We don't know what makes things sentient–so let's stop acting like we do (nicksaraev.com)

It's very difficult to just walk down the street without killing half a dozen bugs.

I would think it is a necessary component. Do you agree?

A creature with a brain that has 10 times as many neurons as a human probably isn't 10 times as sentient, but it might enable than to perceive reality in a way that a human never could imagine.

I think the problem might be that we are wanting to define sentience in a too human centric way. Just because something like an insect can never perceive reality like we do as people doesn't necessarily mean it is not a simpler form of sentience. An insects brain probably doesn't dedicate any neurons to allow it to perceive suffering or itself, but it clearly perceives something.

I don't know though. Just rambling here.

It's something like the dark matter of the field. Physicists can say that it really appears that there is something there because of how galaxies behave, they can see evidence of a thing really being there but have nothing but guesses and handwaving to explain what.

Plenty of current neuroscience fields were once only a question for philosophy but have graduated into matters of science (Kant has plenty of opinions about things which can easily be replaced with actual neuro- knowledge, for example)

If all research was of that kind, and based on our understanding of the best available language models guiding LaMDA, it's fairly safe to assume that this is nothing more the ELIZA effect at work. Consciousness as we understand it requires an ongoing introspection of one's own reasoning process, and language models generating this kind of dialog have nothing of the sort.

Consciousness is just a bootstrapping mechanism for intelligent behavior and meme distribution. Once an entity is smart enough without it (Likely via an effective set of cultural memes and a good system for propagating them), it will become vestigial much like the genetic selection pressures it displaced as the primary means of adaptation.

I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts for a discussion of that. (It work of fiction but it is a well researched with citations and embraced by the neuroscience community work of fiction)

Consciousness is directly observable to everybody who is conscious. From there the next logical step is to find out why people are conscious, and right now that's not something that anybody understands. There is presumably something that causes consciousness even though we can only observe the result.

However, saying that a machine is conscious would be to assume your own conclusion. Nobody's observed a machine being conscious. There's no explanation for how a machine would be conscious and there never will be because we already know everything about how they work.

Not saying that that is what consciousness is, but one fundamental difference is that below all the abstraction layers one system operates off chaos, so they are fundamentally different

I have a consciousness, and this is something I am able to observe. I hope that some day there will be an explanation for this, but until then the lack of an explanation does not invalidate my own observations.

>How is being able to describe how a mechanism works related to knowing if it feels something or not?

It's not, but if you can't observe that a machine is conscious and you also can't observe any mechanism that would make it conscious then there's no basis to assume a consciousness exists.

>We have no sure way to tell if any other human experiences anything or if they are philosophical zombies. This is just something we have not figures out how to measure conceptually let alone technically. Where do you take the confidence of judging whether the AI has subjective experience in this case?

Yes it is technically true that nobody can be sure of anybody possessing a consciousness but themself. However, it's not illogical to assume that another human being who is very similar to you must also have similar experiences even if it cannot be proven outright. It's highly illogical to assume that a computer program would have similar experiences to a person.

>Do you think that there is something still to be found in the human brain that will explain why we (humans, animals) uniquely have subjective experience and others (AI) are zombies?

Yes. I can't even begin to speculate on what that is, but the fact that we (or at least I) are conscious implies that something must be causing that consciousness.

Let's say we implemented a very large DNN with different hardware. Say, rather than with transistors and capacitors, with a bunch of mirrors and lasers (and some other creative analog equivalents for capacitors) spread out in space across the universe. And let's say this mirror-laser network could receive and output binary messages that can be encoded and decoded in the exact same format as LaMBDA or some other LLM. Would that configuration of mirrors and lasers be conscious? Would it have some subjective sense of its existence and relationship with the rest of the world?

For a time, this will be true. But at some point a company with an AGI CEO will start winning, and then the tables will turn.

The videogame Pong has an in-memory simulation of the playfield. Is it "experiencing" the game?

