Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

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> For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter.

> requires the ability to sense the physical environment

Aren't those two statements at odds? Your synapses are made of matter, so sensing the physical environment is being done by matter. You are fundamentally matter (AFAIK). To suggest otherwise the only thing that comes to mind is substance dualism.

My position is that we don't know. I know I'm conscious. I assume other humans are simply because they're approximately the same as me and were produced by the same process. The farther you get from humans the less certain I am. Many insects resemble biological automatons if you examine them closely. Certainly single celled organisms don't seem likely to have anything going on.

If you figure that a clod of dirt can't possibly be conscious but a mouse is, what's the relevant physical difference? Electricity? Computers have that. Complexity? Information density? Both of those as well.

What do you think it means to sense?

> Aren't those two statements at odds?

Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.

So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.

> Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it.

Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence?

Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior?

> Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.

So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.

> Aren't you inventing that whole cloth?

I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..."

> So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step ...

I should have said, "The conscious experience (of qualia) is an extra step, and if consciousness is fundamental then that's a kind of substance dualism.

Thanks for pointing these out - I should have proof-read my reply before posting.

You still haven't answered the question. You think ... why? Based on what?

If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior? Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?

If it's not fundamental then what precludes a computer program from exhibiting it?

Sorry for the late reply.

> If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior?

If I understand you correctly, it might not be exerting influence over our behaviour.

By influence, are you referring to free will rather than just the illusion of it? That's precluded by classical physics, and quantum mechanics just adds randomness. You can make a measurement, but there's no evidence you can influence the result you get.

> Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?

Yes.

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