Comment by roncesvalles

6 days ago

My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years.

The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.

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roncesvalles

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trick-or-treat  6 days ago

That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.

  • roncesvalles  6 days ago

    Not really. Solipsism means only you're (certain to be) conscious. It's an epistemological thing.

    I'm making a purely biological conjecture motivated by some observations. I believe some humans are definitely conscious (including of course myself, if you take my word), but that some might not be. The conscious experience may just be a phenotypic variant, like having blue eyes, eidetic memory or dyslexia.

    Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control. The actual decision-making is done a split second before we perceive to have done it. That means it might be totally optional.

    Consider also that we know some living creatures to definitely not have a mind for example plants, and some creatures deemed highly unlikely to have a mind such as fish and insects. And yet they "operate" just fine. Somewhere in ecology there's a boundary and yet it's not apparent just by observing behavior.

    I have a corollary hypothesis which is that only young people are actually conscious. One day you go to bed and your mind never wakes up, but your body keeps on living the automaton till you actually die.

    (also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)

    • adornKey  5 days ago

      The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?

      I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.

      Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.

      Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...

    • GoblinSlayer  5 days ago

      >Consider also some recent research that shows that our consciousness is only observational and gives us an illusion of control.

      That's fine. Observation is the function of consciousness, and there's nothing wrong with consciousness being observational, it's expected to be observational, because observation is what consciousness does. Control is done by the decision making process, not by consciousness.

    • kodt  6 days ago

      >(also if you're wondering, I don't think the boundary is along racial lines)

      read the entire comment waiting for this

  • randallsquared  6 days ago

    I think LLMs have brought it roaring back for a lot of people.

    • jfyi  6 days ago

      Nah, it never went anywhere. The internet just provides a safe space for people to admit philosophies that would cause social issues in person.

adornKey  6 days ago

One step further is to ask how conscious your mind actually is. There is a lot happening on autopilot - and everybody usually checks out for a few hours at night. Maybe consciousness is a rare temporary thing.

I think evidence suggests that humans aren't conscious most of the time. So it wouldn't surprise me if 95% of the time people are just stochastic parrots. But maybe that number is even close or equal to 100%.

Intellectually a lot of humans perform worse than LLMs and a lot of people (most of them) are completely unable to process abstract concepts and basic logic at all. Can those people truly be called conscious? Is consciousness worth something without the ability to reason?