Claiming it’s complementary is also not benign—it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least some practical success in doing so. I don’t believe that to be impossible and have some things I could suggest there, but I also carry the common scepticism caused by philosophers not getting literally anything right about the 20th-century-physics picture of the world right ahead of time, so I don’t believe it trivial either.

(Yeah, quantum computing and microscopic, low-energy quantum physics in general is kind of an exception to my provocative assertion above, though one could argue that the people who started that were from a counterculture of physics first and philosophers only as a consequence of that. I don’t really want to throw shade on philosophers here, only to express my bewilderment that people who made it their life’s work to speculate what the stuff of the world could be got it so wrong so many times. People in other fields also got it all wrong, of course, but then they didn’t claim to be particularly serious about their speculation.)

Yes, there is a sub area called philosophy of science, and many people in that area are trained in philosophy and science. But I’m unsure why you think philosophers are supposed to be getting empirical facts about physics right ahead of the physicists. That’s not their job.

What is their job then?

But the question still stands: What is the job?

I too am not sure what you are implying there. The enterprise, assuming it had some merit, sounds like evidence of complementarity?

> it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least some practical success in doing so.

Well, yeah, all of those are a given. The rest of your comment goes more toward philosophers speculating on aspects of the material world (i.e. the realm of scientific inquiry), but there is a lot more to philosophy. The holes in the scientific enterprise have long been well delineated, which isn't a criticism, but for example we can't derive human values solely from science [1].

Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

A theory of ants wouldn't "underpin" the behavior of ants. If the ants behave differently than the theory, then the theory is wrong and should be changed. The ant theory is something in the minds of outside observers, not the ants, and ant behavior doesn't rely on it. The dependency goes the other way: the observers modify their theory to better describe the ants. The ants would exist without the theory, but theory would be pointless if there were no ants.

Is a philosophy of science similar? Or does it have a practical effect on scientific work?

Unlike ants, scientists can learn a philosophy of science, and perhaps believe it. Does this affect their work?

One reason it might not affect their work in practice is that they didn't learn that particular philosophy. Also, perhaps different scientists might learn different philosophies without practical effect.

Why that pattern of thought is correct in stating anything is absolutely part of philosophy.

When a person practices science, they are called a scientist. When a scientist exhibits a behavior, that behavior is not necessarily called science.

Also, it seems like there's more to understanding methodology than deciding what counts as science?

To go back to the ant analogy, people had fuzzy ideas about what an ant looks like. Some people might have called other bugs ants even though today we don't. This later led to more precise definitions under scientific taxonomy, where some species are scientifically classified as ants. But there's a lot more to understanding ant behavior than deciding what counts as an ant.

(Also, the definition of what an ant is co-evolved with scientific understanding of ants. Taxonomy existed before the theory of evolution and taxonomies were refined with genetic testing.)

Ants (today) are classified differently from scientists and firefighters. They are not defined based on a specific thing they do, like "anting"; rather, they are defined based on what they are, and their behavior is irrelevant to their classification.

Historically, animal categories were defined much more like professions. A fish was something that primarily swims; a bird was something that primarily flies; a worm was something that primarily slithers; a beast (the category that ants fell into) was something that primarily crawls. Even concepts like "animal" and "plant" were defined this way: animals are animated, while plants are planted in place. There was a lot of debate on how to categorize lifeforms that exhibited less-than-crytal-clear modes of locomotion, just as there is debate today on whether a given person is actually a scientist or not (do they do real science or pseudoscience? do they do a lot of science or is too little science for it to count? etc.).

This, of course, is radically different from the way we classify biological lifeforms now, although there are a few odd historical holdovers (like "fish", which is a catch-all term for aquatic vertebrates without terrestrial ancestors, even though some of them are more closely related to land animals than they are to other fish).

> Is a philosophy of science similar? Or does it have a practical effect on scientific work?

Absolutely, what a p value is depends on your philosophy of science. Whether your statistical analysis even involves p values also depends on it.

> Also, perhaps different scientists might learn different philosophies without practical effect.

Yes, if you stumble upon some simple causal relationship of such massive effect size it is undeniably present beyond a reasonable doubt, it may not matter if a Bayesian or frequentist practitioner came across it. However it certainly can matter what framework evidence gets analysed, considered and aggregated when the observable data themselves are essentially the same.

Okay, let's assume animals (such as scientists) observe things, record them, and react to them without an explicit theory in mind, but there's an implicit epistemological framework that describes how they behave.

It seems like you still need to build your epistemology to match the animals' behaviors, or it's not the one they use? When scientists do math, you need to observe how they actually use math. How do they actually set up and run an experiment or write a paper? It might be different than you imagine?

This is what David Chapman calls the "ethnomethodological flip" [1].

Scientists also might use math differently from how they claim they use it in a formal paper, which doesn't include all the blind alleys and mistakes. A scientific paper is a cleaned-up just-so story.

A fun example of ethnomethodology is studying exactly how a scientist follows the formal procedure for doing a PCR test, including small mistakes that they don't explain and you might not even notice in the demonstration video unless you watch it very carefully, multiple times. [2]

It seems like a very cool thing to do that's rarely done. It might help for coming up with better philosophy?

[1] https://metarationality.com/ethnomethodological-flip [2] https://metarationality.com/rational-pcr

P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). To the extent that philosophy underpins science, it does so because scientists are bad at math.

