Connectionists: Weird beliefs about consciousness

[Hava Siegelmann]

I agree with Daniel.  I would like to add that before consciousness is well
defined it is meaningless to discuss whether it exists in artificial
systems.  We r scientists and require clarity.

On Tue, Feb 15, 2022 at 2:38 AM Daniel Polani <daniel.polani at gmail.com>
wrote:

> There are quite a few researchers spending a lot of effort trying to
> understand the origins of consciousness and to understand whether and how
> the subjective experience of consciousness can be captured in a descriptive
> and ideally mathematical manner. Tononi, Albantakis, Seth, O'Regan, just to
> name a few; one does not have to agree with them, but this question has
> been given a lot of attention and it's worth having a look before
> discussing it in a vacuum. Also worth reading, amongst other, Dennett and
> Chalmers (just as side remark: some of you may remember the the latter as
> he had actually a nice Evolutionary Algorithm experiment in the 90s showing
> how the Widrow-Hoff rule emerged as "optimal" learning rule in a
> neural-type learning scenario).
>
> The issue about consciousness being an exclusively human ability (as is
> often insinuated) is probably not anymore seriously discussed; it is pretty
> clear that even self-awareness extends significantly beyond humans, not
> even mentioning the subjective experience which does away with the
> requirement of self-reflection. It is certainly far safer to estimate that
> it will be a matter of degree of consciousness in the animal kingdom than
> to claim that it is either present or not. It seems that even our
> understanding of elementary experiences must be redefined as e.g. lobsters
> actually may feel pain.
>
> Thus we should be careful making sweeping statements about the presence of
> consciousness in the biological realm. It is indeed a very interesting
> question to understand to which extent (if at all) an artificial system can
> experience that, too; what if the artificial system is a specifically
> designed, but growing biological neuron culture on an agar plate? If the
> response is yes for the latter, but no for the former, what is the core
> difference? Is it the recurrence that matters? The embodiment? Some aspect
> of its biological makeup? Something else?
>
> I do not think we have good answers for this at this stage, but only some
> vague hints.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 4:22 PM Iam Palatnik <iam.palat at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> A somewhat related question, just out of curiosity.
>>
>> Imagine the following:
>>
>> - An automatic solar panel that tracks the position of the sun.
>> - A group of single celled microbes with phototaxis that follow the
>> sunlight.
>> - A jellyfish (animal without a brain) that follows/avoids the sunlight.
>> - A cockroach (animal with a brain) that avoids the sunlight.
>> - A drone with onboard AI that flies to regions of more intense sunlight
>> to recharge its batteries.
>> - A human that dislikes sunlight and actively avoids it.
>>
>> Can any of these, beside the human, be said to be aware or conscious of
>> the sunlight, and why?
>> What is most relevant? Being a biological life form, having a brain,
>> being able to make decisions based on the environment? Being taxonomically
>> close to humans?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 12:06 PM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Also true: Many AI researchers are very unclear about what consciousness
>>> is and also very sure that ELIZA doesn’t have it.
>>>
>>> Neither ELIZA nor GPT-3 have
>>> - anything remotely related to embodiment
>>> - any capacity to reflect upon themselves
>>>
>>> Hypothesis: neither keyword matching nor tensor manipulation, even at
>>> scale, suffice in themselves to qualify for consciousness.
>>>
>>> - Gary
>>>
>>> > On Feb 14, 2022, at 00:24, Geoffrey Hinton <geoffrey.hinton at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>> >
>>> > Many AI researchers are very unclear about what consciousness is and
>>> also very sure that GPT-3 doesn’t have it. It’s a strange combination.
>>> >
>>> >
>>>
>>>
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