[tylerneylon]

Author here: I'm grateful for the comments; thanks especially for interesting references.

Context for the article: I'm working on an ambitious long-term project to write a book about consciousness from a scientific and analytic (versus, say, a meditation-oriented) perspective. I didn't write this fact in the article, but what I'd love to happen is that I meet people with a similar optimistic perspective, and to learn and improve my communication skills via follow-up conversations.

If anyone is interested in chatting more about the topic of the article, please do email me. My email is in my HN profile. Thanks!

[jcynix]

Dennett has walked that path before. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. [...]

Quoted from rom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...

Regarding the multiple layers: the most interesting thoughts I read about theories of a mind, are the books by Marvin Minsky, namely: The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine which should be more widely known.

More on Minsky's ideas on “Matter, Mind, and Models” are mentioned in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i

[freilanzer]

"The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality" could be interesting to you. The framework it presents tries to explain attention and world models, and does so quite convincingly in my opinion.

[transpute]

"Design for a brain" by W. Ross Ashby (1953) is also worth a look, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40846986

> In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".

[tylerneylon]

Thanks!

[rerdavies]

Also a must read: How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker.

Pinker advocates for a model of mind that has multiple streams of consciousness. In Pinker's model of mind, there are multiple agents constructing models of the world in parallel, each trying to predict future states from current state plus current input data. A supervisory process then selects the model that has made the best prediction of current state in the recent past for use when reacting in the current moment. The supervisor process is free to switch between models on the fly as more data comes in.

Pinker grounds his model of mind in curious observations of what people remember, and how our short term memories change over a period of sometimes many seconds as our mind switches between different agent interpretations of what's going on. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Pinker concerns himself with why and how witnesses are unreliable, not for legal reasons, but for how those unreliabilities might reveal structure of mind. Pinker's most interesting observation (I think) is that what we seem to remember is output from the models rather than the raw input data; and that what we remember seeing can change dramatically over a period of many seconds as the supervisory process switches between models. Notably, we seem to remember, in short term memory, details of successful models that make "sense", even when those details contradict with what we actually saw. And when those details are moved to longer-term memory, the potentially inaccurate details of model are what are committed.

[ypeterholmes]

Not seeing your email, so I'll post here. I wrote up a similar theory of consciousness here: https://peterholmes.medium.com/the-conscious-computer-af5037...

In particular, I think there's a nice overlap between my description of self-awareness and yours. You mention a model capable of seeing its own output, but I take it a step further and indicate model capable of generating its own simulated actions and results. Curious what you think, thanks!

[lukasb]

Minksy's The Society of Mind is a must-read

[mensetmanusman]

Ones own consciousness is actually one of the few things you can’t apply the scientific method to.

It will be a good practice to see how deeply terms can be applied in order to combat this gap.

[n4r9]

How do you mean?

I can conceive of scientific experiments involving consciousness. For example:

Hypothesis: Consuming LSD gives me a hallucinatory experience.

Method: Randomized, blind trial. Every Saturday morning I consume one tab of either LSD or water, sit in a blank white room with a sitter (who does nothing), and record my experience.

Results: Every time after consuming water, I have no visual hallucinations and get bored. Every time after consuming LSD, I see shifting colour patterns, imagine music playing on the walls, and feel at one with the world.

Conclusion: Results strongly support hypothesis.

[falcor84]

If I recall correctly, a true hallucination is one that the person cannot distinguish from reality, so at best you'd measure "pseudohallucinations". But even then, your approach would suffer from all the limitations of phenomenology.

[n4r9]

I see what you mean about "hallucination"; I guess I was using the looser definition as per Wikipedia of a perception that "has the compelling sense of reality".

I'd be keen to understand those limitations of phenomenonology and how they apply to this specific experiment, if you have an opportunity to expand.

[falcor84]

I'm not that knowledgeable about this particular area. My familiarity in this area is mostly around confabulations[0] and false memories[1] such as those studied by Elizabeth Loftus[2].

I'm not sure if that would apply directly to your proposed experiment, but my concern is that what we experience as memories can sometimes apparently be generated on the fly rather than accessing something that was there before.

