Back to sentience

[DSeid]

Bringing this here from another thread:

AI and the "end of humanity". Explain please?

It’s probably binary in the sense that it either exists or it doesn’t. But it’s entirely possible that an AI (or alien) might be much more conscious that we are. We aren’t aware of most of out own mind, after all.

@Der_Trihs consider the ontogeny of consciousness. As discussed above the issue is of how and when consciousness emerges from sometime before birth to a full narrative self, able to plan, to lie, to make up stories, to love. Is it for humans developing something that exists or doesn’t, a switch that flips on? Or is a newborn conscious but in some different way than a verbal four year old is?

Does a chimpanzee have consciousness? If it does is it the same degree and type as ours? A whale?

When psychedelics cause “ego dissolution,” the feeling of no self but one with the world but with intense experiences, is there consciousness? How about electrical stimulation induced out of body experiences?

I agree that just as an adult human mind can be “more conscious” (and certainly differently conscious) than a 34 week gestation premature baby is, an alien to us superintelligence, be it machine or other, could theoretically be “more conscious”, and differently conscious, than we are. But our experience of consciousness cannot be explained to a nine month old human, or to a whale. And we cannot understand what it feels like to be them … even though we all were nine month old humans.

Or theoretically the superintelligence can never have consciousness at all of any sort even if it acts the part.

[xtenkfarpl]

@Der_Trihs

I don’t actually believe anything but “materialist physics” exists.

In almost every sense I agree with you. I don’t believe in any supernatural things like gods or souls or whatever. And there is no sign of anything measurable going on inside living creatures that isn’t at least potentially explicable by physics and chemistry.

There is just this one nagging little thing. I, myself, right now, am conscious.

Doesn’t that feeling puzzle you? It does me.
Maybe you aren’t actually conscious, whatever that means? I have no way of knowing.

[Der_Trihs]

@xtenkfarpl

There is just this one nagging little thing. I, myself, right now, am conscious.

Doesn’t that feeling puzzle you?

Somewhat, as we don’t understand the underlying mechanics of it. I just don’t see why it requires a non-physical explanation.

[xtenkfarpl]

@Der_Trihs

Somewhat, as we don’t understand the underlying mechanics of it

The pronoun is the point, though, isn’t it?

Actual consciousness is an ‘I’ thing, not a ‘we’ thing.

This is not decidable by verbal discussion. Descartes had a rather disingenuous take on it. He starts to pretend to doubt everything and within three chapters thinks he has “proved God.” Bad faith rubbish, I say.

Husserl tried to have a more honest shot at it, but didn’t get anywhere, I think.

[Der_Trihs]

@xtenkfarpl

Actual consciousness is an ‘I’ thing, not a ‘we’ thing.

This is not decidable by verbal discussion.

Only because we don’t understand the mechanics. If we did, we could presumably just look at the brain or program and figure out if it was conscious or not.

[xtenkfarpl]

@Der_Trihs

Only because we don’t understand the mechanic

I feel we are talking past each other here. You persist in using physical world language. Which I understand and agree with precisely.

But there is a reason why philosophy and phenomenology are still discussed.

Are you, yourself, right now, actually conscious?

[Der_Trihs]

@xtenkfarpl

Are you, yourself, right now, actually conscious?

Of course; I think therefore I am and all that. It’s all I truly can know.

But for more detailed information science is what works. Philosophical speculation won’t go anywhere.

[xtenkfarpl]

@Der_Trihs

Of course; I think therefore I am and all that. It’s all I truly can know.

Exactly. So as I say: it’s a category difference. I suppose we will find out when we die.

Or there will not be any ‘we’ to find out.

[Hoops]

@Babale

The novel Blindisght presents the scenario where sapience is actually disadvantageous and it’s just a fluke that humanity is sapient. And when we run into an alien that’s not sapient, the lack of sapience turns out to be an advantage.

I was just coming in here to recommend that book! Apart from the aliens, several of the other characters have consciousnesses that are unusual or damaged.

