[aswegs8]

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

[xeonmc]

Perhaps one day a criterion will be found for the equivalent of Turing-completeness but for consciousness — any system which contains the necessary elements of introspective complexity, no matter how varied or outlandish or inefficient in its implementation, would invariably develop consciousness over its course. Kind of like the handwaved premise in 17776.

[andy99]

I've read a (untestable) theory that consciousness is a property of matter, so everything has it, and we're just sort of the sum of the desires and feelings of our constituent matter.

In that construct, a computer program would never be conscious because it's a simulation, it doesn't have the constituent consciousness property.

I don't believe or not believe the consciousness-as-a-property-of-matter part but I do think programs can't be conscious because consciousness must sit outside of what they simulate.

[xeonmc]

How about simulation programs that are impure, i.e. those which include I/O in its loop? After all, taking the Turing-completeness analogy further, while a machine that satisfies said criterion is capable of universal computation, actually performing a computation still requires an external input specified outside of the program itself. Perhaps it might turn out that stimuli residing outside of the simulated system is a necessary condition for non-incompleteness of consciousness, as a seed of relative non-determinism with respect to the program’s internal specification?

[JadeNB]

> In that construct, a computer program would never be conscious because it's a simulation, it doesn't have the constituent consciousness property.

A computer program is the result of electrical and mechanical interactions that manifest in macroscopically observable effects. So are we. Why, if all matter is conscious, should the one count but not the other?

[koolala]

Computers are made of matter. The Earth would be conscious too? A consciousness could contain consciousnessess.

[hhh]

why would it not be conscious in that construct? the bits exist physically just the same

[bee_rider]

The matter would have consciousness, but I guess the simulation would be of a different consciousness, made of processing.

Although, our brains also are doing computation, and also seem to have consciousness. Are they linked? Why/why not…

This is animism, right? It is a religious belief. Not really subject to testing.

[andy99]

I am conscious, I can act as a nand gate. If you set up a billion people and had them act as a computer (was that in 3 Body Problem?) it would not be conscious of what it was doing.

[ghurtado]

> Perhaps one day a criterion will be found for the equivalent of Turing-completeness but for consciousness

My money is on mankind perpetually transforming the definition to ensure only our species can fit within.

We've been doing that long enough with higher order animals anyway.

[aziaziazi]

It's fascinating how visceral the reactions are when someone introduce a comparaisons between humans and other animals, that doesn’t start with the conclusion that humans are superiors anyway.

There’s reflections done around the term Speciesism (and anti-speciesism) and most people today stands for speciesism.

Interestingly the reflection is close to the debate on racism and anti-racism (where most people settled to anti racism to the point there isn’t much debate anymore), but race is only an informal classification that don’t hold much meaning in biological term, contrary to species.

[andy99]

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

[jstanley]

I also read comments like that and wonder if other people aren't conscious.

I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience!).

However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think the processes that produce your own consciousness could not be computable?

[kens]

Yes, some comments make me wonder about other people; I have three hypotheses: a) Some people experience consciousness very differently, similar to how some people have no mental imagery (aphantasia). b) The confusion is due to ill-defined terms. c) People are semi-trolling/debating/devils-advocating. The most interesting would be if people have widely different internal experiences, but I don't know how you could tell.

I read an interesting book recently, "Determined", which argues that free will doesn't exist. It was more convincing than I expected. However, the chapters on chaos and quantum mechanics were a mess and made me skeptical of the rest of the book.

[gpm]

I'd like to offer d) People are using the word without fully having considered what it means, and are thus saying things that don't make sense even given their internal experiences.

[layer8]

It’s something like b). Any description of consciousness is somewhat self-referential, so it remains unclear what, if any, substance there is to the concept.

[gpm]

Computable doesn't really make sense here IMO, as you say, consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience, it's the thing receiving the output not just an evaluation of a mathematical function.

The better question is why couldn't a consciousness attach itself to (be the audience for) a computation. Since we really don't understand anything significant about it, questions like this are next to impossible to disprove. At the same time since we've never seen anything except human start talking about consciousness spontaneously* it seems like a reasonable guess to me that LLMs/the machines running them are not in fact conscious simply because of their dissimilarity and the lack of other evidence.

* I note LLMs did not do so spontaneously, they did so because they were trained to mimic human output which does so. Because we fully understand the deterministic process by which they started talking about consciousness (a series of mathematical operations), them doing so was an inevitability regardless of whether they are conscious, and as such it is not evidence for their consciousness.

[jstanley]

> it's the thing receiving the output not just an evaluation of a mathematical function.

how do you know it's not just an evaluation of a mathematical function?

[gpm]

The definition is wrong.

A mathematical function is a set, possibly infinite, of pairs of abstract elements (commonly defined via sets) where no two pairs share the same first element. Nothing less, nothing more.

Computation is the act of determining the abstract output (second element in the pair) for a given abstract input (first element in the pair).

Nothing in those definitions is capable of expressing the concept of having perceptions (consciousness). That's not an abstract thing.

This isn't to say the concrete thing doing the computation couldn't in principal be conscious, just that it doesn't definitionally make sense for the math itself to be conscious.