In general, these kind of phenomenological studies suffer from subjectivity, and are very difficult to connect to explanatory mechanisms, without additional objective evidence. One relevant approach to deal with this is Dennett's Heterophenomenology[3], which seeks to combine the subject's own impressions with other external evidence - so in your case, instead of having the sitter do nothing, you may want to pay them to gather additional objective evidence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory

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

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology

[n4r9]

Hmm, I almost see why it might be an issue. Although I guess that you could see the hypothesis as predicting what someone reports their subjective experience to be. Or perhaps that makes behavioural assumptions about consciousness?

I suppose if the sitter confirms that they and I stayed inside the cell, and that nothing else came in or out for the duration, that should address that issue? There could be cameras and microphones set up to record the lack of weird trippy phenomena. And I could record my own perceptions in the moment, either by writing it down or speaking into a dictaphone.

[observationist]

This is deeply incorrect; it's been a claim made for thousands of years, but it doesn't stand up in the face of Bayesian rationality.

The brain is necessary and sufficient cause for subjective experience. If you have a normal brain, and have subjective experience, you should have near total certainty that other people's reports of subjective experience - the millions and billions of them throughout history, direct and indirect - are evidence of subjective experience in others.

Any claim of solipsism falls apart; to claim uncertainty is to embrace irrationality. In this framework, if you are going to argue for the possibility of the absence of consciousness in others who possess normal human brains, it is on you to explain how such a thing might be possible, and to find evidence for it. All neuroscience evidence points to the brain being a necessary, sufficient, and complete explanation for consciousness.

Without appealing to magic, ignorance of the exact mechanism, or unscientific paradigms, there exist no arguments against the mountains of evidence that consciousness exists, is the usual case, and likely extends to almost all species of mammal, given the striking similarity in brain form and function, and certain behavioral indicators.

Cases against this almost universally spring from religion, insistence on human exceptionalism, and other forms of deeply unscientific and irrational argument.

I can say, with a posterior probability of certainty exceeding 99.99999999% that a given human is conscious, simply by accepting that the phenomenon of subjective experience I recognize as such is not the consequence of magic, that I am not some specially endowed singular creature with an anomalous biological feature giving me subjective experience that all others, despite describing it or behaving directly or indirectly as if it were the case. Even, and maybe even especially, if the human in question is making declarations to the contrary.

Consciousness is absolutely subject to the scientific method. There's no wiggle room or uncertainty.

Quantum tubules, souls, eternal spirits, and other "explanations" are completely unnecessary. We know that if you turn the brain off (through damage, disease, or death) all evidence of consciousness vanishes. While the brain is alive and without significant variance in the usual parameters one might apply to define a "normal, healthy, functioning brain", consciousness happens.

Plato's cave can be a fun place to hang out, but there's nothing fundamental keeping us there. We have Bayesian probability, Occam's razor, modern neuroscience, and mountains of evidence giving us everything we need to simply accept consciousness as the default case in humans. It arises from the particular cognitive processes undergone in the network of computational structures and units in the brain.

Any claims to the contrary require profound evidence to even be considered; the question is all but settled. The simplest explanation is also the one with the most evidence, and we have everything from molecular studies to behavioral coherence in written and recorded history common to nearly every single author ever to exist.

I find that disputes almost inevitably stem from deeply held biases toward human exceptionalism, rooted in cultural anachronisms, such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave. We could have left the cave at almost any point since the enlightenment, but there is deep resistance to anything challenging dogmatic insistence that humans are specially appointed to cognition, that we alone have the special magic sauce that make our lives important, but the "lesser" animals morally and ethically ours to do with as we will.

Whenever we look more deeply into other mammal cognition, we find structural and behavioral parallels. Given hands, facile lips and vocal apparatus, and a comparable density and quantity of cortical neurons, alongside culture and knowledge, absent disruptive hormonal and biological factors, there don't appear to be any good reasons to think that any given mammal would not be as intelligent and clever as a human. Give a bear, a whale, a monkey, a dolphin an education with such advantages and science suggests that there is nothing, in principle, barring them from being just as intelligent as a human. Humans are special through a quirk of evolution; we communicate complex ideas, remember, reason, manipulate our environment, and record our experiences. This allows us to exert control in ways unavailable to other animals.

Some seemingly bizarre consequences seem to arise from this perspective; any network with particular qualities in connective architecture, processing capacity, external sensors, and the ability to interact with an environment has the possibility of being conscious. A forest, a garden, a vast bacterial mat, a system of many individual units like an ant colony, and other forms of life may host consciousness comparable to our own experience. Given education and the requisite apparatus, we may find it possible to communicate with those networks, despite the radically alien and disparate forms of experience they might undergo.

