There should be some government program that forces scientists to watch dystopian science-fiction movies, so they can have some idea of the havoc their research is obviously going to cause. I just stumbled across an interview with Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, that has been on the site for a couple of months. (Apparently the Discover website is affiliated with some sort of magazine, to which you can subscribe.)
Edelman won the Nobel for his work on antibodies, but for a long time his primary interest has been in consciousness. He believes (as all right-thinking people do) that consciousness is ultimately biological, and is interested in building computer models of the phenomenon. So we get things like this:
Eugene Izhikevitch [a mathematician at the Neurosciences Institute] and I have made a model with a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, all connected through neuronal anatomy equivalent to that of a cat brain. What we find, to our delight, is that it has intrinsic activity. Up until now our BBDs had activity only when they confronted the world, when they saw input signals. In between signals, they went dark. But this damn thing now fires on its own continually. The second thing is, it has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex—what you would see if you did an electroencephalogram. Third of all, it has a rest state. That is, when you don’t stimulate it, the whole population of neurons stray back and forth, as has been described by scientists in human beings who aren’t thinking of anything.
In other words, our device has some lovely properties that are necessary to the idea of a conscious artifact. It has that property of indwelling activity. So the brain is already speaking to itself. That’s a very important concept for consciousness.
Oh, great. We build giant robots, equip them with lasers, and now we teach them how to gaze at their navels, and presumably how to dream. What can possibly go wrong?
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:55 am
Yay! Let’s hook them up to the internet.
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Sounds cool to me, though I would probably appreciate it more if they were research ways to keep our brains ticking over for another century or more, rather than inventing new ones
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I dunno–sounds like grounds for detention at Guantanamo to me. How do you torture computer memory into compliance with your suppositions? (Waterboarding would be a short answer)
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:26 pm
[...] Brain-Based Devices Posted on May 22, 2009 by Nick Srnicek From an interview with Gerald Edelman (h/t: Cosmic Variance): [...]
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Wait, does this explain the Govenator? I hate technology sometimes…
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
From the article:
“An artificial intelligence program is algorithmic: You write a series of instructions that are based on conditionals, and you anticipate what the problems might be. AI robot soccer players make mistakes because you can’t possibly anticipate every possible scenario on a field. Instead of writing algorithms, we have our BBDs play sample games and learn, just the way you train your dog to do tricks.”
ummm while i mostly didn’t go to class when i was in school, i went to a few, and the ones on AI seem to contradict that statement.
He sounds like when a philosopher tries to talk about physics and isn’t really familiar with the literature.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I for one welcome our… darn it:P. Beat to it.
EDIT: Testing new editing feature. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! I love being able to edit my bad spellings away:).
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Ok, sounds to me like they just have some daemons running …
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
So… what percentage of the gazillions of neurons in a real brain are dedicated to motor control and the autonomic nervous system? If the hardware, including I/O, replace that number of neurons, how many artificial neurons are still needed to evolve consciousness?
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
“He believes (as all right-thinking people do) that consciousness is ultimately biological”
That’s awfully dismissive. Sure, people like Chalmers don’t seem to be very popular amongst physicists, but it seems a little harsh to call them wrong-thinking.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I wonder how much activity is needed for the neural net to qualify for entry into heaven?
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
I’ve only skimmed Chalmers’ arguments, but it seems to me that he still believes in a naturalistic source for consciousness (as opposed to supernatural) and allows for the possibility that AI systems can also have consciousness, so in the end his philosophical differences with the majority of scientists in the field are probably moot regarding this particular issue.
In my own view, there has been plenty of evidence found in the last few years that biology is indeed all that’s necessary for a functioning brain to be a conscious entity. There certainly hasn’t been any evidence found to the contrary.
So if, one day, we succeed in fully emulating the functioning of a human brain with a mixture of silicon and software then given the right external stimuli (i.e. education, experience) the result will be indistinguishable from a conscious human being. Creating a new entity from scratch would also have to emulate the growth of the brain from birth, through childhood, so I’m not expecting a breakthrough any time soon (!), but one shortcut would be to take a copy of the state of an adult’s brain which will think and act just like the original (at least to start with).
None of this is remotely possible today, of course, but it’s fun to speculate, and Izhikevitch’s experiments seem to be pointing us in the right direction.
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I wonder how much activity is needed for the neural net to qualify for entry into heaven?
Heh. That certainly will be an interesting debate. If you can create new biological human beings in a test tube and they still receive ensoulment (no religious person or body rejects this notion, as far as I know), then what about creating artificial human life that is truly conscious?
My guess is that the debate will divide into camps based on a force even more fundamental than religion—i.e. politics—with left-wing Christians accepting the possibility of AI humans having a soul, and right-wing Christians calling such an idea an abomination.
Of course, should we ever reach the point where AI humans are a reality, it would pose a whole host of difficult problems related to the issue of what it means to be alive. When you power off an AI, is it dead? Would it make a difference (in terms of being dead) between saving the current state before powering off, or not? And if you make a backup copy, is that a separate entity, even if you don’t switch it on while the original is still functional?
I can see that philosophers and ethicists a going to have a whale of a time sorting through all this stuff when it finally happens for real!
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Re #14, although Christianity, and other religions AFAIK, consider a human soul to be indivisible, I dare say in the scenario you describe (which will undoubtedly come to pass sooner or later at the present rate of progress) religious folk will develop a rear guard argument that all those who helped develop AI have in some sense each contributed a portion of their soul to the product. Gives a new meaning to the phrase “putting heart and soul into one’s work”.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Was there a serious point to this blog entry?
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Forget about steps toward Skynet. I guess the British didn’t see any of those movies. They already have an existing satellite system called Skynet. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/6434773.stm among others.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:23 pm
yawn. I can find more insightful commentary on Slashdot.
May 22nd, 2009 at 6:27 pm
@tacitus,
I’m a computer guy, although not an AI type. My understanding of all neural nets thus far developed is that they share common characteristics with biological ones. Therefore:
1). Regarding backups, restores and cloning. You can do so but it doesn’t matter. It’s like cloning an animal or (in principle) a person. You get a new creature physically based upon the original, but it’s truly a new creature. They don’t know what the original knew, they aren’t “linked” in any way, and they have a different mind and consciousness.
That seems to be because the neural network consists of more than just the physical arrangement of the circuits involved. In biological neural networks this consists of the electrical potentials and neurochemical mixes at the axon interfaces. This is the stuff you cannot clone, and I believe that the ultimate physical reason you cannot is the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle. In computer neural nets, ah, uh, at this point you hit the limits of my knowledge. I just don’t know.
Anyhow, it’s my understanding that cloning a neural network is ultimately just a variation on the physical reproduction methods of any species. No one thinks that their children “are them”, at least no one sane and healthy. You’ve created a new organism. The same should hold true of artificial neural networks.
2). Turning off the net. This would be like a loss of consciousness for you or I. It would not be comparable to death. You’d have to irreparably damage the net to achieve the equivalent of death. In fact it would then be dead.
It would not be like sleeping either, unless you gave the neural network some sort of control over over the on/off switch, even if it was only indirect. Biological neural nets can be roused from sleep by external stimuli, and also by becoming rested. The artificial equivalent of that (sleeping) would be a low power, low activity state with some sort of timer mechanism maybe?
What is really interesting is dreaming. Dreaming seems to be fundamental to conscious minds. It’s quite possible that an artificial neural network would have to dream too. My understanding is that the science to know what the role of dreaming is, is still poorly understood. The theories range from “white noise that doesn’t mean anything” to “searching for meaning from the day’s events” to “pruning memories and knowledge” to “consolidation and ordering of facts”.
I’m sure I have some of the details wrong. Mostly I’m an interested observer of the AI field.
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:34 pm
So, if the machines with neural nets are conscious, are they citizens of the nation where they were manufactured? If so, can they vote immediately, or do they have to be around a specified number of years before being granted the right to vote? Is the specified number of years precisely the same as for humans, and regardless of the type of machine? If so, on what grounds, given the differences in computational speed between different machines (and between machines and humans, for that matter)? If their consciousness was recognized, but they still weren’t allowed to vote, what other ‘human’ rights would they be denied?
I don’t think Terminator is the relevant story; it’s ST:TNG.
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
@Brian,
Interesting comments. I have read a little about the fact that there is no set “state” the brain is in — the constantly changing electrical signals that are always active throughout the brain, but I don’t know enough to know whether that’s something that, if lost (in a reboot, for example) you would end up losing the essence of the AIs personality/consciousness.
I guess the question is whether you can save enough “brain state” before powering down in order to perform a successful restart when you power the AI brain back on.
If you can’t, then powering off would be like biological death, and the rebooted AI would be a like a new individual brought to life, but if you can restore most if not all of the saved state, then I guess powering off would be most like going into suspended animation for a uncertain length of time.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:54 am
Why would robots have navels?
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:58 am
” He believes (as all right-thinking people do)….”
Great! May be there should be a governmental program to tell right -thinking people from wrong-thinking people and tell people what to belive…. We had that in USSR.
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:52 am
Maybe having something to hunt us will force us to evolve some more…
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:59 am
” He believes (as all right-thinking people do) that consciousness is ultimately biological, and is interested in building computer models of the phenomenon”
I met many philosophers who argue that human consciousness is ultimately social. For the experiment in question they would not see any chance of success… even possibility of recreating a brain of an insect. Some AI experts and some linguists like Lakoff and Johnson wrote volumes to prove that bodily experience is highly essential for conscious development, so they think in the same line as those philosophers.
There are many other things in philosophy of consciousness which are interesting, but would not qualify as “right-thinking” in a possible worlds where there is a Church or a Ministry of Education that defines and enforces right-thinking.
