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Absurdist. The Ship of Theseus in modern prose.
Post modernism abhors objective truth, and now this? Consciousness compressed to conscious compressed to acts like must be like?
Intelligence is not compression, proof of point.
Nothing has been “figured out” here, only mulched for compulsive and over saturated appetites.
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore
doing sports photography as-a-fox [1] I am a bit scared of clusters of people screaming hard for their team, like I picture they'll attack me like a pack of wolves. I really gotta get over this and chat them up at half time and get a group photo.
[1] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork
Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all.
But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.
The abstract appeals to a few intuitions, and then vaguely waves toward a kind of slippery slope based on those intuitions, while adding that we ought to not use spatial distribution as bearing on parthood for certain kinds of entities. This has further intuitive appeal for folks who think that consciousness is a kind of emergent property.
It's a little cheeky and seems a little undergrad-ish to me, but I wouldn't call that either absurdist or postmodern.
Also what's wrong with the ship of theseus? If _you're_ tired of hearing that kind of argument, that's fine, but why dismiss it? It's thought-provoking at least, and the kind of thought it provokes has, in my opinion, some practical import
The solution to the riddle of the Ship of Theseus is “continuity.” Continuity defines the form and embodiment of identity.
As for the rest, it is sad, for it is provoking a casual sarcastic hand waving appeal in the near fraudulent guise of constructive thought. Maybe the person has a publication quota? Or just wants to get their name out.
Not constructive. I accuse it as alluring to those who cannot take their ideas seriously.
This paper doesn't seem to have much to do with post-modernism at all; it strikes me as much more in line with modern analytic philosophy.
Nor does it make any claims about the nature of intelligence, for that matter.
Did you even read the abstract?
I only read the abstract, but this sounds a lot like the dust theory from Greg Egan's books.
This is one of the main things that made me seriously doubt my prior assumption that consciousness supervenes over computation.
The author frames this as "either accept this highly counterintuitive result, or take it as a reason to doubt materialism, or find a principled criterion that excludes entities like this" but honestly this doesn't really strike me as highly counterintuitive
Pretty sure this is basically the plot to Tales of Arise.
Materialism implies Panpsychism. Not a surprise, but this is put forward in a confrontational way.
The real question for Panpsychism is not whether something is or is not conscious, but conscious of what. If everything is aware, what is this thing we have that a rock doesn't seem to have (but LLMs might have)? I'm basically sold on the premise of Panpsychism, but we do have to recognize that when we say "consciousness", we aren't always talking about the same thing.
Panpsychism doesn't mean "everything is aware", it means the capacity for consciousness is material and common. Put my brain in a blender and the atoms are the same but I am no longer conscious.
I'm perfectly happy to believe that the United States has an awareness of itself in the abstract sense that its a complex system with emerging behaviors that are feedbackloops of itself. I'm also convinced that all mammals and most sea and air creatures have consciousness in this as well as the more general sense.
To me, the fact that an awareness of one self exists isn't particularly stunning - what's stunning to me is that we believe it is something incredibly special and we are the only ones endowed with it.
I think this assumption comes from the same human self confidence that decided it was the only thing "created in gods image" in the universe and so on...
I'm not clear where the line is between individual agents acting in their own interests, which may involve more or less abstract experiences of cooperation and mutuality, and a direct awareness of self.
You don't need something the size of a country to show the problem. If one person starts a business they have an awareness of the business as a separate entity with its own tendencies, needs, and so on. Even if they're the only employee.
But there's a huge leap from 'a human individual is conscious of their own interests and identifications' to 'and therefore their business has an independent consciousness of its own.'
At what point, if anywhere, does a supposedly independent consciousness appear, where is it located, and can it communicate independently?
I think the line is at emergence.
Once a system (made of people, neurons, wires) creates outputs that are greater than the sum of its individual parts AND these outputs are self-referential you have something that could be considered conciousness. I wouldn't think the business in your example is self conscious - its an entity that is fully controlled by the person and an extension of it.
But, once the business grows, is composed of more people and interacts with customers and markets, it will develop automatisms for self preservation. At this stage, I would consider it concious.
This phrase comes up a lot in discussions of consciousness and I've never understood it and never seen why it's supposed to encapsulate the idea.
It isn't "like" anything to be me. There isn't something else I can compare it to. All I know is that I exist and experience and that there is an aspect of that experience that is impossible to communicate, define or share.
