I don’t know for sure, but for the time being, I’m operating under the assumption that fancy statistics is insufficient to
describereconstitute the entirety of human subjectivity.Just to be clear, the claim is that human thought is qualitatively different than an algorithm, I just haven’t been convinced of the claim. I chose my words incredibly carefully here, this isn’t me being pedantic.
Anyway, I don’t know how you’ve come to the definitive conclusion that somehow emotions aren’t information. Or that thoughts and dreams are somehow not outputs of some process.
Nothing you’ve outlined is necessarily impossible to derive as an output of some process. It’s actually quite possible that they’re only derived as an output of some process, unless you think they’re spawned into existence without causes, which I think religious people do believe (this is the essence of a free soul). I’m not religious.
“some process”, sure, but not every process is an algorithm. My digestion is a complex process with outputs, I wouldn’t describe it as algorithmic though. You might want to do so, and you probably can, but I’d argue you’re just flattening an incredibly complex, species-spanning process into a mathematical representation for ideological reasons at that point.
The question is whether or not human thought can be represented algorithmically. It seems we agree it’s plausible?
Yea, I think we might agree there but I don’t think that supports the original assertion that human thought is nothing but an (exceedingly complex) algorithm. You can also represent human thought as a system of hydraulic pressures, that’s what early psychology did, and how we got words like repression. But just because you can do that, and maybe even gain some useful knowledge from it - doesn’t mean actual human thought is actually made up of a complex system of pressures/valves - or algorithms. Your map may seem useful, but it ain’t the territory, is what I’m trying to get at, I guess.
To be clear, I don’t think AGI/ASI is an impossible idea, but I’m pretty confident that current approaches will not even get us in the ballpark, because they are fundamentally not the right tool for the job. Any allusion to having built the “almost AGI, swear, we’re this close this time” seems, to me, to be little more than marketing hype for silicon valley products and tech stocks. Maybe some day gluing enough of these products together will get you something indiscernible from AGI, but I really do doubt that whole premise. A text transformer won’t become sentient just by throwing more text at it and telling it to process, that’s just a hand-wavy sci-fi premise at best.
The Acid Horizon guest is an unironic god believer and theologian. That is negative credibility for any claim he makes about how reality works.
An algorithm does not exist as a physical thing. When applied to computers, it’s an abstraction over the physical processes taking place as the computer crunches numbers. To me, it’s a massive assumption to decide that just because one type of process (neurons) can produce consciousness, so can another (CPUs and their various types of memories), even if they perform the same calculation.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn’t mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That’s trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that’s still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.
Any algorithm, by definition, has a finite number of specific steps and is made to solve some category of related problems. While humans certainly use algorithms to accomplish tasks sometimes, I don’t think something as general as consciousness can be accurately called an algorithm.
Every human experience is necessarily finite and made up of steps, insofar as you can break down the experience of your mind into discrete thoughts.
That doesn’t mean it’s algorithmic, though. A whole branch of mathematics (and as consequence, physics) is non-algorithmic.
Also, people created math and computers and not vice versa. It’s weird to call an organ a ‘meat tool’ of a any sort. Your brain isn’t a meat computer, your fingers aren’t meat pliers, your liver isn’t a meat Brita filter. We make tools based on our meat bits quite often. Computers are the same. Our brains aren’t based on computers cause computers are products of our brains meant to do some of the jobs of a brain, so I guess unlike a hammer it’s easier to trick yourself into believing it’s thinking cause it’s a machine made to handle some of the load work of thinking.
It seems you’re both implying here that consciousness is necessarily non-algorithmic because it’s non-finite, but then also admitting in another comment that all human experience is finite, which would necessarily include consciousness.
I don’t get what your point is here. Is all human experience finite? Are some parts of human experience “non-categorical”? I think you need to clarify here.
The steps in an algorithm are also specific and guarantee that you will get the same result every time you follow those steps provided you’re operating on the same data. The result you’re pursuing is unambiguous: if you’re using Djikstra you’re trying to get the shortest distance between a source node and every other node in a graph, for instance.
Compare this with consciousness in general: if it is an algorithm, what goal is it being used to achieve? What would the steps even be?
Regarding the point on finitude, “discrete” might have been a more appropriate word. What I’m trying to get at is that people in this thread are playing so fast and loose with the word “algorithm” that the use of the word becomes incoherent '.
So I take it you’re not a determinist? That’s a whole conversation that’s separate from this, but you should know there are a lot of secular people who don’t believe in free will (e.g having a will independent of any casual relationships to physical reality). Secular people are generally deterministic, we believe that wills exist within physical reality, and that they exist in the same cause/effect relationship as everything else.