May 23rd, 2009 at 7:20 am
sergey: I’ve met artists who think that too! And you know what? Their opinion on the subject doesn’t matter any more than that of those “philosophers” (they aren’t *real* philosophers of course, they are merely philosophical history majors, which is something entirely different).
Having a philosopher talk about whether or not consciousness is biologically derived or not is like asking me to design a working fusion reactor with a 5gigawatt net energy output. I’m interested in fusion power, but I have no significant technical knowledge, so I’d have no idea how to go about it. Same thing with a historian (specializing in ancient philosophers) and ideas of consciousness. These are people without even the tiniest smidgen of scientific expertise (they’re *historians* for frak sake), but they like to stand around and blabber like they’re at the top of every field.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:04 am
Sergey is right , gopher65 is wrong and tacitus is largely wrong. I state it this way for the sake of brevity and not in order to be rude, so I apologize for the tone.
The problem of consciousness is essentially philosophical. Empirical science , given its methods, cannot observe consciousness directly: it observes brains and behavior and makes roundabout inferences from these and from the verbal responses of experimental subjects. These last are especially tricky to interpret. Interpretation is an activity fundamentally different from observation: it is a second-person not a third-person activity. Scientists are no better at interpreting what people say (and this is the closest thing to a direct access to consciousness other than introspection) than anyone else, and perhaps not as good.
tacitus says: “In my own view, there has been plenty of evidence found in the last few years that biology is indeed all that’s necessary for a functioning brain to be a conscious entity. There certainly hasn’t been any evidence found to the contrary.”
What is the evidence to which tacitus refers? We have learned a lot about how the brain works in a physical sense, and none of it brings us any closer to knowing why a brain should be associated with a subjectivity. A bunch of complicated activity involving action potentials is still a a lot of complicated activity, no more subjective than any other observed physical events. If we are to answer the question “What is the relation between consciousness and matter?” we must give up clinging to physicalism, which only retards our research. (But notice I am not saying we should stop researching the brain: all such inquiries are of course interesting). The correlation we find between events in the brain and what people tell us they feel are merely clues. As sergey indicates, the key to consciousness is social interaction.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:34 am
gopher65:
actually philosophers whom I refered to were full professors, teaching philosophya and writing papers on Logical Positivism. Lakoff and Johnson are professional linguists, post-positivists. Example of one book by AI experts on the subject is here:
Pfeifer R. and Bongard J. (2006) How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence, MIT Press, November. (Read the book review by H. Kitano in Nature, 447: 381-382, or A.A. Ghazanfar & H.K. Turesson in Nature Neuroscience, 11(1): 3)
I agree that people risk to look like blabbers when they intrude in the field where they have no professional experience. But that also should be a concern to physicists talking about philosophy or about consciousness. One of those philosophers, a friend of mine used to repeat that greatest obstacle to progress comes from great scientists who believed that their expertise in science automatically makes them great philosophers. And one does not have to be as obnoxious as Lisenko (who killed genetics in USSR). The much more serious example was Niels Bohr talking about philosophical interpretation of QM, defining the right-thinking on the subject and preventing other people from considering alternative interpretations of QM for about 20 years (is that so?). My friend used to tell (in his lectures on philosophy) that it would be much better if Niels Bohr learned a bit of philosophy before blabbing about it or at least knew the limits of his ignorance.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
sergey,
Niels Bohr was not merely an interpreter of QM, he was one of the guiding lights, probably the main one. The difficulty he had describing QM in words is that the natural language of QM is mathematics – and he was working on the issue before the right mathematical foundation was at all evident. Philosophy is still largely conducted in words; and it is not at all clear to me that alternative interpretations of QM are any better than Bohr’s views.
How much does your friendly philosophy professor know about using QM? Has he ever calculated a cross-section? The eigenvalues of the hydrogen atom? Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen paradox? Bell’s theorem? If not, maybe he should learn a bit about the limits of his own ignorance.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
And why wouldn’t an AI possessing an accurate simulation of the human brain be unable to socialize? Even people who have very limited social interactions—deaf and blind people, for example, or those with severe autism—are still conscious beings. Providing an AI the means to interact and socialize with the outside world is probably one of the easier problems that would need to be solved.
In any case, what does it even mean to say that “consciousness is ultimately social”?
Are you saying that consciousness cannot be reproduced in an AI because it has a supernatural or metaphysical component that science can never investigate, or are you saying that the biology of the brain is simply too complex for us to ever reproduce consciousness in an AI?
And are you saying that if it was possible to make an exact copy of your human brain, including all senses, neurons, ganglia, and the chemical and electrical activity, in silicon and software (something I admit could not happen for many decades, at least) the result would not be a full conscious copy of yourself? If it isn’t then how would it be different? How would a non-conscious AI copy of yourself behave or react? What component would still be missing?
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:57 pm
cont’d from #29:
With regards to the issue of the basis of consciousness: When two people can respond to this question with such different answers as “it’s based in the brain” and “it’s based on social interaction,” the one point of which we can be sure is that they are not understanding the question in the same way at all. It would take quite a bit of discussion even to provide enough framework that semantics of the two questions could be meaningfully related to each other.
tacitus’ inquiry in #30 is an example of the divergence in understanding of this issue. More explanations are needed!
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Since the argument in this comment thread seems to be about the nature and origin of consciousness, and there is a clear divide, I’d like to hear both sides’ definitions of what actually is consciousness.
Is it being aware of your surroundings and your own internal state, to some extent? A robotic vacuum cleaner fulfils those requirements. Do you also have to be aware of your own consciousness?
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
That’s true, but I see nothing that can’t be explained by the differences in the initial wiring of our brains combined with the almost impossibly complex set of life experiences our brain has soaked in as we age (not doubt including various levels of physical impairment and repair as the result of ill health and/or physical trauma!).
If the AI brain you created was a “blank” without any of this development, then I would agree that such an entity might not be regarded as a conscious entity, but if the AI was an exact copy of a human brain (as described in #30) or the developmental stages of the human brain were also part of the emulation, then again, I see no reason why such an entity would not be conscious.
I don’t want to understate the complexity of creating a conscious AI brain. It may always remain beyond the capabilities of our technology, but it seems way too premature to write it off as a pipe dream because of some seemingly metaphysical quality to consciousness that puts it forever beyond our reach to reproduce.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
That’s a tough question that I am certainly not qualified to answer. That’s why I have been discussing an AI simulation of the human brain since we are all in agreement (I would hope) that human beings have consciousness.
For example, are ravens conscious? They have tool making abilities that demonstrates them to be smarter than the average bird, but do you need consciousness to be intelligent? I have no idea.
No doubt as experiments on neural networks (or whatever supersedes them) advance, there will be a furious debate over whether they exhibit true consciousness or just an clever emulation thereof.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
>So if, one day, we succeed in fully emulating the functioning of a human brain with a mixture of silicon and software then given the right external stimuli (i.e. education, experience) the result will be indistinguishable from a conscious human being…
I agree, but here is a major problem left here, and Chalmers and his philosophy ilk shouldn’t be dissed. They have a lot to contribute, the problem is not trivial in the slightest. We could wind up duplicating a human mind, say by mapping the neural network and weighting of a corpse brain at fine detail, and *still* not understand consciousness.
For example, here’s a thought experiment that (to my memory) I ran across via Chalmers, that still keeps me up at night:
1) Take a fresh corpse brain. Scan every synaptic link, weight, etc (this is closer than you may think to being possible). Now run a simulation of that human brain for one day on a computer, interacting in a virtual world with its human loved ones from its former life. Assuming the mind is some variety of turing machine, then by all appearances it is truly the same person, convinces the people that loved it, claims to be conscious, and in fact carries out a lengthly conversation involving introspection about the mystery of its own self-aware conscious existance.
Probably the neural net requires some random component, to operate maybe even quantumly generated; fine, generate the random numbers required by any means you like.
2) In that hour, assume you recorded every input, as well as the entire stream of random numbers required in the simulation of the mind. Now, assuming the turing-machine / neural net doctrine is true, if you replay the simulation using the same real-world inputs and random-number stream, the person should provide outputs in exactly the same way, and its internal processes be exactly the same, no? So said simulated person is still having a conscious experience of that day, are they not? And I mean internally, the way you and I are now. Yet the day is a mere repetition.
3) Now assume you recorded every internal step and neural firing in that day, just as you recorded every input and output of the system. You can now replay the day like a video recording, every event of the mind both internal and external, with no neural simulation required. Is the person conscious while the recording is played back?
4) Now assume the recorded day, both I/O and every synapse firing of every thought, is burned to a super-DVD and left static on a shelf. Is the disk having a conscious experience?
Consciousness is a hard problem. In fact I’d go further; it is *the* problem, the big enchalata, the problem of our existance and meaning of life, the one we avoid dealing with as much as we can, partly because so much nonsense has been said about it through history. Neuroscientists and physicists may be too close to the gearwork of replicating it to appreciate just how big of a problem it really is. My own best guess is that the existance of our internal experience implies that the “platonic world” of mathemetical proofs, ideas, and such is in some way just as real as atoms and photons.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
tacitus,
I think the question that you are addressing is something like, “What are the physical requirements for a structure that can be the material support for consciousness?”
I think the question that John is addressing is something like, “Why is there an internal experience corresponding to the externally observable activities that creatures (animals and humans) engage in? Why does it inhere in some structures and not in others?”
By this rephrasing, I provide my interpretation of the term “consciousness” as being this internal experience, knowable directly in oneself but only by inference in others.
