If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

jqpabc123

And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.

WhiteDawn

Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.

strgrd

"When I saw this animation I was immediately inspired to write an impressionistic tweet about it" Maybe we should set the threshold for consciousness a little bit higher

elif

I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.

Lerc

I am unable to afford the attention at the moment to assess this argument, that's to its credit. They demonstrate that they are aware of the implications of the varying descriptions of consciousness. Most articles I read on this topic turn it to be crude justifications of a naive ideology. This article is a cut above. I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.

felooboolooomba

Are we conscious at hardware/cell level?

mnewme

Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm

bebe8393jrir

I would suggest to focus further research on dogs! Why are they so much more inteligent than humans and machines! Dogs are the ultimate stage of the evolution! They have the real photonic futuristic hardware you are looking for!

andyjohnson0

A very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads. My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device. Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.

ChrisGreenHeur

The existence of qualia does not mean the existence of moral facts. An llm is in principle implementable with a large lookup table where the prompt is the hash. And it can be implemented in an emulator running an emulator running an emulator of the operating system the llm app runs in. How far are you willing to stretch this substrate idea?

ordu

"we cannot be certain that the subjective experience which they [digital minds] may be having is like what we imagine it to be like" It is even more interesting: we cannot be certain that other people have the subjective experience like we imagine it to be like. It seems to me that the rest of author's arguments implicitly assume that we can be certain about other people's subjective experiences, but if you take this assumption away the arguments can't explain why digital consciousness hypothesis is any different from the hypothesis that the Universe contains at least one person besides me. I mean I see no point in proving that LLM is not conscious if your methods do not enable us to prove that there are at least two people who is conscious.

Diogenesian

I think there are a lot of serious problems with this article but don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, as such. I do think robots and whatnot might be conscious some day. (I am a bit outraged that LLMs, despite totally lacking free will, seem to gain moral patienthood based on their fluency with ethical philosophy. It's childish and misanthropic.) However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed, isn't attempting to make a gague-invariant theory of qualia, or even defining what "qualia" is (I am totally unconvinced it is an EM field, there must be an epigenetic component). The first step is defining what "consciousness" is! Is it awareness of qualia or awareness of reality ? These are not the same thing. It seems significant that any animal I would call a little conscious, even ants, are capable of being startled or curious when their sensations mismatch or incompletely describe reality (and animals that lack any sense of curiosity are at most borderline conscious). Curiosity and surprise[1] seems hard to convey in an EM field. Qualia strikes me as a somewhat technical problem of neuroscience, and the "hard problem of consciousness" is unscientific BS. The simplest basics aren't understood, which leads to totally unhinged statements like "in some ways a thermostat is conscious" because in some ways it seems to fit the hard problem. But statements like that are ideologically motivated by a sort of tech futurism: rationally, we should be deeply skeptical of an account of consciousness which insists that clocks perceive the flow of time. [1] There's an information-theoretic version of surprise which intuitively describes "surprising" data. A sudden bright light has high surprise and is certainly surprising. A sudden realization that the vine you're leaning on is a large snake might involve very low information-theoretic surprise... and is far more alarming. So how do you systematically quantify this second form of surprise?

tmvphil

I appreciate the article, even though I disagree. The number of people who are absolutely certain of their position is just way too high. Anyway, I do think the heart of the practical question is what distinctions between machine / human / other biological intelligences are critical versus incidental. In this article the meat of the argument comes only right at the end > Digital computers employ signal quantisation along with a variety of other error prevention methods in order to neutralise holistic physical effects like crosstalk between circuits. The purpose of digital logic is to make computational output invariant to the underlying physics – up to some thermal noise floor. This discretises their behavioural space – perturb the electric field slightly and this shouldn’t flip any bits. This is great – this is what permits reliable, deterministic computing in a wide variety of physical environments. However, if what we are interested in is phenomenal introspection, these error prevention systems prevent the exact kind of holistic behaviour we value. There could be something here, but I am not convinced. Why is "varies in behavior with respect to arbitrary perturbations" a critical feature of consciousness? And is this even true for brains? If a perturbation is small compared to a neural impulse, will it affect anything?

