There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
Except it’s not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it’s amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that’s the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn’t have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it’s purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy
It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.
However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.
If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.
Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.
I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.
when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?
Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.
Yes, I think you have a point that for it to be an illusion “something” has to perceive it.
I also think your reflection on consciousness being a some sort of process is interesting. Is it a “machine” process where one input+state always results in the same output? Regardless of the answers implication on agency and choice, the mystery is still that I feel aware. I cannot speak for you, but I think you’d tell me the same, even if you cannot prove it to me.
Regarding the emergence I think one aspect could be scale, and said emergence might not be binary. I listened to a Lex Friedman(think what you will about him) podcast episode with Michael Levin from Dec 3 which talks about things along these lines. Not directly related perhaps, it might be more geared towards intelligence, but you might also find it interesting.
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
Let’s take this to it’s full conclusion to see why this is not a meaningful distinction. I am not even aware of every cell in my own body, you don’t even need to make reference to the outside world to argue we are not self aware. This line of reasoning makes self-awareness a rather meaningless word.
And stating why I think the simulation hypothesis is not adequate is not the same as disregarding, even if I didn’t fully explain the reasons.
I think I agree with you about self awareness absolute self awareness is impossible. But I also think you can be partially aware of yourself, so not binary.
I accept I may have extrapolated my understanding of your argument, but I also did not have much to go on. My apologies.
Your statement about not being able to emulate consciousness is what I reacted to mostly. Feel free to fill in the blanks as I see not reasoning for that statement.
Fair enough. The crux of my argument is self awareness is an evolutionary trait for evolutionary purposes. If you sim/emulate the same processes in a different environment then it does not serve the evolutionary purposes of the organism, its definitionally not self awareness. To put it another way, the system doing the simulation is less efficient then the thing it is simulating. And energy efficiency is part of what self awareness delivers to an evolutionary system. To be clear I am not ruling out a machine can be aware of its own economy as part of making it intelligent, I am just saying a simulation distorts the very economy that self awareness is to operate on.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Except it’s not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it’s amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that’s the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn’t have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it’s purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
Is that fair?
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.
However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.
If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.
Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.
I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.
Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?
Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.
Yes, I think you have a point that for it to be an illusion “something” has to perceive it.
I also think your reflection on consciousness being a some sort of process is interesting. Is it a “machine” process where one input+state always results in the same output? Regardless of the answers implication on agency and choice, the mystery is still that I feel aware. I cannot speak for you, but I think you’d tell me the same, even if you cannot prove it to me.
Regarding the emergence I think one aspect could be scale, and said emergence might not be binary. I listened to a Lex Friedman(think what you will about him) podcast episode with Michael Levin from Dec 3 which talks about things along these lines. Not directly related perhaps, it might be more geared towards intelligence, but you might also find it interesting.
Buddy, I barely think humans are sentient
Whenever people talk about human sentience, I always think back to the opening scene of Shaun of the Dead…
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
Let’s take this to it’s full conclusion to see why this is not a meaningful distinction. I am not even aware of every cell in my own body, you don’t even need to make reference to the outside world to argue we are not self aware. This line of reasoning makes self-awareness a rather meaningless word.
And stating why I think the simulation hypothesis is not adequate is not the same as disregarding, even if I didn’t fully explain the reasons.
I think I agree with you about self awareness absolute self awareness is impossible. But I also think you can be partially aware of yourself, so not binary.
I accept I may have extrapolated my understanding of your argument, but I also did not have much to go on. My apologies.
Your statement about not being able to emulate consciousness is what I reacted to mostly. Feel free to fill in the blanks as I see not reasoning for that statement.
Fair enough. The crux of my argument is self awareness is an evolutionary trait for evolutionary purposes. If you sim/emulate the same processes in a different environment then it does not serve the evolutionary purposes of the organism, its definitionally not self awareness. To put it another way, the system doing the simulation is less efficient then the thing it is simulating. And energy efficiency is part of what self awareness delivers to an evolutionary system. To be clear I am not ruling out a machine can be aware of its own economy as part of making it intelligent, I am just saying a simulation distorts the very economy that self awareness is to operate on.