John’s argument appears to be that, just as consciousness of others is merely an inference, consciousness in oneself arises in social interaction with others. If you were raised by robots that made no attempt to communicate with you, would a concept of self, needs, conflicts, etc., arise? Not to say that you wouldn’t have needs and problems, but you would never have to explain them to anyone; so it would be a do/don’t do issue, not a topic for argument or negotiation.
According to that school of thought, I would expect that social animals like dogs, intelligent birds, and so on would be conscious. It’s not clear to me that social insects have to “process” very much with each other, so probably not (or not much: consciousness may be a matter of degree).
With regard to neural networks: First you have to put it in control of something you can interact with. Then you have to see if you like it; in other words, if you would feel bad about zeroing it out.
I think there is a distinction between the old rule-based Artificial Intelligence programs and the neural-network stuff: I suspect that the developer of the rule-based AI system will never be able to take seriously the end-product, but that might not be true for the neural-net system. So the NN approach has a leg up on the Turing test.
Bruce: A DVD cannot be interacted with, so I wouldn’t consider it conscious. Also, it’s frozen, so not much could be going on from its point of view either.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:04 pm
>A DVD cannot be interacted with, so I wouldn’t consider it conscious.
But that’s mistaking the problem. The problem is not the “turing test” problem, of how a being appears from the outside. The problem is why there is an internal experience of being conscious associated with it.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Bruce — thanks for the interesting post. I agree that the question of what is consciousness is tied up with the question of what it means to be human. I can see why Chalmers’ thought experiment would be troubling to people — especially if they are religious in any way. I’ve been in enough discussions with fundamentalist Christians to know that the thought of our conscious mind being nothing more than a highly complex biological machine responding to internal and external stimuli can be an anathema to many people.
Frankly, having thought about it some, it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t change the reality of who I am, any more than my deciding that I didn’t believe in God did. Some Christians argue that if there was no God, then there would be no reason for anyone to act morally and the world would be a hellish place to live, with everyone raping and pillaging to their own heart’s delight.
That’s nonsense, of course, the truth is the world is the way it is, whether or not there is a God in charge. (What people would do if they all suddenly discovered that their religion was a sham is another matter entirely.)
That’s how I feel about this debate over consciousness. If it turns out that we’re just highly complex biological machines that can (one day) be copied and recorded and played back, then it doesn’t change who I am. If free will is merely an illusion, then if it’s a good enough illusion to fool everyone, that’s fine with me! Yes, if we can one day perform those thought experiments in reality, it would be extremely freaky to watch, but I suspect we will be able to deal with it nonetheless.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Okay, assuming that is a fair characterization, I still don’t see why John rejects the possibility that we cannot reproduce a conscious AI from purely physical parts. Our ability to internalize is a product of our evolution and is a key part to our being a social animal and why we empathized when we see others hurting. Our brain is wired that way, so I still don’t see the need to invoke a metaphysical quality that takes us out of the natural world, which is what John seems to be implying.
If what he’s saying is that you can’t quantify consciousness in physical terms, then perhaps I can see what he’s getting at, but that still doesn’t mean that consciousness isn’t itself the result of purely naturalistic purposes. To argue otherwise is getting dangerously close to the position supporters of Intelligent Design, like the Discovery Institute, take on the issue.
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Neal J. King :
“How much does your friendly philosophy professor know about using QM? Has he ever calculated a cross-section? The eigenvalues of the hydrogen atom? Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen paradox? Bell’s theorem? ”
Perhaps not, for he was a simple engineer turned philosopher turned professor. A few years ago he was elected a member of Russian Academy of Sciences and also became a director of one blabby Institute of Philosophy in Siberia. Said so, I do not consider him as a very informed person, certanly he was dumb in Physics and Math, yet about N. Bohr vs. philosophy of QM he did not said anything different from what Murray Gell-Mann later said in “Quark and Jaguar.” Apologies for using the popular reference, reading this certainly exposes me as a dilettante
, but I never said that I am a physicist.
Speaking about Bell inequalities as well as about Kochen-Specker Theorem, which according to some philosophers show impossibility of local realist interpretation of QM : would you like to comment about Chris Isham’s approach to interpretation of QM which intends to resolve the issue of realism using Topos Thaory/Intuitionists Logic?
I’m just qurious about your opinion on this…
May 23rd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
tacitus,
I think that John would not argue for the impossibility of consciousness being based on a non-brain medium. I think he’s interested in a different issue, which is the nature of consciousness as such. As I was saying originally, the “question of consciousness” can be taken from a variety of angles, and the answer to one angle is not easily related to the answer to another.
.
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sergey,
The fact that one person says the same thing that another does about a topic does not mean that their understanding is identical or even similar on that topic. Nothing that you say about your philosopher friend gives me any confidence that he has any degree of comfort with hardcore QM; for me, this is an important point: I have lost interest in what people think about QM who haven’t done homework sets on it. They’ve never had to ask themselves, “Why I am doing this calculation? What does it mean? What the HELL does it mean?”
With respect to Gell-Mann: He’s certainly a great physicist, but I didn’t find anything of philosophical interest in his popular writing. Maybe his writing style didn’t catch me: I read it very quickly decades ago. He’s very clever and very erudite; but not, as I can remember, particularly philosophical. Even Feynman – who claimed to despise philosophy – had more interest in philosophical topics: the experience of dreaming, for example.
With respect to KST and Isham, etc.: Nope, haven’t read it. The stuff I’m talking about is pretty basic and pretty old.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 pm
> I can see why Chalmers’ thought experiment would be troubling to people — especially if they are religious in any way…If it turns out that we’re just highly complex biological machines that can (one day) be copied and recorded and played back, then it doesn’t change who I am…
Well I’m 9/10 atheist, and it still keeps me up at night. I think many people partially embrace atheism for the wrong reason – because it seems to simplify the world by making it entirely atoms and photons. But it doesn’t, really, because the problem of conscious experience remains, and the world seems to be just as much information as physical.
The playback thought experiment is interesting because steps 3 and 4 are absurd. How can a static copy have a conscious experience? It relates to the question of how you can exist now when your existance is finite – once you are dead and those who remember you have died, in what way were you every alive except as perhaps a (static?) pattern further back in the stream of time?
And the answers you settle on for each step very much should have real consequences for your decisions. For example, assume you don’t want to die. (Many people say, well a good stretch is enough for me, but that’s absurd – any limitation on your life is a sort of passive suicide, barring suffering due to age can you imagine suicide? So just assume death is the big bad, now and in the future).
Well then, both general anesthesia and a good hard concussion both appear to be a complete discontinuity in your consciousness (having experienced both, they seemed very unlike sleep). If consciousness is a pattern of causal events running on a neural turing machine, then an interruption in your consciousness, and re-booting of such as a simulation of you generated after your biological death, in both cases is just as much you as the you that wakes up after minor surgery or a hard knock on the head.
If you believe that only your current stream of conscious awareness is the only you and a copy would not be, then you should fear minor surgery or hard knocks on the head just as much as death. If you believe that an interruption in your current stream of awareness is not death, then you either believe that the information state is the true you, and could survive your biological death, or you believe you are somehow magically attached to your current biological copy, or you believe in a spirit world.
So assuming you’re an atheist, and that you do not fear general anesthetic, yet do not want to die, and believe a simulation of a perfect scan of your neural network would be you, then why don’t more people sign up for cryonics?
I admit I haven’t and the only real conclusions I can come to as to why are that it “seems silly” and may open one to ridicule, or that my rational and emotional beliefs are in conflict. That or that my own beliefs on this issue lead me to the absurd conclusion that I should fear general anesthesia just as much as death, because from a first person perspective it is death and may as well be forever, it would only be from an observer’s point of view that it isn’t equivelent to permanent death.
May 23rd, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Neal J. King:
What you say about my friend is correct, but I did not brought that guy as an authority on QM, I brought him in this discussion as a damned historian of science (as gopher65 puts it.) Aside of the fact that you personally like N. Bohr philosophical interpretation of QM, do you really have any problem with my friend’s claim that N. Bohr’s interpretation of QM suppressed the work on philosophy of QM for 20 years? Ain’t we have got more than 14 interpretations of QM after the shadow of the great guru had faded?
I can not stipulate as what should be considered to be philosophical by a physicists such as your good self, yet I have some vague idea regarding what philosophers consider to be philosophical. And as I know, the pesky philosophers ilk still believe that they are the ones who are experts in consciousness, cognition, ideas, logic, etc. During the first half of 20th century they were all crazy about logic, that is the mathematical logic. That had ended with Wittgenstein… Now they are crazy about analysis of language and cognitive sciences. In that environment, the linguist such as Lakoff and Johnson rule the party. I am talking about American brand of philosophy, though..
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Bruce, Peter F. Hamilton’s “Commonwealth Universe” novels imagines exactly the type of scenario you talk about. People can download copies of themselves to be kept in a secure location should anything happen to their physical body. If they die, a clone is grown and the imprint uploaded into the body and they resume their life as before (minus the experiences after the imprint was taken). They also have a chip embedded in their brain taking backups so a more up-to-date imprint can be maintained.
In the later novels, humans begin giving up their bodies altogether and download themselves permanently into cyberspace where they live out virtual lives limited only by their imagination, but they also maintain the option to download a copy into a spare body if they need a physical presence in the real world. Of course, that means there is more than one copy in existence at one time.
He takes things to the extreme. For example, in one part of the story, there is a man who has cloned himself a dozen or more times, and they all live together in the same house and they share a high-tech psychic link *and* they share the same girlfriend. So she ends up having sex with multiple partners except they are all the same person (or personality) and they all share the sexual experience from multiple vantage points. Go figure!