Being you is (presumably) like something: it's nice being you, it's miserable being you, it's exhausting being you, it's invigorating being you... whatever it is like, I can't describe it but you experience it.
You have a subjective internal experience. A thermostat does not. An LLM presumably does not. A dog or a bat [0] presumably does.
[0] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is...
It comes from Nagel's famous paper "what is it like to be a bat?"
He argues that something is conscious only if there is "something it is like" to be that thing. "Something it is like" meaning an answer to a question like "what was it like to speak on stage for the first time?", implying that there is some subjective character to the experience.
No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example. Especially when individual consciousness seems to emerge from a collective of neurons.
So are companies, right?
SCOTUS seems to believe so.
The cool thing about Eric and his work is that he consistently challenges "folk psychology" in ways that aren't just doom and gloom. I think the best way to understand his argument in the paper isn't as supporting panpsychism necessarily since the proliferation of "consciousness" might be because it's cheap and easy to get like an illusionist[0] might support. I think the universe might be conscious, but that's not entirely interesting because being conscious is just a behavioral disposition to get labelled conscious, i.e. it's more akin to a speech act than some deep metaphysical classification.
As always, reading Eric is a treat and if you enjoy reading about the oddities of our world and the weird conclusions that fall out of our best theories, then you would enjoy reading his work.
0: https://keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Frankish_Illusionis...
The answer is probably that consciousness is an illusion like continuity of existence is an illusion. Which is why most attempts to define it are circular.
The U.S. definitely takes actions to defend and protect itself. Seeks growth. I'm not so sure about inner dialogue... but is that a requirement?
One of the strangest implications of the idea that a computer simulation of a human brain would be conscious is that you can also just have humans do the same math manually trillions of times slower and it would still be conscious.
I guess this must be elaborated on in the article (without a subscription I can only see the abstract). But it seems like quite a leap. In particular we could believe in the possibility of consciousness in spacially distributed group entities, but that that possibility isn’t realized in the case of a country.
Which would make sense. For example if one believes that human consciousness somehow arises from signals shooting around from one neuron to another… sure, why not believe that some kind of ant-sized creature (or whatever, ants are just evocative) could be sending those signals between one another, and consciousness arises from that collective? But, human signal propagation might be too slow or error-prone to “close the feedback loop” so to speak.
That's fine, but I'm a materialist and I don't think rabbits are conscious, so the whole thing falls apart. I'm down with Descartes, I think they're just a kind of proteinaceous Roombas, be they never so sweet. I don't think they have a clue what's going on, or any true ideas in their heads (probably rabbit memes though). So in my conception of consciousness, which is self-awareness, entailing understanding and explanations, they aren't conscious. Of course if you want to make consciousness into something more basic like reaction to a stimulus then sure, a rabbit is conscious, and so is the US, and a slime mold, and possibly a rock, since it will fall down when prodded. You could actually manufacture an argument for the United States being properly self-aware and understanding itself! But this isn't it. Besides, nobody really understands the United States.
UC Riverside makes the paper available here:
https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious...
An onotlogical pivot I experienced in my late teens was recognizing that the taxonomy of life is not some immutable fact that we're uncovering. It's this Sisyphean task of providing structure to something that is everchanging. It's never complete, never correct, but it's often useful. In that way it's a lot like unicode!
When thinking about the evolution of the taxonomy of life, I think about how there's really no good reason to imagine a lifeform as being a singular, physically connected organism. We structure it that way because it's useful. We see trees and we imagine each one is a lifeform, but there are entire forests of just one tree. I don't think it's too bizarre to structure a model that demonstrates communities of lifeforms (whether ants, slime mold, or humans) as being effectively one conscious being.
That's very Popperian, I approve. And Hofstadter had anthills conceived as a unified consciousness, named "Aunt Hill" if I remember rightly.
I like to say "taxonomy is bullshit".
Taxonomy is essentially building a metaphor or analogy. It's useful at times, but it often breaks down when you start looking at it too hard.
Take everyone's favorite example: the tomato. We get into all sorts of discussions about what is a fruit, a vegetable, botanically or culinarily, etc, etc. Ultimately realizing that all plant matter is categorized as "vegetable" on the most abstract level. Thinking that one more layer of taxonomy will neatly box everything.
But it won't.
We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.
Classification is one of the hardest things because it's entirely a fuzzy problem.
This is one of my all time favorite posts on HN it’s been here before and I link about it often.
One thing I’ve considered it the corollary: if the United States is conscious, it suffers from bipolar I disorder and is currently deep in a manic psychosis.