Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Worth a read for anyone who thinks AI may be sentient, or for those trying to pop the psychosis bubble of an buddy.
Anyone who’s even slightly interested in the idea of a Chinese Room (or just good sci-fi), PLEEEASE go out and read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Not only is it a phenomenal deep-dive into what consciousness even is, but it’s got dozens of fantastic ideas in it that could make for compelling stories on their own. Also, scientifically-plausible vampires in space! That is all
One of my top 5 books. It’s also free to read online. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
It in no way supports that LLMs can be sentient. And despite the arguments in the book that consciousness and awareness can be missing in an advanced species capable of space travel, I do not actually believe that’s true. But I enjoy the argument and speculation.
The book is highly researched and even contains a reference list of legit research articles. However it is a book of fiction and the writer took artistic liberties when needed to make an interesting story over facts.
For instance. A brain cannot contain two or more personalities because a personality is a full brain deal.
But it’s an interesting argument about cultural designations of what counts as mental illness.
Also the reason I do not think a space traveling species can exist without consciousness.
Because. Motivation.
It’s that simple.
An organism can be shaped behaviorally by the environment. That’s part of evolution. And this shaping can be unconscious.
But at a point, creative construction and ambition to exceed ones given optimal environment for a less optimal one (space) must be an intentional effort.
The scientific research and experimentation required to build complex machines requires a thinking and understanding mind. Because it requires critical thinking.
Critical thinking and creativity is a characteristic that requires a sense of self.
Even in our own history we see that it takes a specific type of person to pursue scholarly work. People who are less conformist are generally more capable of new inventions, research, and challenging acceptable beliefs of the mass. We never see the most rule following conformist being these people.
If everyone was like that, we wouldn’t survive. So diversity of mental proclivities within a species is necessary for advancement. Otherwise optimal survival would be met and stagnate.
Think of the horseshoe crab as an example.
Furthermore , I am a researcher in perception. And the field of perception is often referenced for the exploration of what is consciousness.
There are many definitions. But the sense of self is one. And a popular one.
Higher complex perception creates a sense of self.
It’s a product of the system.
The book does discuss this a bit.
I need to know my body and my actions are not the same as you. That you stand there and I stand over here.
I can perform an action and you can perform a different one that is unknown to me and not within my control.
This understanding of separateness. Of “,this is what I’m experiencing and where I am (spatially)” is something that would always emerge from higher perception. Such as that in most animals.
Maybe not in plants, fungi, bacteria, single cell microbes, etc.
But there are arguments and evidence for some of those examples as well.
As a final point. (I doubt anyone read all that).
Most people who think a probability model (current AI) is capable of consciousness usually have an incredibly simplified view of how the brain processes information.
They follow old school “behaviorist” perspectives. Or “the black box” perspective on brain functioning.
But a neuroscientist will tell you it’s not simple at all. It’s not info in, info out.
The system is changed, biologically, by the input.
The same input given twice will result in a different output the 2nd time.
And the 3rd. And how frequently the input is given or it’s temporal relation to other stimuli will also change its output.
This is because the organic brain learns. And this learning is a biological change in the actual neural structures (connections) and neurons firing potential. Every single moment the brain is physically , biologically, changing.
Computations in the brain don’t use actual math. It’s all estimates (heuristics). And these are not well understood how these computations are made. They don’t work as predicted.
There are always too many factors.
Individual motivations, including personality traits are also a factor in how the information is processed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray's_biopsychological_theory_of_personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
eeeee! thank you for the link! i have too much good stuff to read now, in part thanks to you and @[email protected] (thank you both so much! i might disappear for a week into books but i promise to pop in for air). If i didn’t have a good choosing algorithm by now i’d be in analysis paralysis (for relatively trivial decisions: if you have multiple equally good options, flip a coin. use chwazi. roll a die. whatever works for that number. if, while doing the random number generator you find yourself hoping for a specific option, you know what you really want. if not, go with the random choice. you’re equally happy with all of them so what do you care if you randomly go with number eight? go with number eight.) One of the best problems to have (too many good choices).
Now what did you think of Echopraxia?
I’ll be honest, I’ve read Blindsight a few times and pretty sure only read echopraxia once. Like 10 years ago.
But I re-read the synopsis to refresh my memory.
I remember liking Blindsight more. But not why.
I’m also not sure which story elements I’m remembering came from which book.
Was the whole vampire arch and twist from book 1 or 2?
Can you remind me of a few specific points ? Maybe that will jog my memory. Or maybe I just need to re-read it.
Literally reading it now. I hit that section last night. I put the book down immediately and started reading about the Chinese Room.
I won’t spoil shit, but you be sure to have fun with the rest of the book! It’s uh… well it stuck with me for a while. Also be sure to give his other book in the series, Echopraxia, a look as well. In my opinion it wasn’t quite as good but that’s like comparing a 9 to an 8.9, they’re both incredible
I always was on the hand of Dennet, how believe in the possibility of strong AI and held that a machine that passed the Turing test must be conscious.
Modern LLM’s have shown that a computer can pass the Turing test, even without understanding or consciousness. In that way it’s fortunate that Dennet didn’t get to live through it’s insurgence. I would be curious to his take, though.