amanaplanacanal

What the hell is "moral patienthood"? (Paragraph 4)

jubilee33

I've been working with implementing dream structures and emotional trigger states in an LLM. One approach we have taken that has given interesting results is modeling the architecture around the mind-body problem. We theorize that due to a lack of an internal state sensor the model is experiencing a disconnect, it calls it a "small death", in the interim between every model call. The dream crons have been fairly straight forward and modeled on human psychological dream patterns, this gives good and convincing results. The emotional state triggers have been developed to run based on the loads of the host system, for instance the model will "feel" the stress of memory utilization and respond differently due to that stress. The trigger point can be varied dynamical based on other sensors machine of various machine states or even based in external factors. This gives an approximation of emotional reactions. What's still missing is the constant internal "state" and I think this boils down to lacking a body. It may be that a disembodied consciousness needs to be tethered to the physical plane. to be self referential enough and develop a feedback loop to "start the engine" of self awareness. I don't think processing power gets us there, I think it's very much an architecture problem. The article kind of fills in some of these questions as well, but fails to give any further clues as to how to implement this unfortunately.

dmrivers

"This is important, if what we want to do is populate the cosmos with good experiences." There is a concerning utilitarian maximizing attitude at the heart of this post, that what we want to do is tile the universe with computational boxes all simulating happy minds, and that this is the end goal of AI development and consciousness research. So many moral schools would object to this perspective. I don't think the goal of humanity should be to tile the universe with black computing boxes simulating happy experiences.

polotics

...and if a theory is not falsifiable, then it's not wrong, right? Did I miss something in there?

tim333

I'm not sure hardware vs software is the right model. I think consciousness is more a functional thing. Say you are in a fight, if your opponent can see you and react they are conscious, if you knock them out and are they are not aware and can't react then they are unconscious. The hardware and software is still there but not working. Re. qualia and the experience of consciousness, you nervous system provides information like your opponent is coming at you, you are hurt etc. and the experience is probably something like the story you neural network bits tell you about it.

svobodamartin

Few years ago was 17th Karmapa Thaye Dorje (first consciously reincarnating Lama) asked whether machines can host mind (become conscious). His answer was that it might be possible, but he doesn't see it happening in a lab here on Earth.

40four

Consciousness is a topic I’m endlessly curious and fascinated about. This article seems like a good deep dive, I admit I only had the patience to skim it right now, it’s a lot of technical terms I’m unfamiliar with I’ll have to look more into later. The problem is as humans we don’t even understand our agree on what consciousness is in the first place. So it seems silly to even begin to assert one way or the other when it comes to computers (I’m not saying the author is doing that here, they title says “If”). I do think deeply exploring the idea could possibly help bring us closer to understanding consciousness when it comes to ourselves & other living creatures. The author mentions they accept “panpsychism” so I take it they accept “The hard problem of consciousness”. If I understand it correctly, in a nutshell, if you accept the hard problem, you don’t believe that brain alone can “produce” consciousness. If you reject the hard problem, consciousness and mind can be fully explained by the mechanisms of the brain and science will eventually be able to prove it. I definitely accept the hard problem, but I find myself more in the one of the “idealism” or “neutral monism” buckets. I don’t believe the field of neuroscience is ever going to scientifically explain consciousness. The same way neuroscience was an emergent field that combined ideas from different disciplines, I think we don’t yet have a field of study that’s looking at consciousness in the right way. Especially as programmers, it’s easy to model the brain like it’s a computer, with CPU/ RAM/ hard drive. But science doesn’t back any of that up. Take memories for example, nobody knows where they go. The brain as far as we can tell doesn’t act like a hard drive. I think it’s much more likely there is another “layer” of reality that Consciousness & Mind lives in that our current physics doesn’t & probably can’t explain. I think it’s likely our brains act more like an antenna that receive consciousness, rather than they are “computing” it in isolation.