[FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Fri Jul 12 13:02:44 EDT 2024

By the time the real time retraining part is practical, I expect it will be superior.   Except for energy use.  

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2024 10:03 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Granted - "a sort of consciousness"

davew

On Fri, Jul 12, 2024, at 11:50 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Some supercomputer networks an effective radix of 64.  Blue Gene Q had five-dimensional real torus for connectivity.    These network fabrics are typically autonomous remote DMA systems that are configured so that processors do not have to intervene in data transfers.  

Extreme ultraviolet lithography systems can fabricate 100 layers for a digital processor.   

It seems to me a LLM would have a sort of consciousness if 1) it had continuous real time training and 2) the training was coupled to the physical world through an array of sensors. 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2024 9:00 AM
To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Is consciousness a mystery? (used to be "mystery...deeper".T

Two separate responses:

first to Steve—Personally, I do believe in the spectrum of "consciousness" you suggest with, perhaps a nuance. One contributor tot he spectrum is simply quantity; a quanta has 1 'bit' of consciousness, an octopus has Domegegemegrottebyte (real thing according to Wikipedia) 'bits'. A more significant contributor is "organization." Molecules with differing numbers of atoms of the same elements, organized differently, have very different properties and behaviors. A human and an octopus might have the same number of bits of consciousness, but the organization of those bits (in an N-dimensional space) is radically different.

   This means it may be possible to say that some threshold quantity and and organization results in entities being included in the set of generically conscious things, it is unlikely we will ever be able to say that Consciousness-Human is identical to or even similar to Consciousness-octopus.

BTW: much of my antipathy to AI claims arises from this perspective. A machine very well might have the requisite number of 'bits' of consciousness from the material of which the embodying machine is composed (and the fact that every 1/0 bit of the executing code has a 'bit' of consciousness) and those bits will be 'organized' sufficiently to join the generic set; but machine consciousness will never equate to human consciousness. My objections to machine "intelligence" comes from the fact that machines do not have the N-dimensional organization of humans or octopi.

to Nick—

   Beware blatant anthropomorphism (applied to both Dave and Dusty)

Dave is sleepy and calm.

Dusty is anxious and afraid.

Dusty crawls onto Dave's shoulder and finds reassurance and security.

Dave is tolerant and does not shove Dusty off bed.

Dave senses Dusty's need for reassurance and rests his arm across her back and lets her stay as she is.

Dusty relaxes and goes to sleep.

Love is not present in this transaction, unless you presume that a series of prior interactions created a kind of meta-state of Lovingness between the two and absent that state the interactions  and 'feelings; as presented would not have occurred. But, perhaps Dave is just an (occasionally) good Buddhist showing Dusty the same respect he would express to any living being?

davew

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024, at 7:02 PM, steve smith wrote:

Nick -

(of course) I've larded up my usual style of response below (maybe only for my own need to "express" the buildup of mental-pus that comes with everything I hear here and elsewhere) but to save you (and anyone else who cares) the burden of parsing a few dozen lines of back-and-forth, I offer the punchline.  If you are curious about how I came to said (vaguely) concise punchline you can read the rest after the <horizontal line> element below:

A) Can you recognize that there is a spectrum/continuum of things you would acknowledge as "conscious" between the two extrema (perhaps) of a (presumably apex-complex) human/cephalopod/cetacean and that of a quark or a brane or a string-loop or some abstract monad?  B) if yes, what are the implications of this?  or C) why does quantizing "conscioiusness" into "humans like me" and "every other bit of life" feel necessary, useful or appealing?

Steve

If FriAM typical discourse is the Thunderstorm, is this a (weak) cuddle?

  _____  

Steve,

The scale of your response alone suggests that it cannot be baby steps.  

Thus recognizing it was more of a baby (naive) pentathalon (long, arduous and multi-modal) hellride of a traverse through the implied space.

I guess I am proposing a method here, one inn we work outward from an evocative experience to explore our understandings of contraversial concepts, and that we do it in relatively short bursts. 

yes, let us extrude short strands of noodle and see how they criss-cross.

Dusty comes to cuddle with David when she hears thunder.

Does Dusty love David?

Dave (or does he self-identify as David?) loves Dusty and finds Dusty's cuddling sufficiently similar/familiar to his own cuddling to attribute it to love if he is in the mood to do so.

If yes, what else would you expect Dusty to do with  respect to David. given you have made that attribution.

If no, what more would have Dusty have to do, before you would make such an attribution.

Qualified yes...    Dusty could cower under the bed, leaving Dave to choose to coax Dusty out and cuddle Dusty, giving Dusty the "love" or at least comfort which Dave would offer as the closest cross-species expression of love he knows how to offer in this moment.  Dave loves Dusty, Dusty dog-loves Dave.  They are reciprocal but asymmetric in quality, even if either would give their lives for the other? 

