For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.
> For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.
Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us - physical and social. Every sensation comes from the environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream, every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect it, language and society are part of the environment, we base our thoughts on language and our actions on other people. Our brain is made from environment signals, just like GPT-4 is made from its language corpus.
The unsung hero of consciousness is actually the environment with its reach data stream and feedback. Consciousness, language, genes, internet, LLMs and the evolution of intelligence are all social processes. They don't make sense individually, only as part of an evolutionary population. They can only evolve if there are many agents.
Now, I know this doesn't sound as sexy as quantum consciousness, but it is a more parsimonious and better grounded position. It accounts for the data engine that actually creates consciousness. Don't be looking for consciousness inside the brain or in exotic physics when the magical ingredient is outside.
> Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us - physical and social. Every sensation comes from the environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream, every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect it, language and society are part of the environment, we base our thoughts on language and our actions on other people.
This is also my understanding of consciousness. We are overly focused on the human brain's capabilities as a generic information processing mechanism (because of its remarkable adaptability), that we ignore how fundamentally dependent it is on its environment, leading us to seek a metaphysical explanation for its functioning, when it's actually all around us.
Language, culture, and abstract thought capabilities that we use to describe consciousness are symbolic overlays upon the physical environment, but ultimately emerge from it, and their objectives ultimately tie back to it.
Human consciousness - especially its group/cultural aspects - has been a tremendous advantage to the species, which is why we are even in a position to be fascinated by it today.
True. Which leads one to wonder, could those same kinds of consciousness that inhabit us also be capable of inhabit an AI. Or even, could there be other kinds of consciousnesses in those or other dimensions that are not currently able to exist on earth because there doesn’t exist anything yet that they are able to inhabit. But that our computers would eventually, when we arrive at some specific combination of hardware and software, enable them to inhabit those. Bringing a new kind of consciousness from outside of the universe to earth that is unlike all others outside already present here (in us, the animals, the plants, etc).
Agreed on this to a certain extent. Right here on earth in the present day and without taking into account innovative technological advances in AI, we have examples of highly sophisticated intelligence (at least in a functional way) belonging to things that have little or no known consciousness.
First example, large hive insect nests, such as those of termites and certain ants. Their internal construction is extremely complex and often built in useful (to them) ways that would challenge even the abilities of smart human engineers trying to do the same with similar tools (sharp digging instruments, organic cementing liquids, raw scavenged building materials and nothing else) Yet any individual termite in a nest of millions shows only, maybe, the most minuscule and debatable signs of consciousness. They instead act like biological, physical pieces of an algorithmic process.
Second, obvious example, evolution itself: Here we have a process that produces organic, biological systems of such complexity and self direction that we with all our cognition are barely capable of grasping them robustly let alone emulating any major part of them, yet it's entirely mindless. Sure, it has billions of years to do its thing through the imperatives of brute survival mechanisms, but it's still incredible how on a macro scale none of it involves the least bit of known cognition.
To be fair, there is absolutely nothing within known physics that would explain why we're more than a complex biological computer and how subjective experience and qualia arise from it.
So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the loss of connection"
There's currently no reason to assume that we're more than a complex biological computer - while it's indeed interesting to explain how subjective experience and qualia arise, it's certainly plausible that this can arise as emergent behavior once a specific type of computer is doing a specific type of computation, and we 'just' need to study that complex computation.
Unless we obtain any evidence whatsoever that this can't be the case, Occam's razor would suggest that this is the hypothesis to explore, without looking for new physics or other unlikely assumptions.
> why we're more than a complex biological computer
Are we more than biological "computers"?
I think we are complex biological systems that we do not fully understand yet but that does not mean anything supernatural or beyond our understanding of physics is at play.
Then this is either general physics theories about extra dimensions that apply to the universe as a whole probably applied to quantum physics in this case, or it is random quackery.
that's the kind of musing that leads you off into the weeds. Sure, anything is possible, but science is useful for observing, cataloging, and utilizing knowledge that is provable or at least "approximately" provable to the point it's useful. Spiritual talk of what the mind "is" really doesn't have much of a place when talking about AGI, I don't think. We need repetitive outputs for given inputs into a system. I can make up "what might be" all day long, but it's not really useful, unless I can prove it or use it.
Legitimately made me lol. Thank you for being the rational one. When topics of the mind come up even people who are normally smart and rational can turn into quacks.
Topics of the mind are self-referential and so make most people self-select into three groups, in order of decreasing religious fanaticism:
1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.
2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.
3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.
There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human consciousness probably is, too. In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers and every single time it's turned out to be just physics, just biology, just chemistry...
And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers
Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer.
> Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.
> In a parallel universe where pineapples are the dominant species, intergalactic pizza deliveries are made by flying spaghetti monsters riding unicycles made of marshmallows. Meanwhile, sentient clouds debate the meaning of life with philosophical penguins on top of rainbow-colored mountains made of bubblegum.
That's really not what it says. Godel's incompleteness theorem applied to AI would say something like 'There are statements about the model's behavior we cannot prove without relying on statements that cannot to be proven' (this is because obviously the AI algorithms are based on elementary arithmetic).
The theorem applies beyond elementary arithmetic to any formal system. If we try to be rigorous in that way with our models of the universe, the theorem would say that no matter how formally sound our models are they will have to be incomplete, incorrect, or non-provable; that is, we would not be able to rule out the existence of consciousness or figurative pink elephants.
(And if they are not formally sound in that way, our models can be safely considered to be incorrect/incomplete simply because they are not formally sound in that way.)
This is only true if you reject the pink elephant argument as straw man in the first place.
As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the implication of the theory in context of scientific method.
Gödel's theorem deals with the axioms of mathematics. the scientific method deals with the physical universe. a small part of mathematics is useful in describing the universe, but most of it isn't.
I thought we did know this now. I can't quote exactly what science I read, but the science latest I saw showed consciousness arrises in the nerves outside the brain.
I've heard reliable reports of Jeffrey A. Martin and his fellow research participants moving visual perception out of the eyes and the rest of the body into the surrounding environment. Literally seeing behind him. I don't think his eyes stopped working, he just moved his subjective awareness outside of his body.
I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to contain 'all of reality' into a small space (the visual field) and then 'move' it to my chest. Feeling like music, sight, and body sensations are all happening within a tiny space-contained field is a very startling experience.
There's always 'reports' of people being able to do these magical things that cannot be explained through modern science. And yet challenges such as these https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_... never seem to have winners. It seems that these abilities inherently come with the luck of never having financial problems that could me resolved with a generous cash prize.
Reports, not records. People who I know who know him sharing privately. Jeffrey doesn't and can't publish everything that he comes across and has to be very circumspect with the stuff he does.