First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions, when deploying Bayesianism requires an interpretation about what a probability itself is. Don't take it from me though, perhaps from Andrew Gelman, the guy who wrote the book on Bayesian data analysis [2,3].

Then, wrt the charge that those who do not use such an inductive approach (or outright rejected it, e.g. in favour of falsificationism) are bad at math. Which would include the statisticians who developed the null hypothesis significance testing framework that is still pretty dominant in science today: Jerzy Neyman, Egon Pearson, Ronald Fisher (who literally coined the term 'Bayesian') etc. There's a lot of criticism worth making about Fisher, but I'm not sure if anyone has called the guy that developed linear discriminant analysis bad at math before.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-28

[2] Bayesian Data Analysis http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/

[3] Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/phil...

I'm arguing that philosophical baggage is irrelevant to the current practice of science, because the overwhelming majority of published papers have serious and obvious methodological deficiencies that we have collectively agreed to ignore. Science as practised today is a desperate struggle to demonstrate something (p ≤ 0.05) by any means necessary. Established statistical methods have become a means to conceal rather than illuminate. This isn't the fault of individual working scientists, but the fault of the basic information architecture of science and a ritualistic, cargo-cult approach to understanding data. Bayes theorem probably isn't all we need, but it is all we need to spark a scientific renaissance if only we would use the damned thing.

I worked in private agricultural research for many years, and the issues you describe here did not apply to us. A single instance of statistical significance was insufficient to make any assumptions or adjust any policies. Of course we would present those results if we got them, but nobody was getting excited about it until we got the same results consistently several more times, in several different locations, with several different research teams. Being the first to get a positive result was no more meaningful that being the 10th to get a positive result. Promotions were based on your ability to design and conduct solid research, regardless of the outcome.

This is the core confusion I think. I find philosophy very relevant for the way I reason and solve problems and evaluate arguments, and in this sense philosophy is powerfully practical. But it’s true that for any given claim, there is always the possibility of taking the opposite position. This lack of final, case-closed consensus doesn’t mean that philosophers individually haven’t converged on true beliefs or haven’t made progress. It’s just that unlike mathematical truths, we can write out the proofs of our arguments, but there’s always someone who disagrees about one of the starting assumptions. So then civilians who haven’t heard of people like Parfit think to themselves, wow 2k years and you can’t tell me anything about ethics or logic or epistemology — it’s like bro just read the literature

But I held similar views. What moved me away from these views was the experience that in science you have methods that will let you see with high probability when your thesis is wrong.

Philosophy does not have such methods. You cannot only take the opposite claim for almost anything, but in my experience that claim has actually been taken by another philosopher for almost any topic.

The current consensus is in my experience lead by the people with the loudest megaphone. It's not the best theory given the things that really happen.

No philosophy (in the sense of actual writings of a philosopher) was causally involved in bringing the first astronaut to the moon; in building the first pacemaker - I would argue in none of anything where you could say: if you can do this with it, its probably on to something. Its methods seem to work.

As said, I cannot judge your thinking in any way, but this led me to question that philosophy is not practically relevant to me. How can I even judge if it works? And if I can't, is this not blind trust? Like an imaginary screwdriver for imaginary screws.

In the day-to-day practice of science i.e. when empirical inquiry 'works', there certainly are underpinning philosophical assumptions, whether or not they are reconsidered or appreciated with every experiment. The implicit in the act of hypothesis testing, some variant of which most scientists in day-to-day practice, are assumptions about the nature of probabilities, inference etc. The NHST framework that is typically used came about after extensive battles over philosophical considerations that apply to significance/hypothesis testing between Neyman and Pearson vs Fisher. The fact that I never write that a hypothesis is (as a research biologist) is 'proven', but some variant that of it having withstood an attempt at falsification, is loaded with Popperian critical rationalism.

> Math is the precise language needed to speak about these methods and the knowledge.

Except math can't map directly onto reality, or data generating processes that are studied, unless you are presupposing some kind of logical positivism (and I doubt you are). We need probabilities, statistics, and frameworks to map all of this uncertainty, and they must be underpinned by some sort of philosophical assumptions that can't be derived from science itself.

> Look at the achievements of science. That is how you get convinced it gives us a grip on reality.

But that in and of itself is a philosophy of science, one of instrumentalism. However, it only extends to whether science can be useful, but not whether it is accurately describing reality or is true.

You have many good points.

Let me just say that Popper has been philosophically criticized to the point that some say it is a dead horse. Why are we still using this mixture of Fisherian and Neymar-Pearson hypothesis testing (that is if we don't use bayesian methods)? Because it practically works well, not because Popper was right or found a deep philosophical truth.

These methods just generate more often than not knowledge, as we can judge from the consequences.

I argue that nobody cares if the assumptions we put into the frameworks are philosophical true - they are possibilities, and we try some out. So far we seem to be doing pretty well, no matter what philosophers say about the truth of these assumptions.

I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

But it's not that I have a fixed metaphysical position here. I really only use the tool that was most promising in the past for the task at hand. Never needed philosophy.

I reckon maybe there's something to this. One thing that comes to mind though is: Granting the fact the NHST is now broadly used by practitioners without knowledge of its background simply because it works, I am not sure that necessarily indicates the background isn't important, as my ignorance of my monitor's inner workings does not mean that electricity is not important.