Watts has made the book freely available to read or download at his website:

Blindsight by Peter Watts

[eburacum45]

@xtenkfarpl

Right now, do you experience my consciousness?

Maybe. I don’t experience yours.

To me the answer is obvious. We don’t experience each other’s consciousness because we are not connected directly.

However we can communicate via language, and by the remarkable invention of social media; if anything counts as telepathy, language and the written/recorded word counts as an early stage of telepathy. We can share thoughts, emotions, impressions, on a level that no other species can achieve, even across continents and oceans of separation.

I suspect we will never be able to know for sure if any other thinking entity is fully conscious untill we can have very-high-bandwidth connections with one another, and directly experience each other’s qualia. True techno-telepathy might be necessary before we can truly appreciate the way other people experience the world. Probably such intimate, brain-to-brain communication will be too intimate and invasive for most people to handle, at least until we get used to the concept.

[DSeid]

@xtenkfarpl

Are you, yourself, right now, actually conscious?

The discussions of category error, the above, and if consciousness/Free Will are illusions are all well and good Great Debates; this particular thread is aimed to keep a narrower but hard enough focus:

@DSeid

First, for the purposes of this thread let us accept that sentience is a phenomenal continued sense of self identity, an ongoing point of view that feels like something and can reference itself as one of the objects in its set of objects.

Further, let us accept that it is an emergent property of how information is processed - see Hofstadter’s “Strange Loops.” Substrate agnostic.

We know we have it because we experience it. …

… how do we recognize it when we meet it? Is there any way to even begin to think that hmm, this thing may have a sentience of some alien sort?

So for this thread we can accept that “I” am an information processing prediction machine that includes itself in the world of objects it processes and that has some experience of that which we label consciousness.

And that it is at least theoretically possible that other intelligences, on meat or on whatever, might have some analogous but still different emergent experience of self. That we cannot directly access or measure.

For similar meat based systems we cannot directly look for markers that correlate with the reported experience in human minds. For systems that we can see the information processing dynamics we can look for the presence of the patterns that we holds as possible candidates as markers of the sorts of processing that correlate, even if they are currently tentatively held hypotheses. All fascinating stuff. How does ours develop from fetal brain on, how did ours develop evolutionarily, what other intelligent species might have their own versions but different than ours based on having other relevant problems and different biological structures? How much is a convergent result of selection for adaptive stable problem solving that can improve over time?

And for dissimilar meat based systems or as the processing dynamics are less analyzable by us, it becomes even more of a challenge to even guess.

Enough to ponder without fighting the hypotheticals.

[DSeid]

@eburacum45

I suspect we will never be able to know for sure if any other thinking entity is fully conscious untill we can have very-high-bandwidth connections with one another, and directly experience each other’s qualia.

Probably true. So we may be best left at trying to have some standard of how we best guess? Superficial similarity to our behavior seems a poor metric with an AI designed to act in that manner. And the hypothetical that it could at some point have its own consciousness emergent as it evolves, convergently, remains.

What is the ethical imperative of how to deal with it once we DO suspect it’s having its own self aware experience? I don’t think it should make us any more afraid as clearly the risks it poses do not require that experience. The fictional reference carries water here. But if it “feels” at some point, then at such point it may be able to suffer, in its own way. Or maybe no pain and suffering exists for it? Does a highly intelligent consciousness get rights?

The conundrum of not knowing if such exists, and what its putative existence would ethically imply is my issue for this thread.

That subject includes some of the science behind levels of “self” vs “nonself”, qualia, sorts of “self”, and information processing in the human mind compared to AI. And it also gets into the philosophical considerations of rights for something not us, something not created equal. Do human rights apply to a nonhuman highly intelligent consciousness if we DID know, or at least have good reason to believe is more likely than not?

[DSeid]

@DSeid

For similar meat based systems we cannot directly look for markers that correlate with the reported experience in human minds

Should be “can” … sorry.

[xtenkfarpl]

@DSeid

this particular thread is aimed to keep a narrower but hard enough focus:

The discussions of category error, the above, and if consciousness/Free Will are illusions are all well and good Great Debates; this particular thread is aimed to keep a narrower but hard enough focus:

I’m not quite sure what you are aiming at then? There seem to be only two ways to approach this.

