Thousands of years of thinking about these issues, decades coming to hard grips with how little we understand, and LLMs drop like an atom bomb waking up every idiot on the planet who has naive things to say about consciousness. What's the motivation to talk so loudly and confidently about things one knows nearly nothing about?
Edit: I regret using the word "idiot" above. Nothing against the author's intelligence. Poor choice of words on my part. Naively presumptuous is closer to the mark.
I don't think the use of the word 'idiot' was great by itself, it should have been 'arrogant idiot'
"This is a classic case of Scientism (The opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality.)"
He more or less claims that consciousness is outside the realm of human understanding, but also then mentions the millennia of study by scholars about consciousness has found the real truth about consciousness.
What astounds me is the sheer arrogance of it. The assumption that only humans can be imbued with consciousness, because of... what, exactly? Self-reflection and the rejection of the scientific method?
Point a weapon at an animal (for example, please don't really) and you'll immediately witness its self-awareness and some how even know that you're pointing a weapon at it.
The author just asserts to have a solution to the hard problem of consciousness:
> Consciousness exists independently from the body. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” (PTdC). We aren’t the body emulating consciousness, we are consciousness living through the body.
This is completely lacking evidence and is nowhere near established.
> These aren’t fringe beliefs.
only because they’re propagated by major religions that have been successful over the last few centuries (especially militarily and in trade). This does not constitute evidence of the claim.
We simply do not know where or why consciousness emerges, but to find the proposed explanation compelling, it needs to explain when e.g. in embryonic development consciousness zaps into existence. At birth? At 18 months old? At conception? Prior to conception, and consciousness is embedded in each sperm and egg?
It’s kind of an absurd view when you try to answer any questions with it, so I find the “AI is not conscious” corollary very unconvincing.
I mean, do we even all agree on what consciousness actually is?
You ask a thousand people to define consciousness and you'll get a thousand answers. The only consistent part of all these definitions will be that humans have "it". So in a way, consciousness is just a way to categorize the haves and the have-nots. Us, and everything else.
People have trouble answering the question "does $animal possess consciousness", and most animals have been around for many many kyears.
I therefore have some doubts people would have an answer for stuff that has only been invented relatively recently, let alone looking towards the future.
I think a good approach to defining consciousness is to ask what problem it solved. Why was it selected for.
The obvious functional purpose of consciousness is self-awareness. Awareness of our body in our environment, via our senses, and awareness of our bodies internal state, and all the way to awareness of our primal mental state (feelings, impulses), to awareness of our highest level mental states: what we are paying attention to, what we just deciding that is already impacting our bodies behavior, etc.
The more aware we are of ourselves in the center of our world, the better our ability to control our responses, and learn from the results of our responses.
The point where we are functionally aware of our own thoughts, including that we are aware of our own thoughts, and have enough ability to abstract to experience that as a closed infinite loop (as an abstraction) in real time -> that's consciousness.
The only thing mysterious about it, is we have that strong loop of awareness, but without awareness of a lot of the machinery under it that makes it possible. So to us, it appears to float in out minds free of actual machinery.
But just like we experience memories, without complete awareness of how they are created or stored, experience pain, without experiencing the nerve pathways that took a sensory input and passed it on to our pain center, we are aware of our own thinking about out thinking, but not aware of the machinery that makes us think.
Anyway, to me the functional, behavioral, benefit of the design approach seems sensible, since evolution is what produced our consiousness. And the answer I take from that seem reasonable.
Consciousness is just the depth of our real time awareness of our real time awareness.
And I would expect machines to get this, since this highest recurrent level of internal awareness provides the most information for self-regulation, control and adaptation.
But it seems like something that is easy to withhold in models too. No tight realtime feedback of highest level internal states. Intelligence, with enough self-awareness to be able to function sensibly, but with low or no internal stream of consciousness and the experiences associated with that.
I have a far simpler question that I wish to understand -- why does a pin prick hurt ?
I can understand that nerve endings respond to the stimulus. I understand that it can be transmitted across synapses by way of ionic exchanges to finds it way into the brain (or spinal cord) where it results in firing a bunch of neurons there as well. All in all a series of small scale chemical changes. But why does those result in a feeling of pain ?
Because creatures who didn’t experience that as aversive didn’t survive. We’re the descendants of those who subjectively suffered due to objective physical damage — all the other ones died.
Agreed. But it still makes me wonder about the internal mechanism that makes it work, or rather the last mile of that mechanism. Till we understand that we will not know what else can feel ?
Edit: I regret using the word "idiot" above. Nothing against the author's intelligence. Poor choice of words on my part. Naively presumptuous is closer to the mark.