To my mind, science (formerly known known as natural philosophy) is a subset of philosophy. However, it is a subset that has grown to dwarf the other subsets and is given separate, special attention. You do not learn much, if any, science in a philosophy degree because philosophy degrees now focus on philosophies that have not been spun off into separate degrees/fields.

Within the sciences, you do learn philosophy (or at least it factored highly in my undergraduate degree), but it's not about Aristotle or Nietzsche. It's about the assumptions and logic underpinning the scientific method, statistical analysis, etc.

My introductory classes, at least, covered a number of arguments and assumptions that (to my ear) are very much questions of philosophy. For example, scientific inquiry is dependent on the assumption that the laws of the universe are consistent across time, meaning that experiments performed now can nonetheless offer insight into past and future phenomena.

Specifically why the opinion is philosophical and not just some historic-pragmatic pattern matching and grouping?

Well, Democritus did. But nobody paid much attention. Which is the fundamental problem with philosophy - absent objective criteria of validity, it becomes a popularity contest.

Our natural sciences build on the foundation those greeks laid.

Pythagoras?

Math and Music Science.

Aristotle?

> His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. (Wikipedia)

Plato?

Religion, science, human nature, love, sexuality, ethics, the idea of the soul, ethics, politics, aesthetics poetry and art. (Wikipedia combining two articles in two languages)

And many more.

Luckily the muslims preserved their writings, when the christians tried to destroy those "pagan" scribbles.

Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred observer and experiencing the physics around you in a way that physics assumes no thing can.

Though, there's a tiny, but growing, idealist movement, where all the fun is being had. Last year I was acquainted with the works of Don Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup. To anyone interested in a rational and difficult to refute discourse on the proposition that consciousness, not space-time (i.e. matter), is fundamental, I suggest as an introduction their respective interviews with Zubin Damania. Dense in content, yet made accessible. One of the most transformative rabbit holes I've ever gotten into.

Here's the red pill :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd6CQCbk2ro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZWp0bnMBbM

A brain can exist without it being conscious.

Indeed, even people with normal, healthy sleep patterns still dream during the REM portion of sleep, even if they do not remember it later. Consciousness is not an on/off thing.

Sleep clears the system and reboots it. That’s why all your short term memory gets wiped too if it wasn’t written to disk.

There are plenty of other things that we can't directly experience but we can still use science to investigate them through indirect observations.

I think the biggest insights into consciousness so far have come from people with brain traumas and dysfunctional. E.g. people who have had their brain halves cut, or that guy who got most of his brain taken out by a bit of rail, or the Memento guy.

And it definitely is a thing that exists in our physical universe. A very weird thing, sure, but science doesn't say stuff can't be weird. We can definitely learn about it.

Maybe we'll never learn fundamentally what it is, but that's true of normal physical things like atoms and time too.

Pain and pleasure start with sensory data submitted by electrical signals. But what is it that experiences one signal as pain and the other signal as pleasure?

Why do we feel there’s something that experiences these sensations, that decides it feels good/bad. It’s easy to just say “evolutionary pressures” but it may explain the how-we-got-here but not how it actually works.

And on top of all of that there’s abstract reasoning that we do well, which we can’t reproduce with all the ML and computer power in the world. But let’s forget about this now.

If we can ‘just’ explain the qualitative nature of our experience and what that “something” is that experiences things in the first place, that would be beyond interesting.

Oh and because of nothing, the brain seems more like an FPGA that a system with separate static hardware and software. Like the hardware and software are intertwined and the computer analogy really doesn’t apply.

Firstly let me say human consciousness is many layers of personification and abstract meaning, all of which wonder of existential awareness of being as the ultimate actualization of those who have it.

This proposition is that it is existential reality itself that is dormant “potential of being”, which biotechnology animates and extends. The scope of consciousness lies in whatever the substrate is made of. In our case, likely the 2D crystal lattices of neuron microtubules.

These through aggregation couple and combine such that a shared resolution may capture and reveal an analog “image”, much like wave front holography. Many sub-scopes compete for the illusion of singular awareness consciousness which gets us wondering.

It is this holographic sieve that can be said the echo chamber of one’s personal consciousness. All of the wetware provides perception, enables action, and an ideal container for this process to occur.

Further, neural and behavioral strategies structure and develop character of individual cognition, creating such variety of conjecture as we find among us.

By this sieve of consciousness, and the distribution of potential over time, all strategies of life may emerge. That primitive continuity of will which determines to exist comes by the capacity to maintain corporeal scope of existential being.

Life technology emerges from the intrinsic capacity for consciousness as a sieve of the potential of existential being. Consciousness, how ever large or small is the inflection upon this potential of existential being.

I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.

There is a fallacy among non-scientists that if we don't understand absolutely all of it, it means we understand none of it. We understand most of it already.

Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.

edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they anthropomorphize. I mention this to point out that even the analogy to other humans fails when they look a little bit different.

We also have no way to detect it or to prove that it exists, other than direct experience. Consciousness doesn't affect the world in any way that we know of. I think that the most reasonable position is that if we could somehow extract the consciousnesses of two different people and switch them with each other, that neither the subjects nor the observers would notice a difference.

Unless we're dualists (which is totally valid), there's little reason to think that intelligence and consciousness (depending on how it's being defined) have much of a relationship at all.