In Hamilton’s universe, society has already accepted the continuity of a person through multiple physical deaths and transfers, and he doesn’t really delve much into the philosophical aspects of a portable consciousness (he’s a very plot driven writer, so that’s really no surprise) but it’s interesting in the way he explores the possibilities of such a technology.
I get your point about unconsciousness being like death in that it’s a discontinuity. (Now you’re making me feel like I don’t want to go to bed!
) If I went to sleep, someone downloaded my mind into a computer and then destroyed my body (or not) before “waking up” the AI copy of myself, I guess that copy would sense that continuity of existence every bit as much as I do when I wake up in the morning.
It’s funny though, I was thinking about this when I first read the post. I think most people would object viscerally to the idea of downloading their mind onto a chip as a way to acheive continuity of existence. It would be very hard for them to come to terms with the idea that the copy on the chip was actually them, and that it wouldn’t be a completely different person who was taking over once they (the original) had died.
One the other hand. Suppose you were able to embed that chip into a person’s brain, and then gradually and seamlessly transferred all functions of the brain on to the chip, and slowly deactivating the biological parts of the brain as they became superfluous. They wouldn’t notice anything strange at all and at the end of the day, when the body dies, you have the exact same copy held on a chip as you would have if you just did a direct dump all at once (even if its done at the moment of death.)
But, psychologically, I suspect the difference would be night and day, and many more people would accept the gradual transfer as allowing for a continuity of being. There will never be two full copies at any point, so you remain a single, unique, being, even if you’re mind is straddled across flesh and silicon.
As for anesthesia, I too have had plenty in my time for one thing or another, but I think we don’t fear it because we do trust that we will wake up from it since it is extremely rare for something to go that badly wrong. Of course, death is also made more palatable too by the hope that we will wake up in a heavenly afterlife (funny how people never think they’re going to hell!). I certainly hope there is some sort of continuity of existence after death (though, as an atheist, I doubt it), but I fear that it will come way to early to expect any sort of technological solution, unless there is some breakthrough in life-extension technology, which I guess is always possible. Ho hum.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:03 am
>..I fear that it will come way to early to expect any sort of technological solution…
If you look up brain tissue scanning and automated neural network recognition, there are a decent number of papers covering actual prototype hardware and software, and several competing research groups. It appears almost technically possible now, but just unreasonably slow to scan a whole human brain. Given that it’s a kind of digitizing, given any decent level of effort you can expect a moore’s law kind of speed up. Note that such scanning requires that you be not just dead but preserved, stained, and sliced into brain salami.
For simulation, look up the IBM blue-brain project, or the mouse brain simulation efforts. For a sense of scale the whole network that makes you would be on the order of 1000 tb ($100 of DVDs in bulk). A 1cc mouse brain takes about 3 months to scan, albiet only with the detail needed for the network, but not enough for the synaptic weights (we’re 1500cc or so).
Basically unless something’s really missing from our understanding of neuron biology, it’s already technically possible to scan a person in and simulate them. It’s the sort of thing a manhattan project scale effort could pull off, although that’d be a foolish way to spend $ given the cost halves every 2 years anyways. If moore’s law holds then it the first simulated dead person could occur within a decade, and it would be affordable for a middle-class worker within two.
We wouldn’t even need to understand what’s going on that makes us have general intelligence, never mind internal experience. It’s enough to understand neurons, build decent scanners, and have faster computers. In keeping with the original posting, it’s another case of just smart enough to get into trouble.
Perhaps we geeks aren’t signing up to get our heads frozen only because it’s currently so mocked, and who wants to be the only one to wake up in Second Life 2050, everybody you knew long since dead?
Note this is an argument for the singularity. If moore’s law kept holding true, the cost of a virtual worker would halve every 2 years! That means an exponential speed up in all content-generating fields, technical or not. It also means you would have to commit biological suicide to compete in any intellectual field! I recognize how fantastic and whatnot the concept is, and I (nearly) completely doubt it myself, but it appears you only need to believe:
1) A simulation of a human’s neural net is sufficient to be that person
2) We understand basic biological neuron function
3) Moore’s law continues for another 10 years
4) Somebody somewhere is dumb/smart/foolish/desperate/lonely/depraved enough to do it
I have a lot of trouble knocking down any of those 4 myself. Yet I don’t seem to believe the conclusion, either.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Bruce,
I guess your (or Chalmer’s) example is not really the recording of the replay of states of a model of the brain, but the model itself: You can’t interact with a recording, and it’s a static block of information. But if you download an image of the state at one time, you could re-boot the brain model to that state, which would be like waking up as that person at that time.
However, equally important as the brain model is the interface to something like a physical body. Think of all the modeled nerve endings that have to terminate in something that provides input/output, and the sensation and control issues. It’s not just a Moore’s-law issue.
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sergey,
I don’t see how Bohr could suppress other people’s thought. He and Einstein had a famous series of discussions on the meaning of QM, which it is generally agreed that Bohr “won”. What is it about winning an argument that constitutes “suppression”?
Schrödinger had his interpretation of QM in terms of waves which was incompatible with insights already gained about the nature of atomic physics; the wave-mechanical formalism had to be disentangled from the interpretation to provide a physically consistent theory.
There are other interpretations of QM than Bohr’s that have developed, although my personal feeling is that most of them don’t add very much useful, for my taste. Probably the most definite is the many-worlds interpretation; but I’m not sure that adding an infinite multiplicity of realities is any improvement over saying that there is some kind of singularity in the evolution of the state vector. You are still left with the question, Why am I in the branch that I am in?, which doesn’t seem much different from a re-statement of the original issue.
One of my current interests is reading a history of the development of QM: the 9-volume set by Mehra & Rechenberg ( http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Development-1900-1941-1942-1999-Epilogue/dp/B002155E94/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243149912&sr=1-19 ), which actually discusses many of the individual papers written by the pioneers, in their context as part of the active discussion & development. I’m interested in understanding in more detail how the “standard” conceptual framework of QM was developed: It was not easily arrived at. I believe that a lot of the newer interpretations are attempts to avoid some of the conceptual strangeness of this framework, but do not reflect an understanding of why this strangeness was introduced in the first place. Bohr & friends spent a lot of time wrestling over what could constitute a reasonable kind of explanation for atomic phenomena, building models according to these ideas, and checking them against spectroscopic measurements. The anomalous Zeeman effect was a real headache; and they were continually baffled by the problem of helium. The photon concept was pioneered and promoted by Einstein, and was seriously resisted by Bohr because of apparent incompatibility with the correspondence principle, until the Compton effect was experimentally demonstrated. Probably the most important single step was Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, but there is a lot of context to the question of what Heisenberg thought he was actually doing. Certainly, he was not thinking about operators and Hilbert space in 1925.
I will have a firmer idea of what I think about these interpretations of QM when I am clearer on how we got to where we are with respect to the formalism of QM. It is a complex and multi-threaded story.
May 24th, 2009 at 1:21 am
>You can’t interact with a recording…
Again, the problem IS NOT how the model behaves. The real problem is whether the model has an internal experience at the time of its behavior. A follow on question is, is the internal experience a requirement of the model acting convincingly like a person, including conversing about its internal experience as we are here? And if it is not a requirement to carry out this conversation, then nothing makes any sense – or at least, I could believe you don’t exist the same way I do, that you’re one of chalmer’s zombies.
>However, equally important as the brain model is the interface to something like a physical body….It’s not just a Moore’s-law issue.
Give a quadraplegic a wrap-around VR headset and a second life account. Does he still exist?
That aside, what you’re saying then is that our internal conscious experience requires interaction with the remainder of the universe; an open system. The recording doesn’t experience its actions because the data stream doesn’t originate in the real world on replay.
That leads to the idea that in some way our sense of our conscious experience being within ourselves is false, an illusion, and conscious existance (qualia?) is located in the world not in our brains, thus our senses and brains are only a way station where the qualia have a chance to interact. Our internal lives are an illusion, and the world at large is the only thing that is real. What happens, then, if you get a community of cadaver brains scanned in, and given them free reign to build a virtual society?
I think the real points here are:
1) Chalmers et al often do have something to contribute, even if they’re very often wrong
2) Either Moore’s law will fail soon or we’re about to go through a technological transition much like the splitting of the atom. Making Kurzweil one of the guys who correctly forsaw the splitting of the atom but incorrectly thought it would lead to electricity too cheap to meter, rather than Very Bad Things and/or 60 years of balance-of-terror.
May 24th, 2009 at 2:06 am
Bruce,
If you can’t interact with something, you can’t evaluate its consciousness. I can only infer the consciousness of another being by interaction; I’m not a mind reader (except of my own mind).
It is clearly NOT a requirement of “acting convincingly” to actually BE conscious: the recording of the states of the model is not that different from a movie of a person, and no one claims that a film of an actor is conscious. At this moment, you have no way to PROVE that I am NOT, in fact, one of Chalmer’s zombies. However, at this point, I suspect you find it more in-line with Occam’s razor to believe that I am actually conscious.
The quadriplegic example: He still has eyes that provide sensory input to the neural network; and there has to be an output to impart controls to the 2nd-life avatar.
“The recording doesn’t experience its actions because the data stream doesn’t originate in the real world on replay.” Not exactly what I mean: A recording is not something that is a valid object upon which to project conscious experience. Just as I would not consider the question of whether a pair of tossed dice feel a sense of uncertainty as to its result. I would be willing to entertain the question with respect to the instantiation of the brain model itself, which has capabilities and can interact.