I would like to respond to an inference that there is something patronizing about my insisting on a method, as if  I think you need thought-therapy and I am the guy to give it.

If in fact you were to have intended (consciously or not) as patronizing, I take it as an gesture of love, of filial empathy, of generous guidance from someone who has been around at least as many trees as I have...   I definitely need or seek thought/spiritual therapy/guaidance from every quarter, including this one.

In reply, I only would say that if somebody were willing to ask me short, to-the-point questions about my thinking on any matter and explore carefully my answers, I would eternally grateful.   I might even cuddle with them in a thunderstorm.

I would choose to give you this level of fine-grain attention around your fascination with vortices in the context of meteorology (and other domains) more than this domain, but if this is the one you prefer (for the moment), let me ask a short, three-part but to-the-point question (and leave it to you to ignore the fecundly laden pregnant assumptions hidden by the implied simplicity of the construction):  

A) Can you recognize that there is a spectrum/continuum of things you would acknowledge as "conscious" between the two extrema (perhaps) of a (presumably apex-complex) human/cephalopod/cetacean and that of a quark or a brane or a string-loop or some abstract monad?  B) if yes, what are the implications of this?  or C) why does quantizing "conscioiusness" into "humans like me" and "every other bit of life" feel necessary, useful or appealing?

 Steve

Steve

NIck

Nick

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 4:05 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com> > wrote:

Nick -

I'm glad you acknowledged (in another branch of this thread?) the "grumpiness" aspect of your initiation/participation in this thread.  Your analogy around thought/feeling "expression" and that of pimple popping is in fact very apt if a bit graphic.  I do think many of us want this apparently deeply thorny/paradoxical problem to be easier than it is?   And the plethora of complexly subtle dis/mis-agreements on language around consciousness, intelligence, cognition, (self) awareness, qualia complicates that yet more. 

I don't know if my own baby-steps are helpful, given that my background/perspective might align more with DaveW than most others here (I'm very sympathetic with a pan-consciousness perspective)?  maybe it parses as baby-babble more than baby-steps...

I missed most of this (and related) threads but am surprised at where this seems to be going. I always associated consciousness with subjective experience and not necessarily with self awareness. The "hard problem of consciousness" is qualia, not self-awareness. No? An AI agent cannot understand language on anything other than a superficial basis because it has no idea what, for example "wet," means. Nevertheless, it will be quite good at stringing words together that say coherent things about wetness. An AI agent has no idea about anything. At the same time, an AI agent will be quite good at creating coherent statements about very many things. Just because an AI agent is able to create coherent statements does not mean that those statements reflect the agent's ideas--since it has no ideas.

Russ's  point here is a good pivot point for me in this conversation if it is possible to make the pivot.  It may not be. 

Knowing and Knowing-About:

  I use the former to be the quality of qualia... not easily formalizeable nor quantifiable nor with obvious models which are not intrinsically subjective.   "Knowing-About" is for me reserved for the formalized models of "facts about the world and relations between ideas" and when I say "formalized" I don't preclude storytelling or the highly vilified "just so stories".  

Formalized mathematical, statistical, logical models with digital computer simulations (or analog electronic, mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic "circuits" or "systems")  are "knowing about"...  a steam train for example embodies "knowing about" converting carbon-fuel into linear motion across long distances, carrying heavy loads by way of many repeatable mechanisms...   the implementation and operation of such a device/system is a "proof" in some sense of the design. 

 On top of that design/system are other design/systems (say the logic of Railroad Robber Baronages) upon which yet other systems (say Industrial-revolution era proto-hyper-capitalism) on top of which rides trans-global corporatism and nationalism in their own "gyre and gimbal"  with a in intra-stellar and eventually inter-stellar variation in the sense of Asimov's Foundation and Empire or perhaps for the youth culture here (under 60?) George Lucas' Star Wars Empire or Roddenberry's Star Trek Federation vs ???  

Consciousness:

A the lowest level consciousness or perhaps proto-consciousness registers for me as "having a model of the world useful for guiding behaviour toward surviving/thriving/reproducing/collectivizing".     This permeates all of life from somewhere down at the single-celled bacteria/archaea/fungi/phyto-thingies/  up to and through vertebrates/mammals/hominids/sapiens 

On the reflection of whether my cat or dog, or the hummingbirds outside my window or the mice trying to sneak back into my house have "consciousness", or even more pointedly the mosquito I slapped into a blood (my blood by the way) spot on my forearm last night, have "consciousness"...   while each of these appear to have a "consciousness" I know it to be variously more or less familiar to my own.   My elaborate (unfettered?) imagination allows me to make up (just so?) stories about how cetaceans, cephalapods, jellyfish all variously have aspects of their "consciousness' that I could (do?) recognize (empathize with?).   So I would want a multivalued function with at least two simple scalars: Familiarity-to-Me(Conscioiusness) and Potency-of(Consciousness), pick your scale... my identical twin or maybe conjoined twin might max out on the first scale while a nematode or a bacterium might trail off toward nil on the first AND second scale.  And beyond the scale of organic life into artificial life and  beyond, the "familiarity" of a glider or oscillator in the GameO'Life or the braided rings of Saturn, even less significant but not zero?   The Potency-scale seems to be something like *agency* which feels absolute for most of us except Robert Sapolsky while the *agency* of an electron or neutrino seems registered at *absolute zero*, though the Quantum Consciousness folks maybe put it at max and our own more an illusive projection of that?

