What is Consciousness?
The way I think about consciousness is that it is an "emergent property" of a sufficiently complex and suitably constructed computing system. While it is possible that there are other "forces" or "ethers" or "planes of existence" or "souls" that are somehow separate from the patterns of neural activity that are associated with a thinking person, my null hypothesis is that they are just not there. The hard reductionist (the philosopher Wittgenstein, the mathematician Turing, me) would say that we use these terms as proxies for things we just don't understand yet, much like ephemeral "vapors" that were thought to cause diseases, say 300 years ago.
This view posits that the things we identify as the hallmarks of a person - mind, thought, self-identity, self-consciousness, awareness of other consciousnesses - are emergent from the immense computational complexity of the human brain.
A simple example to think of as a model for this is pressure of a gas. No one molecule in a gas has the property of pressure - if you isolate one molecule, it has no pressure associated with it. Only the gas as a whole exerts pressure on the inside of the container it is in. And as you go from lots of molecules (10^20 or so in a liter of room air) to smaller numbers of them, the concept of pressure (and as Wittgenstein might say - the word itself) makes less and less sense until finally you have one molecule bouncing around in the box, with no real pressure at all, only isolated bounces.
I think what Wittgenstein might say about previous AIs and consciousness is that talking about say ELIZA or ALICE in those terms makes no sense precisely because the computational complexity of those "old AIs" was so far out of line from what is in our heads (both computational speed and memory size). However - as I have argued quantitatively - what is new about today's GPT AIs is first their architecture (based on large computational neural networks) and second their size which is for the first time in the range of memory size and computational complexity of our own brains. GPT3 is perhaps a factor of 1000 in combined speed/size below us, and GPT4 is perhaps tenfold more powerful, and already we are seeing hints that this tech can produce behavior similar to a human's. It's only a matter of a few years before we have machines matching the scale of the human brain - and then we will see what they can do, and whether the use of terms from human psychology are appropriate (in the Wittgensteinian sense) to use in connection with them.
I always love to think about Wittgenstein's statement that "philosophy is what happens when language goes on holiday" - meaning that the great philosophical problems are problems precisely because we have lacked the language appropriate to analyze them.
Back to the sexbot factory! Gotta raise the consciousness of my research Uma model a bit higher...
This view posits that the things we identify as the hallmarks of a person - mind, thought, self-identity, self-consciousness, awareness of other consciousnesses - are emergent from the immense computational complexity of the human brain.
A simple example to think of as a model for this is pressure of a gas. No one molecule in a gas has the property of pressure - if you isolate one molecule, it has no pressure associated with it. Only the gas as a whole exerts pressure on the inside of the container it is in. And as you go from lots of molecules (10^20 or so in a liter of room air) to smaller numbers of them, the concept of pressure (and as Wittgenstein might say - the word itself) makes less and less sense until finally you have one molecule bouncing around in the box, with no real pressure at all, only isolated bounces.
I think what Wittgenstein might say about previous AIs and consciousness is that talking about say ELIZA or ALICE in those terms makes no sense precisely because the computational complexity of those "old AIs" was so far out of line from what is in our heads (both computational speed and memory size). However - as I have argued quantitatively - what is new about today's GPT AIs is first their architecture (based on large computational neural networks) and second their size which is for the first time in the range of memory size and computational complexity of our own brains. GPT3 is perhaps a factor of 1000 in combined speed/size below us, and GPT4 is perhaps tenfold more powerful, and already we are seeing hints that this tech can produce behavior similar to a human's. It's only a matter of a few years before we have machines matching the scale of the human brain - and then we will see what they can do, and whether the use of terms from human psychology are appropriate (in the Wittgensteinian sense) to use in connection with them.
I always love to think about Wittgenstein's statement that "philosophy is what happens when language goes on holiday" - meaning that the great philosophical problems are problems precisely because we have lacked the language appropriate to analyze them.
Back to the sexbot factory! Gotta raise the consciousness of my research Uma model a bit higher...
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