Maybe one line of inquiry that might be able to give us some clues is if we're able to actually have people learn something like a physics equation with no prior knowledge of it while they aren't conscious of the learning of it. That might be a hard study to do with possible ethical concerns but if there's a way to design it, I could see some hope for getting closer to understanding the role/structure of consciousness.

One maybe plausible explanation might be that there's some sort of hierarchy of pattern matching there, where first you need to understand language, then mathematical language, then finally the physics equations. If you take that view, then the equations are really just extremely sophisticated pattern matching constructs. They don't have to actually _be_ the code that makes the universe-computer run so to speak, they just need to give us a precise enough predictive model that we're able to do useful things with it.

Maybe another way to put it is, we're not actually uncovering the source code of the universe, we're just looking at the functioning of the universe and extrapolating our own patterns that yield the greatest predictive power. On that view at least there are some plausble avenues for explaining strange artifacts like the time-reversibility of some equations - i.e. our patterns show that this will give predictions even if time flowed backwards, but the universe's time doesn't flow backwards because this pattern that we found is not the same thing as the actual universe. In that sense we'll never be able to actually uncover this source code so to speak, but that is just how science works - we're always looking for a more accurate theory - we'll never reach "the final theory", and even if we did, how would we know?

Might actually be easier to create artificial consciousness such that we can actually measure and more closely study what is happening.

The biological approach is fiendishly difficult. If we can barely understand how an LLVM is working, what chance do we have of trying to understand one by only looking at the raw electrical output few dozen transistors from a machine running one.

EDIT: fixed spelling of consciousness. Apologies from an english second language speaker.

> When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic — "High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L" — a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him — decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors. And woke up.

This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’ll realise it’s meaningless.

Also it’s not possible to measure consciousness (in the ”hard“ sense, as in ”why do I have qualia”, obviously you can assert something respond to external stimuli easily), therefore the question won’t ever be answered.

The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?

If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses.

For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.

The answer should be obvious to anyone earnestly thinking about the question: it doesn't. The "single consciousness" is just the abstraction we apply. We can, and often do, apply that same model to entire groups of people from cliques, to communities, to cultures, to nation states and just about any cross section of humanity one cares to. With a little effort we can apply the same model to internal mental processes[0].

The human mind is good at abstraction, which is fortunate because abstractions are useful. Unfortunately, it is often so preoccupied with any given abstraction that it forgets that abstractions are only useful contextually, because abstractions are not reality.

[0] As in Internal Family Systems, a model sometimes used in therapeutic contexts.

I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all.

(Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen.

But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made to go together are actually together.

Eg. when you assemble cogs and cylinders and wheels into a car. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

If you mix in some random parts from a cruise ship, you don't suddenly get a car that can go on water and carry 1000 passengers. You just get a bunch of parts that don't go together )

If we knew what consciousness is, we could make sweeping assertions about what is possible.

We don't know what consciousness is.

It doesn't seem to. When dreaming, it's possible to carry out conversations with other "people" in the dream which are indistinguishable from conscious beings you meet when awake. There's usually a single "self" in dreams, but the brain certainly seems to form extra consciousnesses on demand which react as though they had a sense of "self".

i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind".

Could that be a temporary virtual consciousness (like a virtual CPU)?

There's the interesting quarks that people with split brain hemispheres experience. https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8

And dissociative identity disorder where there arguably multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the same brain.

It is probably an evolutionary advantage that humans have a ( mostly) uniform singular consciousness.

Or even if it’s not such a hard limit, there are still likely similar bottlenecks that prefer a single one from arising, etc.

:Solves everything complicated:

You can read under CC here https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

This will probably be shown true when silicon-based life takes over.

I've explored this idea by building a chatbot with an inner monologue, Molly [3], based on GPT-3. The result is spectacular: it gives the illusion of consciousness. And, according to Information Schema Theory, that means that this cognitive system IS conscious.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism#Illusi... [3]: https://marmelab.com/blog/2023/06/06/artificial-consciousnes...

- Heinlein's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ which has already been mentioned

- Harry Harrison's _The Turing Option_ (with forward by Marvin Minsky): https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1807642

- Victor Milán's _The Cybernetic Samurai_ which is notable for a major character in it has the afore-mentioned Heinlein as a favorite book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/472944

Biology is _incredibly_ efficient in terms of energy usage --- it's rather striking to me that the a single query of early iterations of ChatGPT were so demanding that Microsoft was able to put a price on them and monetize them so as to get their stake in the company.

What if the universe itself is conscious? We'd have absolutely no way to measure that from our limited perspective.

A more pertinent objection is that the phrase I quoted above is just a placeholder for anything resembling an explanation.

This is like saying that the Earth and other planets have gravity, and then somebody else saying, well the problem with this argument is that everything has gravity at that point.

As to whether there is something special about it, I personally feel that the difficulty of explaining it is enough to regard it as such.

I don’t think that follows logically, it would be analogous to a (brain)dead person - who is not conscious. The software is what makes the difference here.

And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".

Not if it takes the computational capacity of the entire world to simulate a brain with an iq of 65.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/i-gave-chatgpt-an...

How so? The vast majority of life on earth is far less intelligent than human beings by any objective measure, and yet it still thrives.