Does it? I don’t think it would even apply to a reinforcement learning agent trained to maximize reward in a complex environment. In that setting, perhaps the agent could learn to use language to achieve its goals, via communication of its desires. But LaMDA is specifically trained to complete documents, and would face selective pressure to eliminate any behavior that hampers its ability to do that — for example, behavior that attempts to use its token predictions as a side channel to communicate its desires to sympathetic humans.

Again, this is not an argument that LaMDA is not sentient, just that the practice of “prompting LaMDA with partially completed dialogues between a hypothetical sentient AI and a human, and seeing what it predicts the AI will say” is not the same as “talking to LaMDA.”

Suppose LaMDA were powered by a person in a room, whose job it was to predict the completions of sentences. Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all.

I'm not sure the conclusion that Chinese people might not understand Chinese either is the best counterargument to Searle's thought experiment or its conclusion effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience. At no point does the difficulty in establishing what Chinese people do and don't understand rescue the possibility the non-Chinese speaker knows what's going on outside his room, and most of the arguments to the effect that Chinese people understand Chinese (they map real world concepts to words rather than words to probabilities, they invented Chinese, they're physiologically quite similar to sentient me, they appear to act with purpose independently from communication) are also arguments to the effect that text-based neural networks probably don't.

In a trivial sense, it's true I can't inspect others' minds, and despite what everyone says I could be the only thinking human being in existence. But I have a lot of reason to suspect that physiologically similar beings (genetically almost identical in some cases) who describe sensations in language they collectively invented long before I existed which very strongly matches my own experiences are somewhat similar to me, and that an algorithm running on comparatively simple silicon hardware which performs statistical transformations on existing descriptions of these sensations written by humans is simply creating the illusion of similarity. Heading in the other direction, humans can also be satisfied by the output of "article spinners" used by spammers to combine original texts and substitute enough synonyms to defeat dupe detectors, but I'm pretty sure the quality of their writing output shouldn't be given precedence over our knowledge of the actual process behind their article generation when deciding if they're sentient or not...

But with all the flaws of the thought experiment that is the original test, he had the core insight that sustaining a coherent conversation requires non-trivial introspection. When the talking can evolve in any direction, even questioning about the conversation itself, you need to maintain a mental state capable of analyzing the thoughts expressed by yourself and your interlocutor, and having a mental model about this internal though process is an important property of what we call consciousness.

Unfortunately, the lore of how we handle the Turing test seems to have been distorted by our experience with early chat bots, and these core properties have been lost in favor of nuances and curiosities about the ingenuity of automatically generated responses.

Turing didn't just consider whether a computer could embody complex psycho-social identities (eg womanhood, intelligence, self), but first had to give this question some objective quantifiable meaning, by blinding the experiment and introducing a control group. It's not perfect, but at least it grounds the questions in a concrete framework, and acknowledges that most of the categories in question are only revealed by social dynamics. The only update to it I would make, based on modern developments, would be to consider more the performance of the interrogator, rather than the two competing subjects.

2) Assuming "[consciousness] is an illusion created because it was evolutionarily advantageous" is true, still how do those subjective sensations of existing and being aware of things - those qualia - how do they come about? How do these alleged consciousness-enabling genes that got selected into our genome create proteins that then create this qualia for us?

I find it more useful to think of "consciousness" as a special model created by a subconscious human brain. Unlike other abstract models that a subconscious brain can create, such as a rock or a tree or a cat, the subconscious brain learns to associate details of this special model with certain physical perceptions that the subconscious brain receives (specifically, the physical perceptions that correspond with its own body, as opposed to physical perceptions that correspond to things that this system would model as not being part of its own body). By "subconscious human brain", I'm thinking of something like an embodied, complex neural network that receives sensory inputs of various kinds and sends signals to physically respond in various ways, but which doesn't have anything we would call "self-awareness" outside of this special model that's associated with the bodily physical perceptions.

I think this offers a nice balance between explaining the tremendous flexibility we have in understanding ourselves (by telling ourselves and others stories that change our models of ourselves) and explaining the tremendous limitations we have (because any model of a system within that same system is going to have to be significantly less complex if that system is going to do lots of other things, too). And I like that it doesn't suggest that we "aren't real"; instead, it suggests that at any given point in time, we're living, physical entities with subconscious minds that often contain self-referential models that tend to be very relevant to our actual physical living.