Claiming that “our sense of conscious experience being within ourselves is an illusion” is just avoiding the issue. It’s this sense which is the issue; calling it an illusion does not make any difference. If you are experiencing a nightmare, simply realizing (after waking up) that it is an illusion does not make it any more bearable at the time you are experiencing it, and certainly does not provide any explanation for why you had it.
If you downloaded images of different brains into models and then let the models interact, you could have a society. This would be a 2nd-life situation.
I don’t think the possibility you’re talking about is that close: I don’t think the models are good enough to really hold a full brain-scan, and I don’t think we’re near close enough to being able to take a full brain-scan, even if you’re willing to be sliced & diced live for the cause. I think Moore’s law is the least of our worries. I don’t think we know nearly enough neurobiology.
May 24th, 2009 at 2:35 am
>I think Moore’s law is the least of our worries. I don’t think we know nearly enough neurobiology…
Scanning the neurobiology in terms of raw data is possible but not economical already, or nearly so, and just as with DNA sequencing, can be expected to become rapidly cheaper. If you assume Moore’s law continues, it’s reduced to *only* not understanding the low level neurology. That looks to be a much easier problem than figuring out how to make a general AI from first principles.
So assume you’re right and the neurobiology takes a few decades; that then leads to a powderkeg. You then have a large overhang, where the moment the raw scan data to network-model and simulation of neurobiology problem is solved, virtual people can be run cheaply and at rapid time scales immediately. That’s a recipe for sudden uncontrollable change.
The scenario of controllable transition is one where the software/neurobiology problem is solved while the hardware only allows 1 test subject, run at high cost and slower than real time. All the scenarios have in common that we’re likely to have functioning models of conscious minds before we understand what we’re doing or even how they actually work, much less how they produce an internal experience.
Still, skynet is unlikely. A real AI would seem better able to achieve its ends through near-invisibly subtle manipulation rather than brute force. A lost email there, leaked memo here, some tweaking of online dating, a little playing with the stock market. People who do the right things or feed it real world data do gently better, others do a little worse. It wouldn’t be hard for such a thing to change society greatly in a short time, without violence or awareness of the cause.
May 24th, 2009 at 3:07 am
In view of our discussion, the following link is apropos:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/weekinreview/24markoff.html?th&emc=th
May 24th, 2009 at 4:17 am
tacitus,
“If I went to sleep, someone downloaded my mind into a computer and then destroyed my body (or not) before “waking up” the AI copy of myself, I guess that copy would sense that continuity of existence every bit as much as I do when I wake up in the morning. ”
The problem however that IT WOULD NOT BE REALLY YOU, unless there is a high tech link between your soul and your copy that allow you to read a stream of experience of your copy. And this leads us to one very fundamental thing which comes from pesky philosophers. Unfortunately, I do not remember name of the lady from University of London whose talk on philosophy of consciousness I casually attended 8 years ago, but I sharply remembered her point and it is as follows: With consciousness we have two realities: one is biological brain that is carrier of our consciousness, another is subjective experience what makes you. Even if you map brain and know how it works, that does nothing to your purely subjective feeling of yourself, your dreams, desires, choices, values. According to her, the philosophical definition of soul is as follows: soul is subject that has that subjective experience, your soul is that I to which you refer when you say “I see”, “I feel,” “I choose.”
So, even if you are an atheists, you can talk about souls without committing major sin against your faith.
And, now coming back to your example, while downloading info from your brain try to make sure that you download the soul 
, that is those thing which makes you you from standpoint of your subjective perception.
On serious note, the lady claimed that there is no any reasonable conceptual framework to bridge the two conceptual realities: the reality of the Neuroscience and reality of individual subjective experience and even if Neuroscience gives all answers to the question of Neuroscience, this will do nothing to the second realm, the realm of individual experience. And when you think about the vastness of this gap, then all assertions like “consciousness is fundamentally biological” or “consciousness is fundamentally social” look more like artifacts of primitive faiths.
May 24th, 2009 at 4:51 am
sergey,
What if our neurobiological technology improves to the point that we can make a functionally identical biological copy of the individual’s brain, including all connections and thresholds, etc.? Not just a brain model, but an actual brain?
- Does the copy have the same mental characteristics as the original?
- If copying can be done with arbitrary accuracy, will the subjective experience of the copy be the same as that of the original?
- Does a copy of the soul come for free? Or do we have to find a spare one somewhere?
You could think of this as the Star-Trek Transporter problem.
May 24th, 2009 at 4:58 am
And speaking about studies of the realm of subjective experience, which is the realm of soul, ( in that sense as the enlightened leady whom I mentioned in my previous post had defined that realm) I wonder if one can use methods of science there? Perhaps if you are a scientist you can try to use your world experience and try to be objective in your studies of your subjective being.
But here comes the paradox, you are attempting to have OBJECTIVE view on something which is by very definition is SUBJECTIVE, your internal experience.
Thus, the gap between realms subjective experience and objective science is so conceptually vast that even first attempt at bridging it leads to ostensible logical paradox. The vastness of that gap is what makes me to agree with certain assertions about religion and science Sean made in some of his earlier writings. Sean said that science does not need God. I am compelled to agree, because I think that all subjects related to religion, including God belong to subjective realm, the realm of soul.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:16 am
@Bruce [#49] I’ve no doubt your final paragraph would be true of a dispassionate AI (just as it would be of any aliens who might be in the vicinity). But what if there were competing AIs, each given an overriding goal to work for the advantage of one country or group? Things might get rather more fraught, and their interventions more obvious.
That seems the most depressingly inevitable development, at least when (not if) they first appear. But it raises a question regarding consciousness: If these AIs were conscious, and smarter than humans, would they not be very likely to conclude it was better to work round their programmed goals, for the greater benefit of humanity, just as most people in society agree it is beneficial to curb their baser instincts?
Maybe it will turn out that a primary aim of understanding consciousness is to *avoid* giving AI too much of it, in case the AI becomes too sensitive in its conscience (I think it’s no coincidence those words sound so similar.)
Also, if we assume that consciousness is an individual’s subjective experience of the interactions between a “main” network and a smaller (perhaps overlapping) “monitoring” network whose currents reflect in embryonic form those of the former, then I imagine another problem for AI developers will be to prevent spurious independent monitoring networks springing up and causing what amounts to multiple personalities.
Like heat dissipation, the magnitude of this problem is presumably directly related to the size of the networks, just as math groups of larger order tend to have more subgroups.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:20 am
Neal J. King,
Even if we assume that you have an absolutely precise copy of you with exactly same past subjective experience, that does not do anything whatsoever to YOUR EXPERIENCE. Experience of your copy is of your copy and yours is yours. If you are dead and you copy is left, the mankind could be benefited by your knowledge of QM. Good for the makind, but it does nothing to you. You may feel good about it before you are dead, but once you are dead, than what it is to you? And I agree that Star-Trek Transporter problem poses very similar questions.
On the other hand, may be there are some laws which would prohibit absolutely precise coping, as you said it, you may not be able to copy it for free. Or may be you would need to get that soul from somewhere to make a precise copy. That kind of scenario was shown in the final part of the movie “Artificial Intelligence”: when AI boy David asked extraterrestrial beings (or were they advanced robots?) to bring his long dead adopted mother to life, they said to him that although they can recreate her body from her DNA, yet the one thing which is called soul can not be recreated, for once it is used it can not be reused. All what it can do now is to stay in body for a day and no more than that. “Artificial Intelligence” is a touchy movie and I think it is highly relevant to what we discuss in this thread.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:26 am
sergey,
Even subjectivity can be studied with a certain scientific methodology:
Feynman told us one time of some dreaming experiments he did for a philosophy class at MIT: He wanted to be able to become self-aware during the dreaming state. He eventually managed to do this, and then did some “reality testing.” “Seeing” a nail on the wall, he noted that when he “saw” himself “touching” the nail (in his dream), he also “felt” the nail: a degree of correlation that you naturally expect in the real world, but which isn’t required in a dream. He then suggested to himself that it ought to be possible that he would “see” the nail at point X, but “feel” it at point Y; and this began to happen. Because this was a dream, it was no longer necessary for X and Y to be the same.
“Experience of your copy is of your copy and yours is yours. If you are dead and you copy is left, the mankind could be benefited by your knowledge of QM. Good for the makind, but it is nothing to you.”: I rather think that the experiences of the two brains would be identical, if we can make good enough copies. It could be a problem if both are actually still around (minor problem involved with the slicing & dicing), but if a perfect copy could be made non-destructively, I don’t see an obvious physical basis for saying which one is the “real” brain and which one is the “copied” brain: functional equivalence should be subjective equivalence. And I don’t see any physical entity that could serve as the basis for a soul that could differentiate between these two.
So in the instant case, I would expect that my copy would pick up from the point at which the scan had been made and go on from there, without a hitch.