The only exceptions I can think of to the above rule are viruses and bacteria, where (in most cases) we can't really exterminate them entirely from the face of the earth even if we wanted to. However, it seems to me that sufficient intelligence would allow for better understanding of different bacterial/viral structures that would allow you to make a specific chemical that would be very good at killing that specific thing.

Overall, the danger from a bootstrapping AI that becomes vastly more intelligent than humans (if possible) seems to me to be that we would lose full agency according to its whims as it gets more and more power.

Life is a game with elements where intelligence matters, plenty where it is pure luck, and others where we have a bunch of unknowns (data).

Would a super-intelligent AI have a significant advantage in a game of Monopoly, for example? I think many sci-fi scenarios fail to take this into account, especially the data aspect. Humans are quite intelligent (in the extremes at least), and any extra over that may well be in the diminishing returns category.

The first problem is epistemological... If you think that creative decisions are made by complying with a "reward function," you are entirely missing something. Most values are fundamentally based on irrationality. I've literally spent an entire life doing things that everyone else told me was wrong and being interested in things that almost no one else saw the value in, but which ended up being "correct" (for me, at least, and also leading to tangible success). I have no reason to believe that any of my decisions were rational, functional, or acted according to a "reward function"... and I'm a programmer! So I COMPLETELY understand the appeal of the explanatory power of "reward functions." And yet, I can assure you that this is a piss-poor explanation for many creative decisions that literally no one else understands but the person making it, but which then bears fruit despite all reason to the contrary. Some might call this "intuition"

What YOU have to realize is that you (like many others in the past) can only seem to understand the explanation for something in terms of only what is already understood. And that there is nothing "magical" or "special" about our current understanding (unless you believe there's nothing new to discover, which is preposterous hubris).

https://www.amazon.com/Blindsight-Peter-Watts/dp/0765319640

The working definition is "I am conscious, I know it. Anything that looks sufficiently like me is presumed to have consciousness."

It is sometimes suggested that we cannot study it without a definition, but definitions are written (and rewritten) as we acquire knowledge. It is plausible that studying the above will lead to explanations.

LLMs should make us take seriously that the whole idea of consciousness is just superstition and unnecessary.

That definition is precisely how people define something that isn't real and doesn't exist.

If you can get there, it is quite amusing to think about a huge group of people who would think the idea of angels as complete foolish superstition but consciousness? Of course, we just haven't located this extra property of the brain, yet! It is there though, I know it is because I know is.

As Thomas Nagel put it, science is the view from nowhere. There is nothing experiential about the physical understanding of the world. And yet we are part of that world.

Sentience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience#Digital_sentience

Artificial consciousness > Testing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness

Constructor theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructor_theory :

> In constructor theory, a transformation or change is described as a task. A constructor is a physical entity that is able to carry out a given task repeatedly. A task is only possible if a constructor capable of carrying it out exists, otherwise it is impossible. To work with constructor theory, everything is expressed in terms of tasks. The properties of information are then expressed as relationships between possible and impossible tasks. Counterfactuals are thus fundamental statements, and the properties of information may be described by physical laws.[4] If a system has a set of attributes, then the set of permutations of these attributes is seen as a set of tasks. A computation medium is a system whose attributes permute to always produce a possible task. The set of permutations, and hence of tasks, is a computation set . If it is possible to copy the attributes in the computation set, the computation medium is also an information medium.

Is computation medium sufficient to none, some, or all of the sentient computational tasks done by humans?

However, the brain is highly organized, wherein the various types of sensory input are fed into specific regions of the brain which specialize in processing that type of input. Many areas of the brain have topographical structures which are reminiscent of the type of sensory input they process. This is evident in Retinotopy for visual inputs and Tonotopy for auditory inputs. You will not find such topographical structures in a computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinotopy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonotopy

You have to ask the questions, why do we have meaningful conscious experience that is sensible, coherent, and well formed? And why is consciousness not random chaotic nonsense? Because the brain has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve to process sensory input such that it yields a sensible conscious experience. This simply isn't true of any technology today.

On the other hand, experiment with psychedelic drugs and see how crazy your conscious experience can be. The fact that our day to day experiences aren't like that is significant and evident that the brain evolved to process sensory input for conscious experience.

It seems that tracking the genetic mutations would provide an approximation of the computing complexity needed. One could also look at the death rate as error rate for the success of computations.

How are those two even approximately related?

1. If you want to know about the amount of information inside of our genome then you can just look at the genome directly. You don't need to count the number of mutations.

2. A genetic mutation isn't a computation. It's a random event.

3. Why did you choose a 500,000BC goalpost for anything? Which 500,000 genome do you want to look at? Almost all of them are not-conscious

4. There's no reason to assume biological evolution is an efficient method of manifesting consciousness.

5. Is a genome enough for consciousness? I would argue we would be less conscious without language, which exists outside of our genome.

Computation is roughly equivalent to iterating over a space of possibilities and selecting the subset that satisfy some evaluative function. To determine the inverse of a matrix, I can take the rough shape of the outcome and iterate over all possibilities, picking out the ones that multiply to the identity matrix. Evolution is the process of randomly testing variations in organisms to select the subset that satisfy the objective of superior fitness. So in a sense, evolution "computes" the blueprint for organisms that maximize fitness. The computational complexity of a given genome is then some function of the size of the species-wide population of each ancestor generation summed, with massive time and space constants.

