[strogonoff]

If you forget to drink water while working for many hours, you may feel dehydrated and poorly. If you remember to drink water, you feel better.

Drinking water clearly causes a change in your mind-state. However, drinking water is something you decide (or forget) to do, i.e. it’s obviously caused by your mind in the first place (or that of your partner or another person helpfully bringing you a glass). However, we can further speculate that said mind is, in turn, affected by certain chemical interactions (approximations of something external to those minds), and even call the general existence of minds into question. Yet further, we could treat that chemical reaction as, in turn, derivable from (or be a representation of) mind-states, yours or otherwise, further down the line.

You can see how as far as scientific method is concerned this gets nowhere very quickly—it’s unfalsifiable and outside of what scientific method is equipped to help us with (not a bug, since it’s by design).

Naively, it seems that best we could do is 1) acknowledge that uncertainty and perhaps 2) pick a point in the above chain, reason why to believe that point is not arbitrary, and explicitly adopt that as a philosophical position.

> I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

We can simply do that, though I did attempt to provide a justification for my position. Philosophy, whether done explicitly or implicitly, always informed the application of scientific method.

[lisper]

> we can further speculate that said mind is, in turn, affected by certain chemical interactions (approximations of something external to those minds)

Indeed, there is quite a bit of evidence to support this hypothesis.

> and even call the general existence of minds into question

Well, you can call anything into question, but there is quite a bit of evidence for the existence of minds.

> we could treat that chemical reaction as, in turn, derivable from (or be a representation of) mind-states

Well, I suppose we could, but again there is quite a bit of evidence that the causality of that particular mechanism (if I'm understanding you correctly -- you are being pretty imprecise here) runs in the other direction.

> You can see how as far as scientific method is concerned this gets nowhere very quickly

Sorry, no, I don't see that at all. AFAICT the way in which minds arise from chemistry is pretty well understood. In fact, it is sufficiently well understood that we are on the cusp of being able to create artificial minds that are not based on chemistry.

> Naively, it seems that best we could do is 1) acknowledge that uncertainty

Sorry, no, I don't see any uncertainty to acknowledge.

> I did attempt to provide a justification for my position.

Yes, but I think your attempt has failed.

[strogonoff]

> there is quite a bit of evidence that the causality of that particular mechanism (if I'm understanding you correctly -- you are being pretty imprecise here) runs in the other direction.

Not if you look thoroughly. There is no proof that causality runs[0] in either direction, and in all likelihood it would remain so for as long as the hard problem is unsolved.

> AFAICT the way in which minds arise from chemistry is pretty well understood.

That would be immensely groundbreaking, absolutely historical news that would eclipse LLMs, reverberate HN for months and would not pass either of us unnoticed.

> In fact, it is sufficiently well understood that we are on the cusp of being able to create artificial minds that are not based on chemistry.

Have you heard about the so-called Chinese room experiment or the concept of a philosophical zombie?

> I don't see any uncertainty to acknowledge.

That’s because you have adopted a philosophical position implicitly.

> Yes, but I think your attempt has failed.

You have not even attempted to object by providing a counter-argument, though.

[0] Side note: even though I am guilty of thinking that way myself, I find the whole notion of “causality running” smelling of Cartesian dualism and another inheritance of our religious past. A theory presupposing the existence of two different kinds of things (as in this case, mind vs. physical), while useful in its own ways, is necessarily less elegant than a theory that can manage with one.

[lisper]

> There is no proof

You need to read this:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/three-myths-about-scient...

Focus on myth #3.

> That would be immensely groundbreaking

Yes, it was [1]. Still is, as this work is on-going [2].

> Have you heard about the so-called Chinese room experiment or the concept of a philosophical zombie?

Yes. Have you heard of the Turing test?

For the record, the Chinese Room is based on the false premise that the Chinese Room is possible. It isn't. The person inside the room would be dead long before it emitted its first symbol. And philosophical zombies are IPUs [3].

> That’s because you have adopted a philosophical position implicitly.

No, I have adopted a philosophical position explicitly [4].

> You have not even attempted to object by providing a counter-argument, though.

Perhaps you are unaware that I am the author of TFA [5]? Did you read it?

---

[1] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_neuroscience

[3] https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/feynman-bullies-and-invi...