May 24th, 2009 at 6:58 am
Neal J. King
Interesting note about Feynman’s experiment. But to make it scientific, it should be verifiable and before we get devices which can read mind it is hard to verify it. One only way to verify it is to try to do it. Now, the problem is that different people have different mental abilities. For me it took some time to learn to become self-aware in my dreams. I usually look at my hands and try to both see and feel them. Sometimes I feel but do not see. It is very hard for me to keep landscape stable in my dreams. It always changes: windows and doors disappear, I move from place to place etc. I know some other people have dreams with stable landscape. In any case, the things one person can do in his dreams may not be the same as what another can do and why you should believe to me, to Feynman or anyone else who tell you about their dream experiences? Sometimes those personal experiences have profound implications if we choose to believe in them, for example:
Long ago when I was a student of physics a classmate of mine told me that in his half sleep he often sees himself in a grey world with almost no people. He met only one person in that world and they were talking time to time. He had several experiences of that sort. Ones they saw a body of a third person emerging and they were trying to bring to their grey world but failed. The crux is that he claimed that he later met the person with whom he was in grey world in the real physics world and they recognized each other and were both cognizant of their previous experience in the grey world. Should I believe it or not? If he is right then we get something new and strange added to our physical reality, that is- telepathic communication. My personal answer to this was simple: It is noted, but either it is true tor false it has meaning only for people who experienced it. Even if my friend is honest, that does not really add telepathic communication to mine own reality, for I still have the same capability as I had.I can deny the truthfulness of his account because it contradict my idea about laws of nature and if he was not truthful that is OK. But presume that he was truthful, what would he care about my idea of laws of nature. If he personally experienced it and it is ostensibly in odds with modern physics, then whom he should believe to his own eyes or to a wise guy who talks to him about modern physics?
The other hard problem comes when people talk about integral experiences. You may sometimes encounter people who say “Jesus had visited me in my dream and I experienced profound joy and happiness and it become completely clear to me what I should do about my life.” Neither we can easily reproduce this, nor there is any point in reasoning pro or contra with the person who has got the experience.
“I rather think that the experiences of the two brains would be identical, if we can make good enough copies.”
That may be so, but one of this experiences is yours another is of your copy, so you have no direct relation to his experience?
“I don’t see an obvious physical basis for saying which one is the “real” brain and which one is the “copied” brain: functional equivalence should be subjective equivalence.”
I agree with the first part, but I do not understand what is subjective equivalence and why functional equivalence should apply subjective equivalence.
” And I don’t see any physical entity that could serve as the basis for a soul that could differentiate between these two.”
If there is a physical entity that could serve as the basis for a soul , then first question if you could copy it. Leibniz thought about souls as monads. Those can not be copied, but I am not sure if his monads were physical in any sense. Suppose you can copy physical carriers of souls, then the time copying is done, and presuming that entities are not linked, then there are two entities with their own individual experiences. Each one can love, feel fear, anger on its own right. And what matters to you is what you feel. And to you copy it matters what he feels.
It is easy for us to talk about our own copies or copies of our colleagues. But what would we feel about people whom we deeply love, with whom we very deeply connected (wife, child) being copied and replaced by their copies. I can not think easily about it.
May 24th, 2009 at 8:01 am
sergey,
- Dreams: Different people’s dreams are their own experiences. What can be objectively transferred are methods used to change or manipulate these experiences. The actual “informational” content of the dream is not of interest from this point of view, unless you take the point of view that dream contents have a reality of their own (I don’t, and so I would be politely uninterested in the friends your friend met in his dreams, unless there is some reality-based evidence involved), or reflect current moods and pre-occupations (as the Freudians do).
- Whose experience: If I take a document and photocopy it, the information on both are the same: it doesn’t make much sense to say that the information is only on one of the versions. Since mental contents are informational and not physical, in the same way if a functionally identical copy of myself were to be made, both versions should have identical memories. Each will go forward with his own feelings and views, but based on the same past experiences and patterns. Futures will differ, but pasts will be the same.
I don’t think it’s so difficult to think about: If the mind and consciousness can be supported completely by a physical platform, then it should be possible to duplicate that platform, and if you do that, you will get multiple individuals with the same past. If you don’t believe that to be true, then you must assert the existence of a unique feature that cannot be duplicated; but since essentially anything physical can be duplicated (in principle), that means you are asserting the existence of individuality that based on something non-physical. You may as well all it the soul.
So, after all this running around, either there IS a soul, and consciousness cannot be supported solely on the basis of a physical platform; or there is NOT a soul, and consciousness can be supported solely on a physical platform.
It’s certainly easier to believe that there IS a soul (keeps the relationship bookkeeping more straightforward, going into the future). But that assumption puts a low ceiling on what else we might think about; and we actually have no empirical basis for believing it, because we’ve never been able to put it to any kind of test.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:11 am
sergey, all this talk about souls is unnecessarily distracting, given the religious and metaphysical connotation of the word. When you use the word soul, you are implying that there is an essence to a human being that exists outside the natural realm and thus can never be discovered or investigated by scientific means. Why not just use the term “mind” instead?
As for animating a perfect copy of your brain, then yes, essentially, that copy is not the original “you”, since you still exist. But that copy has nothing missing. It’s not missing a “soul” or any other essential component that makes you “you” and while it may be a copy, if it isn’t informed that it’s a copy (say it’s downloaded into your cloned body after you’re original was killed) then it will have no reason not to believe it is the one with full continuity of existence.
And take my example of a gradual transfer. Embed the new “mind container” chip inside a person’s brain, and slowly transfer brain functions from the biological brain to the chip (perhaps over a period of weeks, while they are sleeping), and turning them off in the biological brain as they are transferred — in other words, do a move instead of a copy.
What then?
There were never two copies of the same brain, and once the seamless transfer is complete, the chip is fully in charge of the original physical container (the body). The only difference is that once the body dies, the chip can be transferred to either an AI environment or a newly cloned body. Assuming the chip is able to contain a perfect biological representation of the brain’s physical state and a perfect simulation of the brain’s chemical and electrical activity, then it’s seems to me to be reasonable to assume that gives you the continuity of existence you need to continue beyond the death of your original body. If not, then what is it I am missing?
We already used artificial brain implants to replace or enhance brain function. Admittedly they are still very crude—-deep brain stimulation and Vagus nerve stimulation devices for Parkinson’s disease sufferers and the clinically depressed respectively—but we certainly don’t see them as being any less themselves for it (in fact, quite the opposite, given that the implants restore them to a more normal state), so is there any reason to assume that there is a point where a person has enough artificial implants controlling parts of the brain that they are no longer the same person? I just don’t see it.
May 24th, 2009 at 9:26 am
Neal J. King,
Bandler and Grinder, the creators of the field of Neuro-linguistic programming have interesting approach to defining reality. According to them reality is something which can be perceived/ shared by several individuals. This reality is not objective but rather inter-subjective. According to this, our dreams are not real unless they are collectively shared, something which does not happen to most of us.
The modern concept of objective reality that based on objective reading of mechanical devices was shaped by Francis Beckon. Our objective reality is much divorced from our sensual experiences. Our mental apparatus and our habits trained to study this objective reality do not give us much ammunition to study the reality of our own consciousness. They may as well lower the ceiling on what we may possibly find in our individual experiences…
Speaking about soul: I do not think objective knowledge of it would be more valuable than individuals control of his/her world of feelings and experiences. We do not want to experience pain or intensive fear. Wealth of objective knowledge about neurological aspects of pain may not be as handy as physical training for a soldier who is wounded and has to run.
. On the other hand the psychologists of that time derived a set of boring mental exercises which would allow souls to be “saved” but one has to spend entire life dedicated to those exercises. Suppose you live in that horrible world where the contemporary science tells you that you go either to haven or hell for eternity!!! Would you choose to secure the future of your individual experiences by doing boring mental exercises or study science which is fun, but it does not warranty that you are saved from hell?
Suppose we nail the soul down, suppose in some far future physicists playing with theories of their time will find out that information processing entity is needed to maintain consistency of their theory (in a similar fashion Higgs particle is needed in SM). Suppose they will write equations that define those entities, find that there is a well defined infinite series of solutions, the entities can be naturally numbered and only one of each should necessarily exist for their theory to be consistent. Suppose they could then develop a test and find out that those things really exist and each human has uniquely assigned entity. Suppose they also find that those entities can go to so called hell and so called paradise in terms of their individual experience. Suppose that the new theory is so complex that learning it would take half of your life, but learning it does not decrease you chances to go to hell for the eternity
May 24th, 2009 at 10:13 am
tacistus
“When you use the word soul, you are implying that there is an essence to a human being that exists outside the natural realm and thus can never be discovered or investigated by scientific means.”
No, no.. God forbid me religious proselytizing
, I did not imply anything of that sort. I use the concept “soul” in that sense as a lady mentioned in my posts defined it: soul is a subject of individual experience. For you it is what you perceive to be you when you say “I see,” “I hear,” “I smell”…
What I am trying to point at, there is dichotomy between your own experience and objective structure of the carrier. What I am trying to emphasize is that no matter what carrier is ( a physical brain, a chip, Matrix, a metaphysical monad, or a particle of exotic matter) you still have two realities: one is world outside which you can study objectively and another thing is your subjective world. And that subjective reality may not be studied by scientific means.
“Why not just use the term “mind” instead?”
This is extremely interesting question. I think that there is a subtle difference between the mind as function or as instrument and the soul as the user of the instrument. One can say “I lost my mind” that means there is a difference between you and your mind. Theoretically one can also say “I lost myself” but I rather consider it as a metaphor, because I am not sure if person can have himself in first place.
Importantly, our individual experience is wider than mental experience. I do not consider pain to be experience of mind. Also you can experience you existence without having any thought which was foundational for some philosophers. On the other hand Descartes spoiled the consensus by saying “I think therefore I am” creating the equation between soul and mind. I am not comfortable in caling perception of smell pain etc mental activity.
Copying the carrier may copy your past experience but you are still trapped in your own carrier. The interesting question is what would happen if you slowly transfer brain functions from the biological brain to the chip . I do not know what would happen to me if functions of my brain were transferred to chip. Would I be the same and would I be I? It is easy to argue that being moved to chip from body would change your self-perception, but it is hard to argue that it completely change it. The question is how weather continuous transfer to entirely different carrier possible without being Brocken down at some point.