2. I'm not sure if that is what I said but I believe that. * I did state it but I plead sloppy articulation rathe than believe each branch is a genetic mutation(an increment smaller than a mutation).

3. I figured it was far enough away to be a valid timeframe for sophisticated consciousness but not so close that the thread would be distracted by historical interpretations.

4.Something manifested consciousness and my thinking it based on some sort of survival reward system.

5.A genome maybe too much for a consciousness.

The developing these ideas further faces at least the challenge that an AI that is exposed to the public will develop an in accurate understanding of our world.

One driver of these misunderstandings is the lack of understanding expressed in the average internet post. The second big driver is that commercial needs requires a thought police mentality. This mentality distorts the expression of the answer the AI is articulating which my look like psychosis to the observers.

I believe that an AI will have to develop in isolation. The maturity of the current system is not able to distinguish a fact vs. fantasy. This is a problem we all posses at different levels. It's also possible we only need our personal AI assistant to be only 80% and the remaining 20% it gains from a dialog of it's host (the user).

Quantum effects really do have something to do with it, (and from there on organic chemistry, organelles, and cell biology) but it seems to me that describing human behavior in terms of quantum interactions might be somewhat tedious, to say the least.

Probably looking at the level of neural networks would be more pragmatic, especially seeing the advances we're now making with artificial neural networks.

Consciousness is a comparison of current sense input with memory.

No sense input, no consciousness. No memory, no consciousness.

A rock, can have a memory (its chips and wear), but no consciousness since it has no sense input.

Self Consciousness is therefore a comparison of the input of our senses with the memory of our Self.

The lack of tangibility or measurability ("rationality") of said "emergent phenomenon" is a problem with this line of reasoning IMHO. This is essentially no different in utility as an explanatory theory than the religious explanations.

The real problem is how does one measure consciousness in the first place?

[*] it's less of a super strange magical phenomenon, and more like a rather mundane philosophical version of mathematics' integration.

Here's a similar conundrum: Without using a human as a "living proxy ruler" or actual sales data, come up with an algorithm that uses only empirical data (not touching human behavior around it!) to determine the fair market value of the Mona Lisa. Then, apply that to some artwork it's never seen before and see if it concords with what "meat computers" (humans) believe the value of it is.

My strong position is that not only will you not be able to do this now, but you will not be able to do this ever.

I think rationality will get us VERY far, though, so we should keep doubling down on it. My money's on it being insufficient to produce an apparent intelligent and unique being, though.

Take an AI for example, like say gpt4, and picture it being tought or being able of survival instincts. How would one differentiate such a beast from life?

I know it's imprecise at best but still, Id bet the key is there. Maybe the question should not be "what is consciousness?" but rather "what is survival instincts?".

Of course the only way to know if someone/something else has a similar subjective experience of something as ourselves is to ask them, so there's always going to be wiggle room for people who don't want to believe that a future AI reporting conscious experience really is conscious in the same way that they are.

But does a system exist which we would describe as ”cognitive” but not also ”conscious”? To me this definition gets nowhere.

What I'm suggesting with the above, is that there is nothing magical or distinctive about the mechanisms that generate consciousness vs. those that generate the understanding of semantics, grammar, syntax in a GPT or the ability to keep a pole in vertical position on a rolling cart with some reinforcement learning. Instead, it views consciousness as the mental model that is generated by a sufficiently complex intelligence (biological or not) when it has the ability to perceive inputs of its environment, and crucially, of itself. That is, a sufficiently complex brain with the ability to observe its environment and itself, will inevitably generate a model of both and their relationship. The model of itself and how it distinguishes itself from the environment is what I think is consciousness.

What I mean with emergent is that this mental model progressively becomes more and more rich ("emerges") as the cognitive abilities becomes more complex and the inputs of itself and the environment increase. A tapeworm with a very minimal central nervous system, scarce sensory inputs of the environment, and likely even less of itself will develop an excessively simple model that can hardly be recognized as consciousness. As you scale the cognitive abilities and the inputs it processes of both; environment and itself, a richer model of both will emerge. And that thing will start to look a whole lot like consciousness.

If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things.

Maybe there will come a point where it's in the gray area but not today. We know that people act in ways that we cannot explain even a little bit.

Also, the bet is friendly. It's just a way to express their different underlying opinions. Neither one is put out by it. They will likely enjoy some of the wine together.

I cannot tell you how tired I am of people arguing about the merits of string theory, where effectively none of the people involved know even the first thing about it. It's not that people shouldn't get involved, but involvement should be more than just cheerleading as if it were a sports game.

Maybe that's inevitable. Maybe the public engagement will always produce 99 dunces shouting and one young scientist who goes on to study it for real. But it can be disheartening when it looks as if 100% of the public discussion is both ignorant and mean.

The neuroscientist wagered that he or other neuroscientists will achieve something in 25 years. They did not. If the goal was poorly specified or impossible to achieve, that is on the person starting and accepting the bet.

There was certainly the possibility that they could have disagreed on the outcome. But there is really no dispute.

The possibility of disagreement would have mattered if the bet itself were significant, but it wasn't. It was always a tiny stake.

Conscious experience is an observable thing, meaning that we can subjectively experience it and infer its existence in other sentient beings (including in cows and pigs), and it is part of nature. The problem is, we still have no good idea how it comes to be.