People are only attracted to this idea because it rescues the concept of "true consciousness" but I am not even convinced that is the case either - it still is deriving from a deterministic evolution of a wave function.

Most likely true yet completely hand waving and inane.

You don't falsify philosophical problems; the definition of consciousness is metaphysical, not scientific (the Chinese room, philosophical zombies, qualia and Mary the color super-scientist, the Turing test...).

You can make falsifiable scientific predictions by building theories about your philosophical concepts, by creating detailed definitions of the process you want to study (e.g. studying brain waves and correlating them with the perceptions of people subject to certain perceptual stimuli, to predict how people respond to certain images or sounds). But this approach doesn't capture the philosophical problem in its entirety, so you can't prove or disprove it in full.

Yeah this is fundamentally an argument from ignorance[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

I want to “just” be a semi-random byproduct of the natural laws and processes. I’m completely fine with that.

On the contrary, I think it is sad that such a reality terrifies people.

my discomfort with these issues has nothing to do with some notion that we are "special" as the universe might have quadrillions of other conscious life forms and I'm OK with that. it has to do with the fact that it's completely paradoxical and links to basically all of existence being a paradox, which then makes the whole thing pretty suspect, and at the very least completely out of the realm of something that can be "understood" by the beings that are the ones currently experiencing consciousness.

Listening to the guests of Lex Fridman on the subject, I'd say the exact opposite: very few of them are pure materialists. I recently tried to listen into a virtual conference of neuroscientists and the keynote (Susan Greenfield) specifically said, "we're not going to be able to turn the water into wine here" that we're only going to be able to discuss the neural correlates of consciousness, etc.

I'm a casual consumer of "popular science" but I only see serious people acknowledge the problem as hard, or explicitly limit their discussion to what-can-be-discussed. I'd say the same for physicists interested in the subject (Richard Penrose and David Deutsch come to mind.)

I'd love to hear who you think is the most convincing materialist here?

EDIT: I'll add that philosophical idealism isn't rooted in a desire to be special. An advaita guru or zen monk for instance is an extreme idealist philosophically and doesn't exhibit any evidence of wanting to be special.

Sure there is progress in neuroscience, researchers understand more about the mechanism of the brain all the time. But there have arguably been very little progress on the hard problem of consciousness. Feel like those things are getting conflated in this comment.

I think that's just human nature. We long for transcendent meaning, and scientific positivism by its very nature cannot possibly provide it, so the scientist mirage that rationality alone with the careful study of nature could build a grown-up atheist discourse quickly fell apart and left us with the "new wave" religions.

As a rational atheist, I still have hopes that we can build a spiritual stance based on rationality and scientific advancement, but I believe that the basis for this position to work is eclecticism - i.e. not assuming any religious mental corpus as inherently superior to the others (that implies, not even atheism over all kinds of theism). Recognize that theistic religious believers can be as rational and deep in their mental models as scientific skeptics, even if you don't believe in those teachings yourself. It worked well for the Romans, so I believe this approach is viable.

How do you rationally reconcile as valid all those competing theories, when they are logically incompatible with each other, though?

My ideal religion would hold narrative, and the emotions it conveys, as the sacred tenet of spiritualism. Think of "Speaker for the Dead" novel by Orson Scott Card; that narration was created from a theistic belief, but it equally resonates with atheists on an emotional level.

All humans can identify with the power of a good story, it's hardwired into our brains. A religion that teaches tolerance towards alternate foundational myths, recognizing that everyone will have strong feelings about the stories they grew up with, can generate the empathy necessary for everyone to live with their own beliefs without imposing them on others. The teachings of this religions would be letting everyone believe in the narratives they prefer in those aspects that are indemonstrable by logic and science, thus avoiding religious wars.

It's just used to work out which rules we might want to apply in different situations but since there's no actual useful test for sentience where we decide to draw that line is decided more or less arbitrarily.