May 24th, 2009 at 11:00 am
sergey, I wasn’t accusing you of proselytizing, I just object to the word “soul” in the context of this discussion because it is such a loaded word, coming with all the baggage of the religious use of the term. I understand that the woman you were quoting wasn’t using it in a religious context, but I still believe it’s an unnecessary distraction.
I understand that when you say “using your mind” and “using your body” necessarily posits the question “what is it that is using them?”, but labeling that as the “soul” implies a dualistic entity that exists outside both the mind and body acting as the puppet-master, and again you get into trouble with using “soul” here because of the inherent religious meaning of the word. We simply have no evidence for a soul of any kind, and I would argue that even the concept is unnecessary. Perhaps person or personhood would be a more suitable term as the actor that uses the mind and body, in the naturalistic sense.
I do not consider pain to be experience of mind.
Pain may be experienced by your body, but it most certainly affects the mind, otherwise you would not be able to learn to avoid it. This is proven by those who lose the ability to feel pain. Without that instant feedback, it’s much harder to avoid, and to learn to avoid, situations where your body can be harmed.
Also you can experience you existence without having any thought which was foundational for some philosophers.
If this is an accurate quote, this seems to me to be little more than philosphers’ psychobabble. If you’re not thinking then what’s the point of existing?
It is easy to argue that being moved to chip from body would change your self-perception, but it is hard to argue that it completely change it.
If the body remains the same, and the nerve connections to the body remain intact (big “ifs” I know) then there is no reason why there should be any change in self-perception as your brain is moved to a chip. All that’s changed is the substrate upon which your brain is built.
Now, once the body dies, and the chip has to be moved into a new body or virtual environment, I would certainly expect there to be a learning process as your mind/brain gets used to it’s new environment. But this is similar to the process people have to go through when they have a stroke or lose a limb. There is something profoundly different about them that can be very difficult to overcome (e.g. phantom limb syndrome) but the brain and thus the person usually adapts to their new situtation in time. However, the important thing is that it doesn’t change their personhood.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Regarding the idea of gradual transfer of subjective experience to keep continuity with a copy, a similar experiment could actually be run via fairly safe surgery:
Have a surgeon drill one small hole in the top of your skull. Then them use a carefully guidd needle to apply local anesthetic to your corpus callosum.
At first you would experience one subjective awareness become two; that part’s already been done for severe epileptics. But later, as the freezing wore off, you’d get the unique experience of two similar “copies” of you merging while fully conscious.
May 24th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Bruce,
How have the epileptics been able to report on two separate awarenesses?
May 24th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
tacitus:
“but labeling that as the “soul” implies a dualistic entity that exists outside both the mind and body acting as the puppet-master, and again you get into trouble with using “soul” here because of the inherent religious meaning of the word.”
well, yet another friend of mine, an avowed atheist, and even an enemy of God
called our common boss “a soulless career machine.” I do not think that atheists can not use word soul and its derivatives. And I think if they do so, that would not mean a dualistic entity that exists outside both the mind and body acting as the puppet-master. But yet, it implies a dualistic entity *conceptually* opposite to both the mind and body. And yes, it is acting as the puppet-master. I do not wish to assert here that it is objectively exists. Personally, I think that probably it exists, but I have no evidence for that, so why to blabb about it. And in fact, it does not even matter in context of this discussion.
Pain being mental vs. not mental experience: it is all matter of definition. You can go with Descartes and equate soul with mind if it makes sense within you conceptual model of the world.
“Also you can experience you existence without having any thought ….If this is an accurate quote, this seems to me to be little more than philosphers’ psychobabble. If you’re not thinking then what’s the point of existing?”
You have just dissed Eckhart Tolle! Oprah would be highly displeased with you.
. On the other hand Goethe would be displeased with both your, Descartes and Eckhart Tolle. As I remember it (I had chance to read Faust 27 years ago) Goethe thought and put it in the mouth of Faust that action should come first, even before perception, thinking and being . So, here are the options:
“I act therefore I am” Faust
“I think therefore I am” Descartes.
“I am that I am” …….old classical idea from Bible, and it may be even older than the Bible.
You choose what you like.
May 24th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
>How have the epileptics been able to report on two separate awarenesses?
From what I’ve read/seen they are not actually aware of it unless the issue is forced. For one thing, only one hemisphere gets the ability to speak.
The really strange/creepy thing is that the person’s speaking hemisphere will give totally bullshit explanations for the actions of the other hemisphere’s hand, when the other hemisphere is responding in a straightforward way to stimulus that the dominant/speaking hemisphere can’t see. It supports the notion that most of our actions are subconscious, and our conscious internal narritive is actually more like the PR officer, and not so much in the decision making loop.
I’ve always been interested in what the non-dominant/non-speaking hemisphere might have to say about its life, but I’ve never seen it dealt with in the articles or documentaries.
Tacitus>”…If you’re not thinking then what’s the point of existing?”
Spoken like a true geek! But I hope you don’t really believe this, or I feel pity for the quality of your sex life.
May 24th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Great post and great discussion! To BtC: could you provide any references on these experiments?
May 24th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Lots. Just google “split brain”.
May 24th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
John #27 wrote:
As I’ve discussed on my blog, it seems to me that the solution is to consider the brain to be a computer that is computing a “virtual” world in which the subjective things we experience really exist. We are part of this virtual world generated by the brain.
The laws of physics combined with the low entropy initial conditions make computation possible in our universe. This then allows us to build computers that can simulate universes of which the laws of physics are competely different.
E.g. given enough resources, you could simulate a world in which people live on a virtual planet where pigs can fly. These people would really be conscious. They would presumably be unable to work out how gravity works in their world; the rules for gravity would be very complicated as the software would have to make exceptions for pigs.
As long as something is computable (formally describable), you can create a virtual world in which it exists. It doesn’t have to exist in the real world. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the brain would have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to effectively compute a world that has to be described using variables that don’t necessarily have an analogue in the real world (e.g. qualia like pain, hunger, thirst etc.).
May 25th, 2009 at 12:56 am
Chalmers:
There is not just one problem of consciousness. “Consciousness” is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into “hard” and “easy” problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.
The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:
the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.
All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.
There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms’ contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.
[...]
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
May 25th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Of course, no discussion of consciousness would be complete without mentioning Dust Theory for Beginners!
Also, for the more advanced Dust Theory enthusiast, see here (good stuff in the comments).
And one of my favorites, the Hans Moravec classic Simulation, Consciousness, and Existence.
And, because it’s Memorial Day and you probably don’t have anything to do, here’s Daniel Dennett’s entertaining Where Am I?
May 25th, 2009 at 3:13 am
I can never quite get my head around what the likes of Chalmers and Searle think the hard problem is. I mean, I grasp that it’s not intuitive that “unconscious matter generates subjective experience”, but I don’t think it’s particularly problematic – philosophiclaly speaking (practically, working out how the brain works is obviously a very tricky thing). Basically, the whole “philosophical zombie” idea seems palpably ill formed. As Neal says above, how do you know I’m not a zombie? Partly because we assume they don’t exist, and partly because we have interactions which persuade you I have a consciousness at least broadly similar to you. So why doesn’t that apply to the zombies themselves? If they describe and respond to their qualia in a convincing manner, how on earth can you say they aren’t really experiencing them subjectively? It seems to me to be a recipe for solipsism, something I’m fairly sure the zombie proponents reject.
And as for Chalmers thought experiment, again, I don’t see the problem. It’s just that putting something we experience linearly (sort of) and biologically into a repeated, technological framework takes us out of our comfort zone. So for point 2, if we assume that the brain state is reset for the second run, to me it seems obvious it’s a conscious experience even if it’s the same. We just can’t reset our own brains, so it’s impossible for us to repeat a day. But if you assume that we could, and we repeated a day in a similar manner, would you dispute that was a conscious experience? And if the artficial brain isn’t reset, then we wouldn’t expect it to respond identically, because it would have the memory of the previous day. It would probably be pretty damn confused, a la Groundhog Day. As for point 3, again, what’s the problem? Assuming the “brain” can’t tell it’s a replay, why wouldn’t it be conscious, but experiencing the same things as before? A lot of the hang-ups we have with artificial consciousness seem to be tied into hang-ups about free will. And as for point 4, of course the DVD on a shelf isn’t conscious, any more than a dead brain is. Consciousness is a process, not a state.
May 25th, 2009 at 5:39 am
RE: Dust Theory
There is a mathematical take on the idea of Universe as a simulation by Jürgen Schmidhuber
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html
His first paper attempts a formalizm for simulated universe/multiverse and derive some consequences from the postulates:
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9904050
May 25th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Ginger Yellow, that’s been my point too. I don’t see that there is any particular unsolvable barrier to creating artificial consciousness. Whether or not we manage to accurately emulate the human brain is likely a matter of whether we can develop the technology to do it. I suspect that we will eventually, but not for a long time yet.
Once we’ve done it, it certainly will cause a lot of queasiness, particularly in religious quarters, over the issue of free will. If you create a machine that has consciousness and free will, what does that mean for the rest of us? I suspect there will be a very large number of people who will argue that the AIs free will is simply a very good emulation and not the real thing.
Then there is another issue. If we create a conscious, thinking AI human simulation, what rights does it have? If I make an AI copy of my brain, who has the rights over what happens to it after it’s switched on? The original me, or the copy?
If you populate a simulated world with conscious AIs who are programmed to believe they are living out real lives within the simulation, do you have the right to play God over their artificial lives? Such a simulation would be a fantastic tool for all sorts of experimentation, but would be ethical to do that, or would we be no better than the Nazi scientists who experimented on Jews during WWII?
