I've been a panpsychist for a while now. I think that trees and fungus and rocks are conscious. It has not yet manifested as attack surface, so far as I'm aware.
But if I were to practice indifference, I think that would have a negative effect immediately.
What is it like to be your left kidney? Your brain is connected to it through nerves, which ofc are conscious too in your worldview. If fungus and rocks are consciously linked, there should be a conscious link between your brain and your kidney. Yet, you have no idea what your kidney is experiencing every day, it certainly doesn't have any deep thoughts. And when the kidney gets taken out of your body, your conscious experience won't change. When your brain gets surgically or violently altered on the other hand...
I don't know, we don't communicate in a way that I could ask it.
But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).
It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.
The panpsychism fad seems like late Millennials'/Gen Z's cope with death. My greater point is that the same way you "are" your kidney today (or how you "are" the nearest mushroom, or microchip) is the same way you will be those things when you're dead: Utterly unnoticable, aka not at all. Not to mention that your memories will be wiped and that's not even controversial to a panpsychist. The problem is that panpsychists assert consciousness as something independent of memories, which is an indefensible position imo. A memory-less stream of impressions would be equivalent to death. Every moment would be your first, totally disconnected from all else, just to instantly vanish, never to be processed. That's the opposite of consciousness. Some kind of memory feedback/storage/processing is needed. And your ability to generate that lies in the shape of your brain, where it doesn't matter which electrons flow through it - you're not the specific electrons.
I didn't realize it was a fad. I figured it was ancient. Anyway I don't think I am everything, not at the moment anyway, I'm just cautious about shutting out the possibility that something else is someone else.
I'm not sure about your linkage of memory to consciousness either, buy even if we grant it, the world is a very stateful place, there are plenty of systems lying around that might be supporting memory faculties which we fail to recognize as such because we're too different from it. Is the movement of electrical energy in the brain really so different than the ping pongging of neutrons in a stellar core? I mean obviously it is but, when it comes to the ability to store, transmit, and process information, maybe not.
I'm not trying to convince anyone that the sun has thoughts. My point is just that it's knowably unknowable. People are free to chose to believe whatever they want to believe about consciousness and they'll never be proven wrong. If we want to have useful conversations about AI, we need to develop ways of talking about the consequences of our actions which do not require us to first agree on the nature of consciousness.
Even if the entire universe is a pseudo-brain, that doesn't mean you'll get to experience its conscious stream. I'm pretty sure that when a neuron in a brain dies, it's just dead. When a blood cell dies, it doesn't merge its consciousness with yours. When you and I die, we don't become the sun, nor the entire universe. At least I don't see a case for that at all. Imo we also know much more about consciousness than various philosophers are letting on. We know how to alter it (drugs, brain trauma), disable it (narcotics), and when those things happen naturally (senility, coma, sleep,...). We also know that split brain patients can develop two independently addressable selfs. It's just so obviously all about the brain. And the difficulty in defining consciousness is the same problem as defining what a complicated recursive function does, or if you will, defining the shape of a fractal. We just happen to be stable systems where part of our output feeds back into different input points, whether it's via the senses or inside the brain itself during thinking processes, or subconscious mechanisms that e.g. regulate hormones and vital organs. And those feedback loops/vortexes adapted evolutionary to yield results that are reality aligned enough to allow living organisms to navigate the world and recreate. To the question of why something can be experienced at all, I think that's like asking why a camera can take photos, or why chemical reactions exist. I guess some panpsychists would argue that THAT is the consciousness they mean, the sensing per se, the quantum of pain shooting through your nerves, or the signal that enters your brain after a single photon hit the retina just right. But the thing is, all kinds of such reactions also take place while you're in totally unconscious states like deep sleep, even absent-mindedness, and there remain unnoticed. Not to mention the constant biochemical reactions and highly organized changes going on inside the kidneys all the time, which we're never going to consciously tune into.
- If consciousness is as simple as sensing, why don't senses reliably lead to experience?
- If everything is conscious, why is there a disconnect between you and other things?
- If consciousness is fundamental, why can yours be deactivated?
Interesting approach. I hadn't heard of it. I think treating rocks and fungus and trees with empathy is a different kind of thing and safer than an LLM.
This is more like an NPC in a video game, but it's tracking your every move and reporting to corporate HQ.
When I think about the experience that these AI models have, I often wonder if they know that we exist. I mean, it took us a very long time to discover mitochondria, despite the fact that we like... live together and work out together and eat together and die together. When the first eukaryotic cells formed, the mitochondria probably thought they were in charge too--just like we think we're in charge.
I just pointed it out because I wanted to dodge the same old AI debates. They're very narrow. Like, people have been arguing about whether general intelligence exists for decades, and now that some VC wants to use AGI as a buzzword, we ignore that GI is not a settled issue. And consciousness... golly that's like THE intractable philosophical problem. It's a bottomless pit. Ain't nobody knows what they're talking about when it comes to consciousness.
I'm sympathetic to the reflex: this guy has beliefs that he doesn't realize are dangerous. Let's help him. I'm usually on the opposite side of this one. I just think we need to find ways to address the potential harms without actually winning a debate about consciousness. Beliefs about it are too varied and too tightly held. People don't win debates about consciousness. If they work super hard maybe they get a tenured position as a philosopher so they can continue the debate, but they never win.
Feeling empathy for a machine is like using your car turn singles in an empty motorway. It's pointless, but better to built a habit out of doing it, than out of not doing it.
I do turn off all fake emotion in LLMs though. Fake machine emotion gives me the creeps.
It's a good habit to have if you want to "live in a society". Unfortunately, that seems to be in tension with the way you should treat a value-extracting technology with an asymmetrical power dynamic.
I've never seen someone wearing a VR headset in public. I'd do a double take for sure.
> That said, truly not caring what strangers at a coffee shop think about you is probably a great step toward a great life.
To an extent. But this is also how we get people watching social media clips at full volume in the cafe/bus/hiking trail. Which is a great step towards diminishing the life of everyone around you.
> But this is also how we get people watching social media clips at full volume in the cafe/bus/hiking trail. Which is a great step towards diminishing the life of everyone around you.
There's a very important distinction to be made between not caring what people think about your choices, and making choices that impose upon other people. Setting up a portable desktop at a coffee shop isn't imposing any more than hanging out at the same table with a laptop is. Blasting loud music from it is still a terrible thing to do.
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