Iāll believe it when it happens. Thereās a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. Thatās not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they donāt know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
Iām not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We donāt need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what Iāve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real flyās brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, youāve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I donāt like it, but itās what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. Itās a useful lie.
Discworldās Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. āIām not stupid. Youāre saying humans needā¦Ā fantasiesĀ to make life bearable.ā
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
āTooth fairies? Hogfathers? Littleāā
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THEĀ LITTLEĀ LIES.
āSo we can believe the big ones?ā
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
āTheyāre not the same at all!ā
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THENĀ SHOWĀ ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YETāDeath waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOMEā¦SOMEĀ RIGHTNESSĀ IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
āYes, but people haveĀ gotĀ to believe that, or whatās theĀ pointāā
Except itās not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, itās amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since thatās the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldnāt have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and itās purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real flyās brain and a virtualized one.
Thatās not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you arenāt simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a flyās behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, āthatās the right one. Copy
It.ā So, your āfly simulationsā are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly.
Thatās just not true. Consider āWhat The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.ā Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information ā as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think youāve discovered āneurons work similarly across species,ā which is like saying āthing does same thing when used in other location.ā This doesnāt tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesnāt tell you what itās like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesnāt tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over timeā¦ At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. Thatās without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I canāt believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a humanās brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, youād be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
āIf you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, youād be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.ā
Seems to me you think thereās something special about humans, I donāt believe thereās any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesnāt mean itās impossible to simulate.
Thereās no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
Seems to me you think thereās something special about humans, I donāt believe thereās any proof to that.
I donāt, though. I get where youāre coming from, because I too often point out other peopleās hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I donāt subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.
that doesnāt mean itās impossible to simulate.
I think it does. You arenāt going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how youād simulate stock exchanges.
The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best ā no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but thatās just not the same thing. It wouldnāt work the same way, wouldnāt feel the same, and you definitely wouldnāt have āfigured out consciousnessā just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldnāt be sentient. Thatās obvious to me.
Thereās no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
Yeah, and Iām really not arguing for a soul. Iām arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you havenāt achieved anything really remarkable ā except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. Thatās it.
If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. Thatās not arguing for a soul. Thatās saying, pinch yourself ā you are awake and you are not a robot.
At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?
Never.
Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.
You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. Youāre still doing us a disservice if you call it human. Itās more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.
But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be āaliveā is arguable. Iād just call it a neat toy.
I donāt understand why you think itād be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldnāt we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
Think about hearing aides or other similar āenhancementsā wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.
I would agree it wouldnāt be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if theyāre not literally humans.
I donāt understand why you think itād be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldnāt we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
The difference is having a phenomenological experience versus data processing. A phenomenological experience actually feels like something. We have literally no reason to believe phenomenology isnāt deeply dependent on the body. In fact, we probably have more evidence that it does depend on the body. Science doesnāt do a good job at justifying phenomenology thoughā¦ and you arenāt going to conveniently recreate phenomenology using brute force via a technique that hinges itself on conveniently ignoring subjective information such as how things feel.
If your simulation has the āsame pathwaysā to smell, congratulationsāyou just remade biological life. You made the nose, brain, and the connections between the two. If you didnāt do that, then you made a fancy copy cat machine. It doesnāt actually smell, not anymore than ChatGPT actually thinks.
Maybe you can give it a device that lets it convert air-born chemical signals into information it can act on. Thatās a feature of intelligence thoughā¦ not really a phenomenologically active experience. If you asked this intelligence machine ācan you smell like I do?ā I imagine it might respond, āno. I can process chemical information much like you do, but my ability to do so is based on data whereas yours is based on feeling or intuition.ā
You literally cant experience the world like a computer wouldāwithout personal and phenomenal subjectivity. Equally so, a computer cant experience the world like you would. Even simulated, thatās not the same thing as feeling something.
Honestly, ā¦ Iām not saying this machine wouldnāt have applications. It very well may be like a supercharged LLM, for all I know. Itās just not human, no more than a Birch can ever be a Redwood.
I donāt understand why you think itād be out of the question for it to have phenomenological experiences
Addressing that more specifically, I think itās because I have yet to see a single scientific development in the wake of understanding the cause and nature of phenomenology. Itās ignored, rightfully so. Science doesnāt need to concern itself with phenomenology, at least hasnāt so far.
People have similarly argued that consciousness āarisesā when an information machine is sufficiently complex. This claim of weak emergence seems ignorant to me; āariseā is doing a lot of magic handwaving. Iād argue itās the same for phenomenology ā youāre not going to stumble upon how to make a machine feel just by brute forcing more complexity.
Also, we should not be so naĆÆve to think that understanding phenomenology is unnecessary for our goals [only because itās not in the scientific spotlight]. Phenomenology is central to our experience and every other complex life forms experience (given a CNS).
Slime mold is intelligent, bear in mind. No nervous system, Iām doubtful it āfeelsā anything, but itās intelligent. Imagine that you reprogrammed some slime mold to process information such that its external behavior perfectly resembled a human. It morphed into a humanoid shape, did human thingsā¦ but youād still say itās not human. Itās all the intelligence, none of the humanity.