If your priors include mysticism, religion, magic, or other sources outside the realm of rational thinking, this might not be the argument for you. If you don't have a particular attachment to those ways of thinking, then recognize where they exert influence on ideas and update your priors all the way; brains cause consciousness. There's nothing particularly magical about the mechanics of it, the magic is all in the thing itself. By understanding a thing, we can aspire to behave more ethically, that we can include all forms of consciousness in answering the questions of how to make life as good a thing as possible for the most people... and we might have to update what we consider to be people to include the lions, tigers, and bears.

[Propelloni]

There are quite a few attackable premises in your chain of arguments, and some dubious conclusions, too. I'm not going into it because I don't want to type a lengthy treatise, and, of course you know, those arguments have been going back and forth for the better part of three millenia now. I'm not the right person to rehash those. Just, if it would be easy it would be as cut and dried as you try to picture it.

I guess each of us, individually, has to, at some point in time, come to a version of an answer that we can live with. I find yours neither the worst nor the best I've ever heard, but I'm glad you have it.

[observationist]

I've had this point of view for years; I would love to refine, abandon, or update my perspective as necessary. Please tear into it!

[MarkusQ]

I mostly agree with you, but since you ask... :)

I think one weak spot is the assumption that the physical hardware for speech (e.g. lips & vocal chords) are to some extent necessary and sufficient for language. I think we know with pretty high degree of certainty (by arguments parallel to your other points) that <i>specialized brain circuits</i> are key to language use, and the physical means are secondary.

You may also want to consider why you implicitly draw a line at "mammals" and if this is really justified. The line might belong at "primates" or at "vertebrates" or...the whole idea of a line might be mistaken.

Also, kudos for inviting criticism. If more people did that, we'd all be better off (at least, I believe this to be the case).

[observationist]

Speech is part of our framework of capabilities essential for what we experience as normal consciousness. We have vocal apparatus that, together with our brains, enables language. Our complex hands allow us to manipulate our environment and perform complex abstractions and communication. For example, pointing at an object and making a sound represents "naming," which facilitates further abstractions. With language, memory, and storytelling, cultural development occurs, refining the tools and abstractions by which we engage with and understand our environment. Without dextrous hands, capable vocal hardware, or sharp eyesight, language and culture might not have developed, preventing the creation of machines that think.

Granting an animal the cognitive software of our culture means they only need speech to benefit from abstractions otherwise impossible to develop without humans.I focus on mammals due to the shared structure of our brains. Humans are conscious, and we must identify a specific phenomenon, network, circuit, or class of neurons responsible for consciousness. Since rat, human, and whale brains are incredibly similar, it's highly probable they have similar subjective experiences. We can't definitively rule out consciousness in different mammalian species due to our limited understanding of consciousness mechanics.

Some birds and lizards exhibit conscious and intelligent behaviors, suggesting different brain structures can serve similar functions. An Etruscan shrew has the smallest brain of any mammal, and there might be a threshold of capacity and architecture required for consciousness. If consciousness depends only on architecture, shrews might be conscious in a way we can relate to.

We don't fully understand consciousness yet; untangling the factors is a complex problem. Bayesian probability suggests that if your brain causes your subjective experience, other animals with similar brains are also conscious. Their behavior and artifacts, such as emotion, psychology, and intricate devices, indicate consciousness. Consciousness includes not just self-awareness or theory of mind but the second-by-second experience and interpretation of sensory constructs.

This idea challenges dualistic explanations. Religion, simulation theory, metaphysics, mysticism, and other explanations often arise in the absence of a clear understanding. However, one's conscious experience as a fundamental prior suggests a material basis for consciousness. Abandoning the bias of human exceptionalism is necessary for a cold, clinical view.

Consciousness seems to be a spectrum. Helen Keller described moving from a continuous, borderless blur of experience to concrete, episodic sequences with clear self-other delineation. Primitive humans, biologically similar to us but without language, would have experienced life differently - much like Helen's pre-language blur of the eternal now. Whales and other large-brained mammals might experience life similarly. If we discover their language, or a way of mapping engrams of their experience onto language, it will reflect a different way of experiencing things. The same applies to forests, giant mycelial networks, and colony insects, where we might find the computational circuits underlying consciousness and cognition.

