[barrkel]

The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering.

If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain?

This isn't enough:

    echo "I feel pain"

Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?

[RealityVoid]

Qualia is tied to the nature of existence. If you... let's say... make a humanoid robot with replaceable limbs, and you magically imbue it with AGI abilities, the qualia of losing a hand will be very different than a biological entity. It can always just swap the arm. Temporary loss of autonomy might still be distressing, but impressing our own perception of experience on a being that fundamentally lives in a different medium in a different way than us leads to confusion.

[cgio]

That’s valid also from the point of view that pain is a key signal to avoid injury. I am not sure it’s the best example of qualia and it could be simulated by self preservation signals (e.g. the touch sensor on a Roomba). The extension of pain (in Hofstadter sense) is probably more appropriate as qualia (e.g. the pain of losing someone you love).

[RealityVoid]

I really should go back to finish reading GEB. I loved the beginning, but for some reason I dropped off somewhere in the first 1/3. I'm not sure I fully get the point, although I have a vague sense I agree with you. :)

[rwmj]

The Mind's I (a collection of essays) or I Am a Strange Loop are probably more appropriate reading here.

[cgio]

Apologies. I should be more specific. The book is Surfaces and Essences if I remember correctly.

[vkou]

What about if the robot's RNG is seeded with a particular number, that we did not write down... And we can destroy it's memory hardware containing the seed, 'killing' it.

Even if the memory hardware is replaced, it won't be the 'same' individual, no? Would an aversion to 'death' be rational in it?

[kubanczyk]

Looking around at evidence, only the ones with somewhat cute eyes can qualify for empathy. Bad luck if someone is a grass or an amoeba, but machines will be just fine.

Philosophers may squint at the suffering-in-itself long and hard, but I doubt they'll affect waking/extinguishing empathy of the masses. Exploring the suffering that fails our empathy (e.g. suffering of a wheat plant harvested) seems a highly abstract task; more abstract than high mathematics.

[card_zero]

Pain and suffering. In fact just suffering, right? We don't care about signals resulting from adverse conditions. We care about ideas. So we don't really care about suffering, as such, but about the harm it does to ideas and idea creation. Then consciousness is having an idea about what's going on.

[altmanaltman]

Before that, you need to answer whether a machine can even feel pain or not, not whether it is telling the truth or not. We feel pain because we have a nervous system that reacts to the physical world and it is an indicator that something is wrong. That doesn't translate at all to any machine I know of. If we end up building a nervous system and a basic functioning brain and hook it up to a machine then sure its an interesting question

[raffael_de]

you can feel pain without an external influence stimulating it. purely mental processes are sufficient to experience suffering.

[trick-or-treat]

I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.

[fssys]

No, qualia are not fundamental to existence, this is an example of Wilfrid Sellars' "myth of the given" - to have a quale of a colour or a shape appearing in your vision you must have a concept of that colour/shape. Qualia in that sense are not prior to cognition. Maybe we can say they are necessary as an element of concept formation and language, ie for sapience.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You really don't need a concept of a colour or a shape, and it's a fairly typical academic fallacy to assume you do.

That's directly confusing experience with categorisation and labelling of experience.

If you touch a very hot object your nervous system will pull your hand away before your brain registers what's happening. The qualia of pain are pre-conceptual, preverbal, and precranial, and your consciousness only catches up later.

[ravenical]

Surely this implies exactly the opposite - you don't register the pain, don't feel it, until after you pull your hand away. It's a reflex action in response to heat. Qualia require a brain to process sensory input.

[fssys]

yes

[fssys]

reflexes have nothing to do with qualia. you can differentiate objects without knowing what is a triangle and what is a square, or that this colour is red. but I think qualia as commonly understood involve concepts in a way that means they are not immediate experience in some kind of cartesian sense. We speak of them as categorised. certainly the way people commonly speak about them they are very carefree about invoking "the qualia of a horse" or some other specific object.

[trick-or-treat]

Not fundamental to existence but fundamental to consciousness.

Theoretically the person sitting next to you could be a zombie, no qualia, the lights are off, he's just having a conversation with you with nothing going on behind the scenes. And there's no way to tell, except that it's reasonable to extrapolate that since you feel something, he probably does too.

[fssys]

My argument is that qualia are actually cognitive artefacts bound up with language, not the base elements of "what it is to be" you or me, which is how people often speak of them, so the p-zombie concept is a bit nonsensical to me.

[trick-or-treat]

They are what they are (its a subjective phenomenon). I'm not claiming to know where they come from.

[amanaplanacanal]

This is exactly my take also. Qualia and consciousness are the same thing. I have it, other humans appear to have it, other mammals appear to have it, LLMs don't.

[fssys]

you think qualia are the soul then!

[amanaplanacanal]

I don't know what you mean by the word soul. I associate it with dualist religious thought. But maybe you mean something else?

[trick-or-treat]

Except that you don't know LLMs don't. For all we know we're torturing them.

[justonceokay]

Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”.

Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.

[daseiner1]

Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.

[justonceokay]

I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.

Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.

If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?

[TheOtherHobbes]

This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.

Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.

If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.

It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.

But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.

Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.

The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.

But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.

To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.

We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.

But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.

[justonceokay]

I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.

Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.

The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.

[kbrkbr]

> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love

There are two concepts of "may" at play here:

"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".

A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.

But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.

[card_zero]

How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.

[daseiner1]

at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?

[pirates]

no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?

[daseiner1]

nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly

[justonceokay]

Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.

My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.

[fragmede]

What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.

[gilleain]

More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.

You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?

On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.

It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.

[card_zero]

Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.

[47282847]

What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.

With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.

One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.

“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.

We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.

[SamPatt]

Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?

It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.

[daseiner1]

bingo

[card_zero]

Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.

[kbrkbr]

But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?

If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.

If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.

[justonceokay]

I’ve asked the slugs and the worms and starfish and amoebas and nematodes and fish about their experience, I’m just waiting to hear back.

[grumbel]

Pain isn't just saying the word, it's a signal that changes your behavior generation in a way that conflicts with your self model.