this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Consciousness is an illusion. Which is why it's so hard to find, or even define. However it's a critical illusion.
If our mind's are akin to an orchestra, then consciousness is akin to the conductor. Critically however, an orchestra can still play without a literal conductor. Each of the instruments can play off each other, and so create the appearance of a conductor. The "fake" conductor provides a sense of global direction., and keeps the orchestra in harmony.
Our consciousness is a ghost in the machine. It exists no more than the world of a TV series exists. Yet its false existence is critical to maintaining coherency.
Current "AIs" lack enough parts to create anything like this illusion. I suspect we will know it when it happens, though its form could be vastly different from ours.
You have provided a descriptive statement. Descriptive statements should come with scientific evidence. What evidence do you have to support your orchestra analogy? Or is it just your hypothesis?
Spoiler alert: It is just your hypothesis, as you would've won a Nobel had you managed to generate evidence explaining consciousness in further detail.
Many like to point at the Chinese room experiment to show how LLMs imitate consciousness rather than being conscious. They however forget, that our brains are Chinese rooms too in this regard, in that they learn how to provide the best responses to external stimuli while remaining blackboxes (at least for current tech).
It's not a 1-1 match, but it's not unsimilar to GNW theory
Sadly my evidence is mostly anecdotal or philosophical in nature. A lot of it stems from how ADHD and Autism alter the brain. The orchestral analogy works well as a good number of people for communicating changes in functionality, from an experience perspective.
It also works well for explaining how a system can appear to have a singular controller, without such a controller actually existing.
Ultimately however, it is philosophical in nature. It does anchor well to, and is reasonably consistent with, our current existing understandings of consciousness however.
Consciousness is very obvious from the inside. There also seems to be no "seat of consciousness" within the brain. Conversely, there are multiple areas of the brain that cause consciousness to collapse, if damaged. We also see radical changes in consciousness with both epilepsy and strokes. This proves that it is highly dependent on the underlying brain structure (since stroke damage will change it) and on longer range communication (which epilepsy disrupts).
The music of an orchestra follows similar patterns. Eliminate the woodwind, and the music fundamentally changes, deafen the violins, and it will change in a different way. The large scale interplay produces an effect far greater than the sum of its parts.
You could reduce any fact to an unknown with that type of troll reasoning. You can never know anything for a fact but you can get pretty damn close, and you absolutely can rule out anything that contradicts. The idea that an LLM could gain consciousness contradicts the fact they lack memory and the ability to learn/grow. They're called machine learning but all the learning happens before they deploy.
Sorry that I came across as a troll. That was not my intent.
Lmao this statement itself is a contradiction. You first say how "you can never know anything for sure" in regards to descriptive statements about reality. Then, in the same statement, you make a statement relating to the laws of logic (which by the way are descriptive statements about reality) and say that you are absolutely sure of this statement.
Serious answer though - the scientific method is based on a couple of axioms. Assuming that these axioms are true, yes, you can be absolutely sure about the nature of things.
You lack the understanding of how LLMs work. Please see how neural networks specifically work. They do learn and they do have memory. In fact, memory is the biggest reason why you can't run ChatGPT on your smartphone.
Untrue. Please learn how machine learning works.
I'm done, i'm just going to start blocking you lot because you're completely immune to reason.
I'm sorry you feel that way. However, don't you think it would be more helpful to point at the holes in my reasoning?
I could, but I won't. I'm saving my mental health by not engaging with debate perverts who only care about winning.
I don't know what a "debate pervert" is. However, what I know is that I wasn't engaging with the intent of "winning" or something.
Not to poo-poo your point too much but consciousness is a real thing; it lives in our gray matter. It's why people with prion diseases who lose white brain matter will feel normal but suddenly find themselves unable to do basic things or recall memories. Just because it's a transient property doesn't mean that it isn't real, it just means you have to factor in time as well as space in order to find it.