May 25th, 2009 at 11:47 am
>Ginger Yellow: “As for point 3, again, what’s the problem? Assuming the “brain” can’t tell it’s a replay, why wouldn’t it be conscious, but experiencing the same things as before?”
You really should to read the “dust” links above. If you assume a simulation has an internal experience, the problem is that there is a nearly seemless spectrum of states between a real-time simulation, to a repeated simulation using recorded inputs and random component, to recorded full synaptic states, to a dead recording, to nothing special at all, including the data encoded as bits scattered around the universe in a form meaningless without a key.
Think of the recorded brain states, stored in an array of memory locations each representing a step in time. The only distinction between examples 2 and 3 in the thought experiment is vs logically generating the next step, or simply loading it into the memory region representing the current synaptic state. Given the neural simulation code involved, you could probably generate many partial examples between 2 and 3. As the “dust” idea demonstrates, you can then go from there to … really nothing at all.
I agree that it may be our imagination or intuition that is failing in many of these thought experiments, as it does in quantum physics. I also agree that it’s hard to see how the simulation would *not* be internally aware while interacting with a real world person and reporting on its own consciousness (this is why chalmer’s zombies are interesting, they’re a deliberately absurd/impossible thought experiment).
Yet something is still wrong. The only easy, sensible solutions to the paradox are that some kind of interaction with the real, quantumly-rooted world is required, or that in some way internal experience derives from causual relationships with the real world, which the pure repeated simulation lacks. But then, what if I give you a hit of muscle relaxant and sensory deprivation measures? Experiments have shown you’d suffer permanent mental injury within hours, but putting that aside, does it make sense that you would not be internally aware / conscious during that time? There are no solutions to the paradox left then.
>I mean, I grasp that it’s not intuitive that “unconscious matter generates subjective experience”, but I don’t think it’s particularly problematic…
Put 10 people side by side, holding hands and each thinking of a different word in a sentence. Can you say that there is a gestalt awareness that contains the whole sentence in its consciousness? No, eh? So why would that be true for 10^x atoms, or 10^10 neurons?
But the thought experiment that still bothers me most is the lack of any first-person distinction that I can find between going temporarily offline due to deep anathesia, concussion, hypothermia, hypoxia etc (disorganized or near-zero neural firing), and permanent death, or waking up as a copy. As far as I can tell from that one, if I’m defined as one continous instance of internal awareness, then I may have “died” many times already, and it’s only from an observer’s perspective that I’m one continuous being. Kind of gets under your skin. We don’t really continuously exist except to other people?!?!
If you want a fun (fairly safe) experiment that you just have to fake epilepsy for, check out the “Wada Test”. That and split-brain patients kill off dualism fairly convincingly.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:51 am
“If we create a conscious, thinking AI human simulation, what rights does it have? If I make an AI copy of my brain, who has the rights over what happens to it after it’s switched on? The original me, or the copy?”
These are indeed very interesting questions, and ones I think we’ll need to seriously address long before we have a reasonable simulation of a human brain. After all, even non-human animals have some rights in our society. If it’s true that Edelman and Izhikevitch really have created a model cat brain that demonstrates brain-like behaviour in terms of self-stimulation, then we need to be asking these questions right now.
Incidentally, my answer to your second question would definitely be the copy, at least once it’s switched on. Do you have rights over your clone or your identical twin?
May 25th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
As far as I can tell from that one, if I’m defined as one continous instance of internal awareness, then I may have “died” many times already, and it’s only from an observer’s perspective that I’m one continuous being. Kind of gets under your skin. We don’t really continuously exist except to other people?!?!
That we don’t freak out about this is probably the same reason we don’t freak out about flying (well, most of us), or even getting out of bed in the morning, considering all the horrendous things that happen to other people after they get out of bed! Sometimes there is something to be said for having a limited imagination
May 25th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Bruce, I’m familiar with Dust Theory, although not by that name. Again, as far as I can see it only really presents a serious problem to people who start out believing in the hard problem (and I do mean believe in a quasi-religious sense). It’s not very different from Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, which I find equally unconvincing. And I don’t have a philosophical problem with some part of the universe being conscious (or rather simulating something and thereby generating consciousness), though I think the reality of it doing so in practice is far less likely than the person in your link, ie negligible if not impossible, given the distances involved.
“Put 10 people side by side, holding hands and each thinking of a different word in a sentence. Can you say that there is a gestalt awareness that contains the whole sentence in its consciousness? No, eh? So why would that be true for 10^x atoms, or 10^10 neurons?”
Because the neurons are communicating with each other, and with other neurons, so that at a certain higher level of organisation there is a self (or if you prefer to keep it strictly biological a “neuronal correlate of consciousness”) which processes the syntax and semantics of the sentence as a whole. I mean, nobody pretends that 10 unconnected neurons each responding to an aspect of a stimulus would generate conscious experience.
“As far as I can tell from that one, if I’m defined as one continous instance of internal awareness, then I may have “died” many times already, and it’s only from an observer’s perspective that I’m one continous being. Kind of gets under your skin. We don’t really continously exist except to other people”
That’s pretty much Hofstadter’s take, and I pretty much agree. We’re less of a self than a succession of selves, and each self has less integrity than we conventionally think.
May 25th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Ginger, except for the fact that you state you don’t “believe” in the hard problem, I don’t disagree with your last post. But note where you say:
>Because the neurons are communicating with each other, and with other neurons, so that at a certain higher level of organisation there is a self…
This is still the hard problem, you’re just implying a solution to it: that meta-information states, such as physics equations, math theorems, mental models of the world or minds, all have as real an existance as the atoms and photons that they’re composed of. Each level of abstraction, if grounded in reality, exists in just as real a sense as those above or below it. But an infinite number of such things could exist, so they must have a causal relationship with physical reality.
May 25th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Well, I’m not really comfortable with talk of abstract things being “as real as” material things. They’re real, all right. But I don’t claim they’re of exactly the same ontological status. Again, it seems palpably obvious that they have a causal relationship with reality. There’s a reason maths works and describes the universe. Here I suppose my approach is broadly in line with Dennett’s “intentional stance” approach.
“This is still the hard problem, you’re just implying a solution to it:”
I suppose you could put it that way, but it just doesn’t seem like an interesting or especially difficult problem to me. I mean, the 10 people holding hands bears no relation whatsoever to how hard problem denialists like myself envisage consciousness, or for that matter our neuroscientific knowledge. Searle’s and Chalmers’s experiments, and “dust theory” get closer, but they still seem to boil down to an “ick response” to non-intuitive implications of neuroscience.
May 25th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
>Searle’s and Chalmers’s experiments, and “dust theory” get closer, but they still seem to boil down to an “ick response” to non-intuitive implications of neuroscience…
No, there’s something we’re not getting, and those paradoxes just aren’t enough clues. It seems to me it’s more akin to theories about time or interpreting QM. There’s something seriously missing about our understanding, but it’s like seeing behind your own head. So the most practical stance is Dennet’s, but it’s just the equivalent of Feynman’s comment re QM – “Shut up and calculate”.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
“So the most practical stance is Dennet’s, but it’s just the equivalent of Feynman’s comment re QM – “Shut up and calculate”.”
I wouldn’t particularly disagree with that, but then I think Feynman’s comment is right. To the extent that thought experiments generate testable hypotheses or avenues of research, then great. But otherwise they’re mainly just amusing diversions.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Sean, your claim about biological origin of consciosness is probably wrong. Strange, but nobody yet here mentioned Memetics. Although Dennets’s name was waived a lot, he is basically a philosopher …
Memetics claim that high consciosness, among other things like languages, dress codes, religions, scientific ideas, technology (even agriculture in the first place) etc. – is a product of memetic (= cultural) evolution, which works much the same way as genetic one, but has a different type of replicator. Memes are second replicators that employ humans in the same “selfish” way as genes – they just replicate with minor deviations and propagate by imitation. Only some copies can survive – hence you inevitable get memetic evolution. There is a lot of evidence that memes can have high survival ability at a detriment to survival of genes, i.e. it’s not at all true that all human culture gives some evolutionary advantage and hence can be explained by some biological “profit”. So evolution of humans is different from any other animal’s, because we bear and propagate 2 different kind of replicators – genes and memes, and animals only have genes (with exceptions so rare that they make sensations each time discovered).
By “high consciousness” i mean this feeling of mini-”me”, sitting somewhere in my head and operating the body. Imagine you look in the mirror and see utterly different face and body. You would still be quite sure it’s exactly you, but in a different body .. If by consciousness you guys mean general awareness of environment, than probably infusoria and even bacteria are conscious
This is Memetics, supported among well-known atheist people by Richard Dawkins (if you need authority on this).
Than there is brilliant and highly original phychologist and thinker Julian Jaynes, who claimed with very good arguments that above defined “high consciosness” is no less or more but a complex set of language metaphors, that allow us to create internal mind-space. Most important of them are metaphors of “time like space”, because we can’t imagine time per se, as we don’t see it or feel directly.
So there is nothing supernatural in saying that consciosness is NOT biological. Sure enough, ultimately it’s all down to QM etc., but i can’t see any value in trying to derive properties of social interactions directly from axioms of quantum mechanics.
May 26th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
[...] It is not true AI, the brain model is not a thinking entity right now, but it is getting very close. Via Cosmic Variance [...]
May 28th, 2009 at 6:50 am
Why do you automatically assume artificial intelligence will become a threat to humanity?
I think the first thing a true aware and superintelligent being will do is get away from us and Earth as soon and as fast as possible. Why be stuck on one planet with such a limited species?
May 28th, 2009 at 9:00 am
[...] Thanks, Cosmic Variance [...]