The idea of "collective individuation" (e.g. mashup of Eleanor Ostrom's collectives and Jung's individuation) suggests that perception, cognition, intelligence, even consciousness may well be a collective phenomena.   Our organs, tissues, cells, organelles, macromolecules, CHON++ molecules, atoms, baryons/fermions, quarks, strings, branes  are on a loose hierarchy of diminishing Familiarity-Consciousness and Potency-Consciousness.   I'm more interested (these days) in the emergent collective consciousness of the noosphere and perhaps the symbiotic culture of humanity and life-at-all-scales (SCHLAAS?)   it feels wild and science-fictiony to assert that earth's biosphere has already (in the last 150 years) conjured a nervous system, a global-brain (ala Francis Heylighen: Global Brain Institute)

https://globalbraininstitute.org/ with "our own" Bollen, Joslyn, Rodriguez still on the Board of Technical Advisors.   I scoffed at this somewhat 25 years ago (mostly because of the hubris of "Global" and "Brain").

OK Nick, so not "baby steps" more like a hyper-baby's mad dash through an obstacle course or maybe a pentathalon?   I tried shunting all this to George Tremblay IVo but he referred me to Gussie Tumbleroot who cheered me on on my careening ideational orbits.  

Gurgle,

 - Steve

-- Russ Abbott                                      

Professor Emeritus, Computer Science

California State University, Los Angeles

On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 9:30 AM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com> > wrote:

Glen,

This is a test to illustrate somethiing about Gmail to Nick.

On Tue, Jul 9, 2024 at 4:37 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347215003085

On July 9, 2024 2:04:29 PM PDT, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm> > wrote:

Maybe I should not be replying, as I do believe my dogs (and your cat if you have one) are conscious.

I have not experienced a Vulcan Mind-Meld with either of my dogs, so I cannot say with certainty they are conscious—I must infer it from observations:

1- interactions with other dogs would seem to indicate they "remember" past interactions and do not require the same butt-sniffing protocol with dogs they have met at the park frequently. Also they seem to remember who plays with who and who doesn't. "That ball is not mine, this one is."

2-they modify their behavior depending on the tenor, sharpness, and volume of barks, ear positions, tail wagging differences, by the other dogs; e.g., "that's enough."

3-They do not communicate to me in English, but seem to accept communication from me in that language—not trained responses to commands, but "listening to conversations" between myself and Mary and reacting to words (e.g., dog park) that are exchanged in those conversations. Mary and I are totally sedentary and speaking in conversational tone, so pretty sure there we are not sending 'signals' akin to training words, training tone of voice.

4-they seem to remember trauma, (one of our dogs spent three days with dead owner before anyone knew the owner was deceased and will bite if anyone tries to forcefully remove him from my (current bonded owner) presence.

5-seek "psychological comfort" by crawling into my bed and sleeping on my shoulder when the thunderstorm comes.

All of these are grounded in anthropomorphism—long considered a deadly error by ethologists. (Some contemporary ethologists are exploring accepting and leveraging this "error" to extend our understanding of animal behavior.)

davew

On Tue, Jul 9, 2024, at 2:54 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

While I find all the  ancillary considerations raised on the original thread extremely interesting,  I would like to reopen the discussion of Conscious as a Mystery and ask that those that join it stay close to the question of what consciousness is and how we know it when we see it.  Baby Steps.  

Where were we?   I think I was asking Jochen, and perhaps Peitr and anybody else who thought that animals were not conscious (i.e., not aware of their own awareness)  what basis they had in experience for thinking that..  One offering for such an experience is the absence of language in animals.  Because my cat cannot  describe his experience in words, he cannot be  conscious.  This requires the following syllogism:

Nothing that does not employ a language (or two?) is conscious.

Animals (with ;the possible exception of signing apes) do not employ languages.

Ergo, Animals are not conscious. 

But I was trying to find out the basis for the first premise.  How do we know that there are no non-linguistic beings that are not conscious.  I hope we could rule out the answer,"because they are non-linguistic",  both in its strictly  tautological or merely circular form. 

There is a closely related syllogism which we also need to explore:

All language using beings are conscious.

George Peter Tremblay IV is a language-using being.

George Peter Tremblay IV is conscious. 

Both are valid syllogisms.  But where do the premises come from.

Nick

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