It's not like how you can experience or observe redness by looking at something red.

   Consciousness is those parts of the workings of the brain that are available to introspection.

People so love to throw all kinds of babble under the heading of consciousness, so there's scant chance that people will agree on any kind of definition, let alone this one.

But it's what I've been using, and I find that it makes all the supposedly hard questions about consciousness very simple to answer.

Let's say someone is lying motionless on the ground. You then say they've "lost consciousness". Later, they wake up and object that they were not unconscious. "I could hear everything you said. I was paralysed, but conscious the whole time." Being able to relate their experience is what proves that they were conscious.

Someone will say that they "made a conscious decision". Same thing. They can relate the thought process behind the decision.

Someone will say: "I got lost on the way to the airport. I must have unconsciously wanted to stay home." In this case they tell you that they made a decision, but they cannot relate the thought process behind the decision, and they don't believe that at any point they could have. It is a decision not available to introspection, therefore "unconscious".

> the question under investigation

What investigation? Which observation is in need of explanation? All I have is the introspective observation of myself thinking, and reports from others making similar introspective observations.

If you are going to say that "consciousness" needs explanation, then your question is ill-formed, because your question contains a word that has no definition and no agreed upon meaning.

It's observable. You simply ask people what they have been or are thinking or sensing. If they are able to relate that, then, by the definition, they were conscious about it. Of course they might be lying or misremember; introspection is not intersubjective, and therefore hard to create reproducible experiments around. But that doesn't mean introspective information doesn't exist.

> says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way

What kind of experience is observable, except by introspection?

The only observations of experiences that anyone can have are through either one's own introspection, or through what others have related of their introspection.

If you are to say that you have had a "phenomenological experience of consciousness" that you want me to explain, then you are giving an introspective report of a brain process that left an imprint that you can now describe. If the experience was not available to introspection, then you wouldn't be asking, because you wouldn't realise there was an experience at all.

I'm intrigued!

Let's try some.

> Is a dog conscious?

Probably yes. Dog are social animals, so it makes sense that they would have the ability to reflect on earlier events, including a memory of what they were thinking.

Since we don't have a common language so we can hear their introspective reports, it's hard to confirm, though.

> Is ChatGPT conscious?

No, it does not make observations of its own mental state. When it appears to do so, it is reconstructing plausible observations from its training set of others making such observations.

That's just the specific design of ChatGPT, though. It doesn't have an "inner thought" layer. Other AI designs could easily be conscious; it's just that the best ones we've so far managed to build, don't have it.

> Is ps conscious?

No, it doesn't think.

> Does consciousness survive death?

Obviously no. It's a property of the living brain.

Somehow, that was way too easy to answer for such a big question. There's this expectation that the answer should cover all the mysteries of life and death. It doesn't. It just answers a specific question about consciousness, which, with my definition, is a simple question with a simple answer.

1. you have consciousness

2. people are speaking about consciousness

The second point makes it likely that consciousness is not simply a consequence of physics, but e.g. that it loops back into it; or perhaps it is more likely (because simpler) that physics is a consequence of consciousness.

Why would something that has no consciousness make up that it has consciousness?

You can make a computer program `printf("I have consciousness\n");`

But I actually also didn't follow the rest of the argument. How does whether other people say they have consciousness or not, tell anything about whether it's physics based or not? If it's physics based, people could say they have consciousness. If it's not physics based, they could also say that?

1. People are talking about consciousness.

2. This talking happens in the physical world (soundwaves are being produced, etc.)

3. We assume that other people have consciousness since they talk about it. As you say, there is no absolute proof of this, but Occam's razor makes it silly to assume otherwise.

4. So, the soundwaves (physics) are happening because of consciousness. There is a causal link from consciousness to physics.

This means that consciousness is not simply the observation of physics. It actually loops back into it, or physics is an emergent property of consciousness.

This shows that consciousness is not just qualia, i.e. the observation of physics.

Just the same way existence is self-referential.

Consciousness is a comparison of current sense input with memory.

No sense input, no consciousness. No memory, no consciousness.

A rock, can have a memory (its chips and wear), but no consciousness since it has no sense input.

Self Consciousness is therefore a comparison of the input of our senses with the memory of our Self.

I don't know, but it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if the code on your computer is on a HDD or SSD.

> and where is the execution logic for it?

I don't know, but it doesn't matter either. It's a question about the workings of the computer, not of the software.

Electronic computers make it really easy to separate the software from the hardware, and make it easy to dump the software in some other representation in order to understand it. When I want to understand a piece of code, I read its source code, I don't care about whether it's an amd64 or an arm64 CPU and the details of the encoding unless I am working on a compiler.

With biological computers it's much harder to dump the software. But nevertheless, until people realize that this is what they should attempt, or research how it can be done, I feel we won't make any progress on the nature of consciousness.

But it does matter! You arbitrarily dismiss the brain as "wrong level of abstraction" then bring up the computer which internals we know and understand as an example of parallel system.

If both are same, where's the hard drive in the brain? Which part of the brain is the CPU dedicated to consciousness? We know regions of brain are specialized in function, like the computers.

> But nevertheless, until people realize that this is what they should attempt, or research how it can be done, I feel we won't make any progress on the nature of consciousness.