We don't get to explore those things if we insist on staying in the cave and theorizing; I'd love for someone to point out I've wandered down a dead end, but everything I've read and considered so far leads me to believe that there's no value in distinguishing one's own consciousness from all other things scientific. Treat it as the evidence it is; if you need to update, update all the way.

[tivert]

> I've had this point of view for years; I would love to refine, abandon, or update my perspective as necessary. Please tear into it!

I think he's telling you to do that work yourself, because he doesn't want to do it and he's also not the best equipped to do it either.

[MarkusQ]

So..."I know you're wrong but I can't/won't say what about, how or why I know it, or otherwise back up my claim"?

This sounds like just another way of saying "I don't like your conclusions, but I can't see a good way to refute them."

[mistermann]

There's all sorts of assertions I take issue with, I'll just take the first one:

> This is deeply incorrect; it's been a claim made for thousands of years, but it doesn't stand up in the face of Bayesian rationality.

1. In this case, how is "Bayesian rationality" implemented (literally implemented(!)...what are the inputs, what are the outputs, what is the source code of the algorithm)?

2. What is the meaning of "doesn't stand up in the face of"?

[webstrand]

I do agree with you: one can absolutely apply the scientific method to their own mind, the subjective experience of consciousness is a largely consistent source of information, and that's all you need for the scientific method. Applying those discoveries to other people is unlikely to be correct. But you're arguing a tautology, you've already accepted the axiom of other minds, and you're working backwards from that premise to find evidence supporting the axiom.

The point of solipsism isn't to actually reject other minds. I'd argue that's quite a useless belief to hold, it provides no predictive power and no additional ways to engage with the world around one self. But there are any number of other equally valid interpretations of the only evidence one has access to: the fact that you yourself are conscious and that you receive input from a remarkably consistent source of information.

Not all of those interpretations provide the same tools of thought, but some are equivalent in power: For instance you could reject other minds and instead posit that your perception of them is a sophisticated construct created by your own consciousness to simulate interaction with a complex and consistent world. Alternatively, you might consider that other minds are simply facets of your own mind, reflecting your subconscious processes. These constructs are similarly axiomatic, they're unfalsifiable.

A lot of the rest of your argument feels like a straw-man to me. I don't fundamentally disagree with you—I also accept the existence of other minds because it provides predictive power and useful tools of thought. But writing-off people who question this axiom as "irrational", you're just defining "rationality" to include the axiom of the existence of other minds. And "irrational" is a loaded term when used to describe a person or their beliefs.

[FrancisMoodie]

Gödel, Escher, Bach - An eternal Braid is a great book about consciousness from a logical standpoint. Is this a work you're familiar with?

[Vecr]

Eternal Golden Braid, that is. Quite a bit of it's outdated at this point, but the explanation of uncomputability is probably still the best.

[Animats]

> a book about consciousness

Too many people have written books about consciousness. There's much tail-chasing in that space, all the way back to Aristotle. Write one about common sense. Current AI sucks at common sense. We can't even achieve the level of common sense of a squirrel yet.

Working definition of common sense: getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup.

[cornholio]

That's not a working definition of common sense. You've pulled as dependencies the entirety of human reasoning and self-reflection, a theory of mind for all sentient creatures you encounter and a gargantuan amount of context sensitive socio-cultural learning, to name but a few.

[ben_w]

For most of my life, people use "common sense" as an insult, "XYZ has no common sense" or similar — therefore I think it is, in practice, the overton window of the person saying it.

Others define it as "knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument", which LLMs absolutely do demonstrate.

What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.

[bamboozled]

Same could be said for a driver less train I suppose or the auto-pilot on a 747.

[creer]

I think you can go to a CNC machine, or a rock.

[Animats]

> What you ask for, "getting through the next 30 seconds of life without a major screwup", would usually, 99.7% of the time, be passed by the Waymo autopilot.

That speaks well of the Waymo autopilot, which does considerably better than that. Tesla "self driving", not so much.

[ben_w]

The Waymo percentage was calculated based on the disengagement rate and a guess at the average speed.

Tesla may be the same or not, but they aren't publishing current numbers where I could find them, only really old numbers.

Not that the exact value matters, because so far as I can tell the only autopilot worse than your threshold was the Uber one that crashed into a pedestrian pushing a bike. Even Tesla's 2016 version beat that.

[tgaj]

"Common sense" is just knowledge about society and our environment. It's not some kind of magic.