[layer8]

A camera perceives its surroundings (add some image recognition to that). An LLM perceives its inputs. Things like that can be fully mathematically described. The question is, how is consciousness different from that? Introspecting, all there is is perception, arrows pointing to the things being perceived, where “things” includes some of the arrows themselves. Is there anything else? What prevents any of this to be fully mathematically described?

[jstanley]

I agree with everything you said up to "Nothing in those definitions is capable of expressing the concept of having perceptions (consciousness)".

Do you think the universe is not computable?

If you think the universe is computable, and you think that you exist in the universe, and you think that you are conscious, don't you think it follows that consciousness can exist within mathematical structures?

[saltcured]

I don't doubt others' consciousness, but I do doubt that (some) others have the same depth of meta-cognitive experience.

So, my own personal "P-Zombie" theory is not of mindless automatons who lack consciousness. It's just people who are philosophically naive. They live in blissful ignorance of the myriad deep questions and doubts that stem from philosophy of mind. To me, these people must be a bit like athletes who take their prowess for granted and don't actually think about physiology, anatomy, biology, metabolism, or medicine. They just abstract their whole experience into some overly broad concept, rather than appreciating the complex interplay of functions that have to be orchestrated to deliver the performance.

Though I went through university like many others here, I've always been somewhat of an autodidact with some idiosyncracy to my worldview. The more I have absorbed from philosophy, cognitive science, computation, medicine, and liberal arts, the less I've put the human mind on an abstract pedestal. It remains a topic full with wonder, but lately I am more amazed that it holds together at all rather than being amazed at the pinnacles of pure thought or experience it might be imagined to reach.

Over many decades, I have a deepening appreciation of the traditional cognitive science approach I first encountered in essays and lectures. Empirical observation of pathology and correlated cognitive dysfunction. I've also accumulated more personal experience, watching friends and family go through ordeals of mind-altering drugs, mental illness with and without psychosis, dementia, and trauma. As a result, I can better appreciate the "illusory mind" argument. I recognize more ways in which our cognitive experience can fall apart when the constituent parts fall out of balance.

[shayway]

> I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience!).

Do you mean to say there are objective criteria for consciousness? Could you expand on that?

[parpfish]

When people say that consciousness is “an illusion”, I think they mean to say that the illusion is that consciousness has the ability to direct our actions and the consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Our body processes sensory inputs and convert them into look actions (including speech) all on its own without a conscious decision maker directing anything or making decisions. the experience of consciousness is us just going along for the ride like a Maggie Simpson playing with her toy steering wheel in the simpsons intro

[saltcured]

I think you're conflating "consciousness" and "free will"? Most of what you are explaining is the question of free will to make decisions and take action.

The consciousness illusion is a different focus, as to whether our experience of alertness, thought, and perception even has the temporal and causal elements we tend to assume. This problem has many layers.

One example is the visual system and the illusion of a constantly perceived visual field that is really a synthesized memory of many smaller visual samples from the frequent saccades of our eyes. We don't see our own eye movement that is happening We also don't usually see our retinal nerve blindspot nor recognize the inherent asynchrony of some of our different senses. Our consciousness experience fuses all this together and well known perceptual illusions and magic tricks generally exploit the gaps in this process.

But there are many other layers, such as full blown hallucination where the mind constructs sensory perceptions that do not match our physical stimuli. There are many more subtle layers in between. Delusional beliefs can be felt as "fact" that suppresses internalization of other contradictory perceptions.

More subtly, people often post-rationalize causal relationships between social experiences, emotional state, and actions in ways that are inaccurate. Psychologists talk about "cognitive distortion" as an overall concept for this fuzzy area where people's internal state biases their perception and belief derived from physical stimuli.

[xeonmc]

Corgi-towed ear go zoom.

[add-sub-mul-div]

The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it.

And I'm not talking about spirituality, it could all be perfectly deterministic on some level. With that level being centuries or millennia or forever outside of our grasp.

[ghurtado]

> The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it.

You offer a pretty big statement without any backing whatsoever.

Lots of things are imitable without understanding how they work

Mankind was making fire for hundreds of thousands of years before knowing that it was the rapid oxidation of combustible materials.

Claiming that it wasn't fire because it was complicated to understand would be ridiculous.

[andy99]

I think the burden of proof is on showing that they are. Since we have no idea what consciousness is or how it works, I don't see how we could assume it clearly follows from anything.

[jstanley]

I'm not saying all algorithms are conscious. I'm saying I don't think it's obvious that algorithms can not be conscious.

[iwontberude]

David Parnas said it well recently that it’s verifiably true through past study that humans are often quite wrong about how describe their own cognitive processes. They will say one thing and then in practice do something else entirely.

[ghurtado]

It sounds like you stopped just short of realizing this is also how others feel about your consciousness.

[ljlolel]

Are bots writing those comments?

[ghurtado]

Perhaps the one I'm replying to.

It seems too pointless to be human.

[jstanley]

You can't tell if another being is conscious without being on the inside of it.

[layer8]

When you are inside of it in that sense, how would you be able to tell that it isn’t conscious? Doesn’t “telling” imply consciousness?