[4] https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/03/a-clean-sheet-introducti...

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40205012

[strogonoff]

> Focus on myth #3.

If you don’t like the word “proof” then replace it with the phrase “conclusive evidence”.

> Yes, it was [1]. Still is, as this work is on-going [2].

Sorry, how does any of that show that “minds arise from chemistry”?

> Yes. Have you heard of the Turing test?

Yes, and a Chinese room would pass the Turing test by its very definition.

> The person inside the room would be dead long before it emitted its first symbol.

Replace the person with a powerful CPU.

> And philosophical zombies are IPUs [3].

In this context a philosophical zombie is an instance of a Chinese room, which are fairly real things. Take a sufficiently advanced LLM, or an emulation of human brain, and you get one. (Showing that it is not a philosophical zombie would call for some conclusive evidence showing that the phenomenon of consciousness is caused by whatever entities feature in models from today’s natural sciences—so that manipulating them in a particular way is enough to cause consciousness to magically arise.)

> Perhaps you are unaware that I am the author of TFA [5]? Did you read it?

That slipped my mind after a while, but I don’t think it invalidates the discussion. I skimmed it back when it was posted and generally I have been familiar with the illusionist takes on consciousness for a while. As monistic materialism (as well as cartesian dualism) in general, they always strike me as inelegant and needlessly contrived. (When competing hypotheses cannot be falsified due to limitations of scientific method, beauty and elegance remain as qualities we can judge them on, and I find that beauty inversely correlates with the number of entities a given hypothesis must magically conjure into existence.)

[lisper]

> how does any of that show that “minds arise from chemistry”?

That's too long a story for an HN comment (which is the reason I referred you to an entire field of study) but the TL;DR is that the only reason we have to believe that minds exist at all is the I/O behavior of things that purport to have them (i.e. people) and that I/O behavior can (as far as we can tell) be completely accounted for the the behavior of neurons, which can be completely accounted for by chemistry.

> Replace the person with a powerful CPU.

That completely eviscerates the experiment. The whole point of the Chinese Room is that there is a conscious person inside who does not speak Chinese. Without that, the Chinese Room is just a run-of-the-mill AI.

> Showing that it is not a philosophical zombie would call for some conclusive evidence showing that the phenomenon of consciousness is caused by whatever entities feature in models from today’s natural sciences—so that manipulating them in a particular way is enough to cause consciousness to magically arise.

Where is your "conclusive evidence" that this "phenomenon of consciousness" actually exists?

If an AI exhibits I/O behavior that is indistinguishable from a human (i.e. can pass the Turing test) then on what basis can you call one a "philosophical zombie" and not the other?

> they always strike me as inelegant and needlessly contrived

What is your alternative?

[strogonoff]

> that I/O behavior can (as far as we can tell) be completely accounted for the the behavior of neurons, which can be completely accounted for by chemistry

Thing is, this can be explained the other way around. If neurons & chemistry were merely how conscious phenomena appear (a map of the territory), the observed outcome would not change. (Most of chemistry, physics, etc. all work equally well in that scenario, by the way, but there may be implications in other fields.)

By the way, reducing everything to I/O behaviour is also a philosophical position, I believe it’s called behaviourism.

> The whole point of the Chinese Room is that there is a conscious person inside who does not speak Chinese.

Neither does a powerful CPU/an LLM—the point of putting a slow person that doesn’t speak the language is to illustrate on an intuitive level what happens with a fast program that does the same, just in the blink of an eye.

> Where is your "conclusive evidence" that this "phenomenon of consciousness" actually exists?

You want to attribute me a claim I do not make. There is no conclusive evidence either way, and it could be impossible to obtain any (at least within the framework of scientific method). However, a theory where it does not exist has major logical flaws in my view.

> If an AI exhibits I/O behavior that is indistinguishable from a human (i.e. can pass the Turing test) then on what basis can you call one a "philosophical zombie" and not the other?

Hinges on the hard problem. If you claim consciousness does not exist, then you have your answer and I have mine, but I would object to treating it as a fact.

> What is your alternative?

I would not claim to have my own, but variants of monistic idealism as I understand them presuppose the objective existence of consciousness and go from there. I find that way we may have to magically conjure out of nothing much fewer entities and arbitrary rules, and don’t have to explain away the only phenomenon we have direct access to.