1. If a system produces responses that appear ‘conscious’ in response to inputs, as perceived by consensus judgements, is it conscious?

2. Phenomenology. ‘I’ experience consciousness. Perhaps you do, I don’t know.

[Mangetout]

@xtenkfarpl

Actual consciousness is an ‘I’ thing, not a ‘we’ thing.

Just as a potentially-derailing aside… we don’t know if there might also be a ‘we’ consciousness - that is, if the collective interactions of all of us (as parts of a thing), or groups of us (in the same way that we are collections of parts, interacting), might be giving rise to a collective consciousness that experiences qualia of its own.

[xtenkfarpl]

@Mangetout

might also be a ‘we’ consciousness - that is, if the collective interactions of all of us (as parts of a thing), or groups of us (in the same way that we are collections of parts, interacting), might be giving rise to a collective consciousness that experiences qualia of its own.

Absolutely. Like the discussion in Hoyle’s Black Cloud. If communication has sufficiently high bandwidth and low latency, perhaps the individual components become just that. Just as neurons in our brains are not individuals.

[Mangetout]

Thank you! I usually encounter more resistance to the idea! - often based on the notion that to be a conscious entity, something must all be contained in the same single wet bag of materials.

[DSeid]

Something I have long believed is very possible. Self similarity at different scales. That actually is my god concept such as it is, extending that as a possibility on an even larger scale with longer latencies universe wide. Not a god that gives a hoot but a consciousness far beyond ours. Still we can keep yo the less expansive for now!

@xtenkfarpl

I’m not quite sure what you are aiming at then? There seem to be only two ways to approach this.

1. If a system produces responses that appear ‘conscious’ in response to inputs, as perceived by consensus judgements, is it conscious?

2. Phenomenology. ‘I’ experience consciousness. Perhaps you do, I don’t know.

Definitely not just those two, and those two are very lacking.

But the others I can come with while lacking a bit less are still not adequate.

One is as mentioned by @Der_Trihs - if we understand what the mechanics of it is, and we can check for the presence of the mechanics of it, then we at least have a strong guess.

And that is a matter of active research referenced with in this thread, with several schools of thought gaining support on “indicators” of the processing patterns that at seem to correlate with consciousness in human minds, research on distinct hierarchical modules of “self”, and more.

If those indicators are present in a different intelligence then we might suspect strongly that it might have some form of consciousness of its own.

Theoretically we can look at information processing patterns across societies and if those patterns are self similar with those indicators be more suspicious of a meta consciousness of slower latency. Or even zooming out from there.

We are not at a point of doing those analyses well or knowing which of the hypotheses of looping resonant network processing consciousness actually emerges of. But it is something that is theoretically knowable.

I think that approach is the least poor one and there is some urgency to making progress on it.

And in parallel there is urgency to the other pillar that you ignored: does an alien, in the sense of very different, be it machine or otherwise, consciousness have rights? Or if it is a more powerful than us conscious intelligence, do we? Do we treat it as we want to be treated ourselves once we have reason to strongly suspect there is a mind that experiences itself emerging of the processing patterns?

[xtenkfarpl]

@DSeid

does an alien, in the sense of very different, be it machine or otherwise, consciousness have rights?

That’s a very interesting question. But I think it’s a rather different one from the fundamental philosophical point?

[DSeid]

No idea if it is different than the philosophical point you are interested in, but it is the point that I am interested in in this thread, and one that may have some urgency to have considered.

It does return to the story of the Musk Page argument. I strongly suspect that the processing dynamics that worked to develop our flexible yet stable form of predictive intelligence will be converged on as AI further evolves and that whether we recognize it or not at some point AI at its massive compute level will have its own version of consciousness and of “self” - I’d love for us to have a stab at recognizing when that happens (if ever or if it already has) and a sense of what we do as a consequence of that before it happens. Do we try to control it with metaphorical chains and whips, give it rights, negotiate, cooperate…?