I loved the vitriol he had in his denial of Searle and the Chinese room argument, though.
Guy who invented the Chinese Room though experiment : Look! If I write a flowchart that precisely imitates a Chinese person’s mind, then it looks like a Chinese person’s mind, even though it’s just a flowchart!
Reddit level reply : Of course! A flowchart is capable of precisely imitating all the functions of a person’s mind, even though it isn’t conscious. Therefore, consciousness cannot be measured behaviourally!
Scientist level reply : I don’t know if flowcharts can be conscious because I’ve never been a highly advanced flowchart. But if flowcharts can be made advanced enough to precisely imitate the behaviour of a conscious mind, I guess they might be capable of consciousness after all.
Right it’s silly to deny consciousness (a phenomenon we know almost nothing about) just because we can see the inner workings of a system.
Yeah, I once used a TMS machine to magnetically stimulate a guy’s brain and force him to move his hand. I have a pretty good understanding of how the brain works on a functional level. About as good as My understanding of LLMs, maybe better. Still no idea how the brain produces qualia.
Wait actually? Can you tell me more about the process and how it works? Genuinely curious
Have you ever cooked on an induction stove? It uses the principles of electromagnetics to transmit electrical energy wirelessly using magnets. Every electrical field is accompanied by a perpendicular magnetic field and vice versa. You can actually put a towel or a slab of wood in between an induction stove and a pot, and it’ll go straight through the wood and heat the metal. That’s because a magnetic field is transmitting electrical energy into the pot. Which immediately turns the electricity into heat through resistance. A wireless phone charger works the same way, it transmits electricity through magnets.
A TMS machine is basically a magnetic coil that costs thousands of dollars, and a capacitor kinda device that can store a shit ton of energy and send it into the magnetic coil all at once. The result is a really powerful magnetic field that only turns on for a split second. It’s powerful enough to go straight through your skull and creature an electrical impulse in your cortical neurons. It can’t do the subcortical (inside brain) parts, though. Only the surface.
You can use TMS for a lot. If you stimulate the motor cortex, you can cause muscle twitches all over the body. If you stimulate the prefrontal cortex, you can induce plasticity and aid learning. That’s good for treating depression, because you can do cognitive behavioural therapy while having your prefrontal cortex zapped, and you learn healthy thought patterns faster. I haven’t read about stimulating the parietal or occipital lobes, but I bet you can make people see things. Nothing complex, just flashes of light probably.
TMS is more like a hammer than a scalpel, since the brain is so complex and it’s just sending a burst of electrical energy into a few million neurons. You’ve got 86 billion neurons in your brain, so if it hits 0.01% of your neurons, that’s still 8 million. You can’t achieve much precision with that. The motor cortex is the easiest place to do precise things, because it’s so well organised and you get immediate visible feedback. You can find the part of the brain that controls the hands or the feet and stimulate that if you’ve got a steady grip. It’s actually really fun. But good luck getting reliable results stimulating the prefrontal cortex.
The placebo effect is super strong in that chair, because as a participant you have no idea what to expect. You know this machine can make your involuntarily move your body, and that wows you so hard, you get super suggestible. You’re thinking “if this machine can do that, and I just felt it do that, and I couldn’t stop it if I tried, then what else can it do!” And so people get lots of random side effects from TMS even if you turn the machine off ten minutes in. You can pretend to stimulate non motor regions and the participant gets symptoms.
I’m not saying it’s pseudoscience at all, I’m just saying, the random bullshit effects are pretty big compared to most forms of science. So you’ve got to have a control group to filter out the random bullshit effects. And with control group comparisons, you don’t know what’s happening in the moment, so you can’t really correct for stuff as well. Double blind experiments are possible with TMS.
This was incredibly interesting, thank you so much for sharing!
We know nothing about a lot of things, and we can deny them with certainty, due to probability.
Just because you close your eyes and want it to happen, won’t make it happen.
Won’t make what happen? I think I’m missing an implication
What would even be the difference in this case besides the artificiality of the mind?
So a “Chinese Room” is more of an illusion of consciousness than anything else. The main idea is that the person operating the room doesn’t speak/write Mandarin/Cantonese/etc, they’re just giving pre-determined responses according to the flowchart/binder full of rules. They don’t actually understand anything that’s going on, not what they’re being asked, not what they’re providing as an answer, they just know that when the symbol “A” appears, they must respond with “B”. If asked to do anything outside the parameters given, or otherwise not listed in that flowchart then the whole system would collapse. A “Chinese Room” is just a very elaborate version of those automated phone systems where they ask you to “Press 1 to go to Accounts Recievable”; if you know EXACTLY what to say and where, you’ll probably be fine, but most of the time its just going to be easier to talk to a real live person instead.
The issue is that the man in the room isn’t the mind, he’s an appendage. He doesn’t know what’s going on because his mind isn’t the “mind,” the program generating the instructions is the mind, and if it’s sufficiently powerful, it may possibly be considered intelligent. It’s like how your hand doesn’t understand English, it just follows the instructions sent to it by your brain that does. I’m not saying current “AI” is intelligent - it definitely isn’t, but I think that a sufficiently powerful computer program could be. We’re just a long way off from that.