Would you consider my humanoid slime mold a āperson?ā Youāre free to, but I think itās arguable. My dog really connects with meā¦ I donāt believe my slime mold would ever really connect with me.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesnāt reach classical mechanics.
Iāll believe it when it happens. Thereās a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. Thatās not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they donāt know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
Iām not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We donāt need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what Iāve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real flyās brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, youāve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I donāt like it, but itās what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. Itās a useful lie.
Discworldās Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. āIām not stupid. Youāre saying humans needā¦Ā fantasiesĀ to make life bearable.ā
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
āTooth fairies? Hogfathers? Littleāā
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THEĀ LITTLEĀ LIES.
āSo we can believe the big ones?ā
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
āTheyāre not the same at all!ā
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THENĀ SHOWĀ ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YETāDeath waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOMEā¦SOMEĀ RIGHTNESSĀ IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
āYes, but people haveĀ gotĀ to believe that, or whatās theĀ pointāā
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Except itās not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, itās amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since thatās the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldnāt have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and itās purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
Thatās not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you arenāt simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a flyās behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, āthatās the right one. Copy It.ā So, your āfly simulationsā are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
Thatās just not true. Consider āWhat The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.ā Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information ā as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think youāve discovered āneurons work similarly across species,ā which is like saying āthing does same thing when used in other location.ā This doesnāt tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesnāt tell you what itās like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesnāt tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over timeā¦ At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. Thatās without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I canāt believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a humanās brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, youād be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
āIf you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, youād be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.ā
Seems to me you think thereās something special about humans, I donāt believe thereās any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesnāt mean itās impossible to simulate.
Thereās no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
I donāt, though. I get where youāre coming from, because I too often point out other peopleās hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I donāt subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.
I think it does. You arenāt going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how youād simulate stock exchanges.
The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best ā no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but thatās just not the same thing. It wouldnāt work the same way, wouldnāt feel the same, and you definitely wouldnāt have āfigured out consciousnessā just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldnāt be sentient. Thatās obvious to me.
Yeah, and Iām really not arguing for a soul. Iām arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you havenāt achieved anything really remarkable ā except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. Thatās it.
If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. Thatās not arguing for a soul. Thatās saying, pinch yourself ā you are awake and you are not a robot.
At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?
I still think youāre conflating the aspect of life we experience as somehow separate from the procedure our brain takes to present that to you.
Never.
Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.
You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. Youāre still doing us a disservice if you call it human. Itās more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.
But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be āaliveā is arguable. Iād just call it a neat toy.
I donāt understand why you think itād be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldnāt we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
Think about hearing aides or other similar āenhancementsā wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.
I would agree it wouldnāt be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if theyāre not literally humans.
The difference is having a phenomenological experience versus data processing. A phenomenological experience actually feels like something. We have literally no reason to believe phenomenology isnāt deeply dependent on the body. In fact, we probably have more evidence that it does depend on the body. Science doesnāt do a good job at justifying phenomenology thoughā¦ and you arenāt going to conveniently recreate phenomenology using brute force via a technique that hinges itself on conveniently ignoring subjective information such as how things feel.
If your simulation has the āsame pathwaysā to smell, congratulationsāyou just remade biological life. You made the nose, brain, and the connections between the two. If you didnāt do that, then you made a fancy copy cat machine. It doesnāt actually smell, not anymore than ChatGPT actually thinks.
Maybe you can give it a device that lets it convert air-born chemical signals into information it can act on. Thatās a feature of intelligence thoughā¦ not really a phenomenologically active experience. If you asked this intelligence machine ācan you smell like I do?ā I imagine it might respond, āno. I can process chemical information much like you do, but my ability to do so is based on data whereas yours is based on feeling or intuition.ā
You literally cant experience the world like a computer wouldāwithout personal and phenomenal subjectivity. Equally so, a computer cant experience the world like you would. Even simulated, thatās not the same thing as feeling something.
Honestly, ā¦ Iām not saying this machine wouldnāt have applications. It very well may be like a supercharged LLM, for all I know. Itās just not human, no more than a Birch can ever be a Redwood.
Addressing that more specifically, I think itās because I have yet to see a single scientific development in the wake of understanding the cause and nature of phenomenology. Itās ignored, rightfully so. Science doesnāt need to concern itself with phenomenology, at least hasnāt so far.
People have similarly argued that consciousness āarisesā when an information machine is sufficiently complex. This claim of weak emergence seems ignorant to me; āariseā is doing a lot of magic handwaving. Iād argue itās the same for phenomenology ā youāre not going to stumble upon how to make a machine feel just by brute forcing more complexity.
Also, we should not be so naĆÆve to think that understanding phenomenology is unnecessary for our goals [only because itās not in the scientific spotlight]. Phenomenology is central to our experience and every other complex life forms experience (given a CNS).
Slime mold is intelligent, bear in mind. No nervous system, Iām doubtful it āfeelsā anything, but itās intelligent. Imagine that you reprogrammed some slime mold to process information such that its external behavior perfectly resembled a human. It morphed into a humanoid shape, did human thingsā¦ but youād still say itās not human. Itās all the intelligence, none of the humanity.
Would you consider my humanoid slime mold a āperson?ā Youāre free to, but I think itās arguable. My dog really connects with meā¦ I donāt believe my slime mold would ever really connect with me.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesnāt reach classical mechanics.