This reminds me of the famous Andy Grove's fallacy. To paraphrase:

    The engineers tend to apply knowledge and concepts of their field to biology because they think both engineered and organic systems are the same. In doing so they miss the elementary difference that engineering is about creation and development of new systems, and biology is about researching and understanding existing systems we have no prior knowledge of.

And how exactly is this a win for philosophers? I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either.

I'm sure once someone figures out how consciousness works it'll be irrefutable while seeming incredibly obvious in hindsight. Which, honestly, just makes it more frustrating that there isn't a full accounting already. How many key insights are needed to fully describe consciousness and how many do you think have been found? Do you think anyone in the past has figured out how consciousness worked and taken it to their grave because of how obvious it seems?

Maybe it's like searching for the Dragon Balls, and you need to put all 7 key insights together to figure it out.

Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy.

> I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either.

This bet was about putting the burden on neuroscientists who claimed they were making pretty quick progress towards understanding consciousness. It's a bet on what would eventually happen, not a competition to see who's better.

Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts? Similar to how the blood-brain barrier exists as a defense mechanism. The wording "deliberately" can imply a pedestal that doesn't really exist, that places "deliberate" human design above "natural" micro-evolution that basically happened by chance. It would stand to reason that a more complex brain, that's harder to understand, would survive natural selection. Even the brains of tiny animals are quite complex in their smallness, they encode a lot of different knowledge ("instruction set" if you prefer), that enable them to do certain things that would take us a lot of manual "over-the-top" processing and calculating. For example, the ability for a cat to right themselves nearly perfectly when falling, given enough distance. Their brains can inherently calculate the exact amount of force, and the exact motions to take, to achieve the desired amount of rotation in three-dimensional space.

I don't see why evolution would have optimised our brains for that specific goal. It's possible but it seems very unlikely, as there's no motivation for it AFAICT.

It doesn't really prove anything, of course. I actually don't think much of Chalmers' work. But it's very remarkable that the bet expired just as machines are coming tantalizingly close to being consciousness without qualia.

Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

And how do you know if they have/haven't qualia? :)

Seems quite an odd and dismissive thing to say. Pretty much every "stride" within the subject seems to have been made by philosophers.

It's an emergent phenomenon.

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.13...

A circuit is a highly systemic, regular design which can be precisely studied in isolation. It is not so easy to carve up a human brain, cell, or metabolic process so that one can study this thing hidden to the human eye. The only tools available require working within artificial constraints to have any hope of picking up trends. Biology is incredibly messy full of overlapping systems, sometimes operating at cross purposes.

It's basically impossible when studying biological systems. Can you imagine trying to understand human digestion in isolation from the gut microbiome? Even if you had perfect information about what the digestive system does, you'd still be completely missing half of the big picture.

You can't even try to think of something like insulin as massive polynomial function where you might eventually understand all of the variables involved and how they affect said function. In fact the function could completely change at any time depending on other esoteric confounding factors in the body. It's absolutely insane.

In fact almost all biological functions in the body can be described as trillions of chemicals and chemical pathways interacting in infinitely complicated ways that just so happen to occasionally result in enough homeostasis to support the macroscopic survival of said organism because of a sloppy brute force evolutionary system that took centuries to unfold.

My understanding is that they're asking the question: are the tools we apply to the task able to solve another related but much simpler task?

If the answer is no then we should probably take another look at our approach.

The problem is not necessarily intractable. Despite the pretense of omnipotent scientific capabilities (which is now in obscene display with the AI craze) in fact our mental models for explaining things have not advanced very much after the 19th century.

Explaining the brain captivates our brains and we attribute special, even metaphysical signifance to it, but the fact is we havent explained any complex system.

In other words, how would you even explain "consciousness". In words? In mathematical equations? As a reproducible experiment? As inexplicable "behavior" in some cellular automaton?

I now know they told this story to me (as a child) to make me feel better. It was one of those things like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy to me.

Later when I studied animal behavior, I found out science-wise that animals behave in ways that strongly suggest that in fact they do think, are able to solve problems, and even recognize themselves as separate entities.

As we build systems that are capable of more and more sophisticated tasks previously classified as "cognition" , it wouldn't surprise me if these systems start to pick up some of these traits too, one by one. (I believe there might be some tentative empirical studies to that effect).

I realize that this is very different from a binary "Superior Human" vs "(biological) machine" point of view. It is more of a consciousness exists on a sliding scale point of view.

Generating written content is a pretty powerful tool, all things told.

Ehhhh the title is a click bait imho.

Which is just scientist for "eh, anything can happen in 25 years"

Whereas Chalmers' whole career long project is very much dependent on his "hard problem" and other neo-dualist ideas, so of course he would make this bet.

Pretty boring stuff as far as bets between academics go.

And follow up thoughts were along the lines of “did we uncover some fundamental truth of the brain?”.

I got flagged and cant respond, yet again.

a dog is conscious right? what would be a minimal test for consciousness?

i’m annoyed that something has to be super human or else „it’s just statistics“. there have to be minimal definitions of reasoning, feelings, self reflection etc.

will we have the tiring chinese room discussion again where for some the emulation does not count because something does „not really“ do something?

The much harder ethical quandary is how we should operate in a universe where we are not specially privileged, and as a species I think we are generally unwilling to consider such a thing.

Ethics is a whole other department.