I am unable to afford the attention at the moment to assess this argument, that's to its credit. They demonstrate that they are aware of the implications of the varying descriptions of consciousness. Most articles I read on this topic turn it to be crude justifications of a naive ideology. This article is a cut above.
I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.
yes and no. In my opinion, consciousness is not a process (yes I think Descartes was wrong). The 'thing' that is conscious, whatever it is, is the thing that is capable of experiencing the world. It doesn't need to do anything else to be conscious. Panpsychism is the closest thing to anything that make sense to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism). This view also makes it possible to separate consciousness from intelligence.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overview here: https://ccli.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mystery-in-neuroscie...)
> [...] but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, [...]
LLMs are nice here: we don't need a theory of everything to simulate them. You can indeed use pebbles on the beach.
Scott Aaronson said that in theory a finite look-up table can win eg a ten minute Turing test (any finite length is fine). Of course, to borrow his argument further, the naive table would be galactic in size. So the real magic is in being able to compress the responses of that table into something human sized / LLM-server sized.
I would argue that for the situation of the comic to occur, it's only necessary to have a theory of everything that's sufficiently good to simulate a universe that's close enough to ours that it's hard to notice the difference.
> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists
Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?
I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to say that it feels like something Gödel would have opinions about?
[0] the honest nerd's "did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night"
As an analogy: you can have a zip archive that expands to itself. Or even more so: to itself (the simulation of itself in itself) plus something arbitrary (standing in for the rest of the universe).
It is entirely possible (if perhaps unlikely) that the correct theory of everything is a relatively straightforward expansion of the current standard model.
Our bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.
Well, thermodynamics is considered pretty fundamental, and the second law of thermodynamics is pretty much all about information. (But your link already touches that.)
People also interpret the 'unitarity' of quantum mechanics to mean that information is preserved.
I haven't read the article myself yet as it's big and I haven't got time now, but I will as it looks like it might be very good. However, if you read just the very first paragraph you'll see that's exactly what the author thinks:
> Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree
Each consciousness is a universe on its own. Matter is just how those universes interact with each other. This is how quantum mechanics work in my idea, each observer affects the matter and quantum effects take most probable outcomes because of that.
I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy.
You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.
I like the debate because I've learned a lot of stuff about consciousness, thinking, free will, determinism, agency, intelligence, emergence, problems with reductionism, qualia, etc... Lots of these concepts may be related but it might just be a correlation.
For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?
I never thought I'd have so much sympathy for Kate “Forgive me, Mr Data; I am not accustomed to work with non-living devices that… Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive.” Pulaski, but here we are.
Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.
This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.
Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.
Maybe we should set the threshold for consciousness a little bit higher
I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.
Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious.
Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
LLMs are nice here: we don't need a theory of everything to simulate them. You can indeed use pebbles on the beach.
Scott Aaronson said that in theory a finite look-up table can win eg a ten minute Turing test (any finite length is fine). Of course, to borrow his argument further, the naive table would be galactic in size. So the real magic is in being able to compress the responses of that table into something human sized / LLM-server sized.
Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?
I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to say that it feels like something Gödel would have opinions about?
[0] the honest nerd's "did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night"
Yes, it is possible! See how a Quine is constructed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)
As an analogy: you can have a zip archive that expands to itself. Or even more so: to itself (the simulation of itself in itself) plus something arbitrary (standing in for the rest of the universe).
People also interpret the 'unitarity' of quantum mechanics to mean that information is preserved.
> Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree
A part of the universe is objectively conscious.
Each consciousness is a universe on its own. Matter is just how those universes interact with each other. This is how quantum mechanics work in my idea, each observer affects the matter and quantum effects take most probable outcomes because of that.
You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.
For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).
But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.
Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.