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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36042 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests, then there is no reason they shouldn't happen in large language models.

We may not necessarily understand why or how, but clearly that doesn't stop them.

That statement makes no logical sense. You might as well say there’s no reason why qualia and consciousness are a thing the brain does there’s no reason they shouldn’t happen in a calculator.

Sure, if you design a calculator to convincingly imitate human outputs, I'll say the same thing about it.

If qualia and consciousness are a thing that the brain does, which all available evidence suggests

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

We may not necessarily understand why or how

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

And pray tell, what evidence would that be?

Well, if I hit somebody on the head it tends to impact their conscious processing. Similarly, if I jam an electrode in somebody's visual nerve it tends to have a pretty direct effect on their qualia. And the various other kinds of brain damage to specific regions with repeatable effects on particular kinds of mental operations.

Then you don't know if it's happening or not. You're just guessing.

Even before we understood gravity we saw that objects fell. Knowing that something is happening is generally easier than knowing how, and usually predates it.

The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.

Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.

No, there's nothing odd about brain damage changing aspects of personality in the soul-radio model.

If I mess around with a radio, add in an extra subwoofer, change the EQ settings etc to make it sound completely different when it gets played, I haven't actually changed anything about the signal. If you've read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (great read, not so sure it is correct), Jaynes actually gives a really good explanation for what consciousness actually does - and what it does is substantially less than most people actually believe... but that explanation is an entire chapter so I won't post it here.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.

If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal.

What? I cannot understand the point you're making here. If I turn the volume up or down on a set of speakers, I do not in any way begin to suspect that the speakers are the source of the audio signal rather than receiving it. Similarly, I've had psychedelic trips that caused me to behave in extremely odd ways compared to normal - but there was still a solid continuity of consciousness the entire way through. The signal remained constant despite the radio acting in bizarre ways, and when that temporary shift was over the signal returned to normal so to speak.

As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation

That is most definitely not how I interpreted Jaynes' work on consciousness. Could you please provide a bit more elaboration on what you think his model of it actually is?

Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.

I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,

I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.

But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.

Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it.

I didn't permanently damage myself with them but I have consumed those substances and never experienced anything that would be inconsistent with that model.

But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.

Yes, but there was a specific reason I brought up specific parts of Jaynes' work and if you haven't actually read the book then you won't understand the relevance to it - I said that I was talking about his work in the earlier chapters establishing exactly what consciousness is, rather than the central thesis of his work. I don't think we're allowed to just post entire chapters of copyrighted books in here, so I'll post a quick excerpt that sums up some of the points I was trying to make.

Let us review where we are, for we have just found our way through an enormous amount of material which may have seemed more perplexing than clarifying. We have been brought to the conclusion that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not to be confused with reactivity. It is not involved in hosts of perceptual phenomena. It is not involved in the performance of skills and often hinders their execution. It need not be involved in speaking, writing, listening, or reading. It does not copy down experience, as most people think. Consciousness is not at all involved in signal learning, and need not be involved in the learning of skills or solutions, which can go on without any consciousness whatever. It is not necessary for making judgments or in simple thinking. It is not the seat of reason, and indeed some of the most difficult instances of creative reasoning go on without any attending consciousness.

As for the hard problem of consciousness, I think the correct answer is that it falls on the other side of the line dividing science and religion/spirituality. My tradition has an actual answer to the hard problem that I find satisfying and consistent with my experience of reality, but I don't expect that to be convincing to anyone else (though if I had to categorise it as one of the existing responses it would fall under panpsychism).

I was expecting this to be the obvious answer and I pondered pre-addressing it because it's such a common claim, but the problem with the "altering the brain alters experience therefore the brain is the seat of experience" is that it's not the only thing that does that. Queue the weird syndromes that go with losing limbs or all the new stuff that we've recently learned about the gastrointestinal system heavily influencing mood, or even merely all that goes with the rest of the nervous system.

I think there is a much better argument for the body as a whole being the seat of experience.

Now clearly some pretty important stuff happens in the brain, but like you say, it's mysterious and we don't really know what the deal is.

I think the soul-radio model can actually explain all this in ways that are about as parsimonious overall as the meat-computer model (they both have different massive problems really). But since the particular phenomenon of consciousness that we're talking about here is very much unexplained, there's really no way to tell which one is right, and it's likely neither are in the final analysis.

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