Comment by doctoboggan
21 hours ago
> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property.
I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own.
Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above
I think consciousness is going to turn out to be very challenging to define rigorously enough that we can test for its presence or absence. Emergent or not, the question is how do you determine when it has emerged? Is it a quantity or an attribute? Discrete or continuous? Does it have a finite or infinite range?
We can all agree on what color something is, but we can’t describe the color a priori, only by example. I think consciousness may be a similar phenomenon and the only test is by shared experience. If so then we are in deep trouble because we will not be able to anticipate when a system becomes conscious.
I like the color example, but colors can be reproduced at will by trial and error and by observing the results (and collectively compare them to our shared experience).
Why cannot this be applied to consciousness as well? I mean, it's surely much more difficult to do compared to colors but... impossible?
You and previous comment seem to agree that trial and error/shared experience can determine if consciousness has emerged. And this might/will be challenging.
Previous comment used the word "anticipate" and I think they mean that we won't know in advance before we run the trial and error process.
When they say "deep trouble" I assume they mean because creating a non-friendly conscious AI might pose an existential risk for humanity.
However there is also the ethical issue of creating a consciousness and then destroying/murdering it.
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I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.
The counter to that is that altering the brain directly alters the consciousness. I can take LSD and I literally change. I can have parts of my brain removed and parts of my self disappear. It's not like cutting off a leg, where I lose capabilities but am still the same me.
The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me.
> The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me
The logical conclusion under the popular axiomatic framework of materialism, for sure.
But there are other possible logical conclusions depending on your philosophical foundations, e.g. the brain could be a receiver for consciousness which is translated into our worldly experience from somewhere else.
"an", not "the" alternative.
Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.
Another alternative is that consciousness exists on the map, and unfortunately we're confusing that with the territory.
Aren't you saying the same thing? It seems like the metaphysical and the map would be analogous here.
Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.
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I don't know if most people would dismiss the sentence "all matter has a sort of proto-subjectivity very different from ours but which gives rise to ours". And it solves some problems (introducing others).
Panpsychism is certainly an interesting idea but I wouldn't consider it a popularly held view.
That's because Panpsychism is silly.
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I'd expand a little bit to say inevitably emergent property. That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. With regards to current AI, we're a fair way away from building something with enough connections, but we'll get there.
One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of information processing, may matter: there might be something about neurons that isn't (currently) reproducible in silicon. I don't know, and there's not (yet) any evidence for or against, but it at least seems like plausible speculation. We just don't know enough about any of this right now.
> That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result.
Why is that?
Aye, that's the question, and we don't know: everything in this sub-thread my comment kicked off is speculation. The thing is that several large groups of (or at least led by) fundamentally reckless people are racing to build machines that will test these hypotheses, with little regard for the consequences. The rest of us are scrabbling around in their wake wondering what's going to happen next.
Well, I think the "brain as an antenna" theory is also plausible given your preconditions.
But I think my issue with the emergence theory is that it seems to imply to me that consciousness is non-physical and non-local. So what entity is actually experiencing the consciousness? It's not that I believe consciousness is physical and local, but people who make the emergence argument seem to believe it is and I can't figure out how that is supposed to work.
Why would emergence imply anything about non-physicality and non-locality? Temperature is a another common example of an emergent phenomena. An individual atom doesn't really have a temperature, only a large group of them do. But you wouldn't say temperature is non-physical and non-local, would you?
I am not sure, but I think you might misunderstand what emergent means. Take chaotic systems, in the math sense. Chaos is a well defined property of, say, iterated dynamic systems.
A linear dynamic, say x_n+1=lambda x_n, or x_n+1=(1-x_n), is never chaotic. But if you multiply them, x_n+1=lambda x_n (1-x_n), it depends on lambda if the system is chaotic.
None of the components are chaotic. But for specific combinations, chaos emerges as an property.
In physics, the mass of mesons and the nucleon is emergent. It's completely different from the constituents' mass. Different from an atom, where its mass is very close to the mass of its nucleus and its electrons.