With enough information of the present, you could know everything a human will do in their lifetime, there’s no will that exists outside of reality that is influencing reality (no will that is “free”). Instead, will is entirely casually linked, like everything else.
Put another way, you’re guaranteed to get the same result every time you put a human in exactly the same situation. Even if there is true chaos in the universe (e.g pure randomness) that’s a different situation every time you get a different random result.
The rejection of your thesis that consciousness is an algorithm is not a rejection of determimism. I have no doubt that all that exists is only material and the properties that emerge from it. The word algorithm makes no sense without a goal for it to be used to reach. Taking your paragraph about being able to predict everything a human will do in their lifetime with sufficient information (possible in principle, but intractable), what outcome would I be trying to achieve with this information? Is there some clear end state that the consciousness algorithm is optimized to reach?
Well, my (admittedly postgrad) work with biology gives me the impression that the brain has a lot more parts to consider than just a language-trained machine. Hell, most living creatures don’t even have language.
It just screams of a marketing scam. I’m not against the idea of AI. Although from an ethical standpoint I question bringing life into this world for the purpose of using it like a tool. You know, slavery. But I don’t think this is what they’re doing. I think they’re just trying to sell the next Google AdSense
Notice the distinction in my comments between an LLM and other algorithms, that’s a key point that you’re ignoring. The idea that other commenters have is that for some reason there is no input that could produce the output of human thought other than the magical fairy dust that exists within our souls. I don’t believe this. I think a sufficiently advanced input could arrive at the holistic output of human thought. This doesn’t have to be LLMs.
Who said that?
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Replace “magical fairy dust” with [insert whatever you think makes organic, carbon-based processing capable of sentience but inorganic silicon-based processing incapable of sentience].
I haven’t seen anyone here (or basically anyone at all, for that matter) suggest that there’s literally no way to create mentality like ours other than being exactly like us. The argument is just that LLMs are not even on the right track to do something like that. The technology is impressive in a lot of ways, but it is in no way comparable to even a rudimentary mind in the sense that people have minds, and there’s no amount of tweaking or refining the basic approach that’s going to move it in that direction. “Genuine” (in the sense of human-like) AI made from non-human stuff is certainly possible in principle, but LLMs are not even on that trajectory.
Even setting that aside, I think framing this as an I/O problem elides some really tricky and deep conceptual content, and suggests some fundamental misunderstanding about how complex this problem is. What on Earth does “the output of human thought” mean in this sense? Clearly you don’t really mean human thought, because you obviously think whatever “output” you’re looking for can be instantiated in non-human systems. It must mean human-like thought, but human-like in what sense? Which features are important to preserve, and which are incidental or parochial to the way humans do human-like thought? How you answer that question greatly influences how you evaluate putative cases of “genuine” AI, and it’s possible to build in a great deal of hidden bias if we don’t think carefully and deliberately about this. From what I’ve seen, virtually none of the AI hypers are thinking carefully or deliberately about this.
The top level comment this chain is on specifically reduces GPT by saying it’s “just an algorithm”, not by saying it’s “just an LLM”, which is implicitly claiming that no algorithm could match or exceed human capabilities, because they’re “just algorithms”.
You can even see this person further explicitly defending this position in other comments, so the mentality you say you haven’t seen is literally the basis for this entire thread.
That’s an unfalsifiable belief. “We don’t know how sentience works so they could be sentient” is easily reversed because it’s based entirely on the fact that we can’t technically disprove or prove it.
There’s a distinction between unfalsifiable and currently unknown. If we did someday know how sentience worked, my stance would be falsifiable. Currently it’s not, and it’s fine to admit we don’t know. You don’t need to take a stance when you lack information.
The same could be said to you? Or the people insisting that these AI chatbots are sentient. It’s a blatantly dishonest statement because they don’t actually know. And it’s rather unlikely.
How is that plausible? The human brain has more processing power than a snake’s. Which has more power than a bacterium’s (equivalent of a) brain. Those two things are still experiencing consciousness/sentience. Bacteria will look out for their own interests, will chatGPT do that? No, chatGPT is a perfect slave, just like every computer program ever written
chatGPT : freshman-year-“hello world”-program
human being : amoeba
(the : symbol means it’s being analogized to something)
a human is a sentience made up of trillions of unicellular consciousnesses.
chatGPT is a program made up of trillions of data points. But they’re still just data points, which have no sentience or consciousness.
Both are something much greater than the sum of their parts, but in a human’s case, those parts were sentient/conscious to begin with. Amoebas will reproduce and kill and eat just like us, our lung cells and nephrons and etc are basically little tiny specialized amoebas. ChatGPT doesn’t…do anything, it has no will