May 19, 2023 04:02 PM
https://nautil.us/is-consciousness-more-...4463870784
EXCERPTS: I caught up recently with Anil Seth to discuss his work on consciousness, AI, and the worrying intersection of his pair of passions—the possibility of creating conscious AI, machines that not only think but also feel. We discuss why consciousness likely isn’t reducible to brain algorithms, the trouble with AIs designed to seem conscious, why our experience of the world amounts to a “controlled hallucination,” and the evolutionary point of having a mind...
[...] Why do you think that consciousness isn’t some kind of complicated algorithm that neurons implement?
This idea, often called functionalism in philosophy, is a really big assumption to make. Some things in the world, when you simulate them, run an algorithm, you actually get the thing. An algorithm that plays chess, let’s say, is actually playing chess. That’s fine. But there are other things for which an algorithmic simulation is just, and always will be, a simulation. Take a computer simulation of a weather system. We can simulate a weather system in as much detail as we like, but nobody would ever expect it to get wet or windy inside a computer simulation of a hurricane, right? It’s just a simulation. The question is: Is consciousness more like chess, or more like the weather?
The common idea that consciousness is just an algorithm that runs on the wetware of the brain assumes that consciousness is more like chess, and less like the weather. There’s very little reason why this should be the case. It stems from this idea we’re saddled with still—that the brain is a kind of computer and the conscious mind is a program running on the computer of the brain.
But the more you look into the brain, the less like a computer it actually appears to be. In a computer you’ve got a sharp distinction between the substrate, the silicon hardware, and the software that runs on it. That’s why computers are useful. You can have the same computer run a billion different programs. But in the brain, it’s not like that at all. There’s no sharp distinction between the mindware and the wetware. Even a single neuron, every time it fires, changes its connection strength. A single neuron tries to sort of persist over time as well. It’s a very complicated object. Then of course there are chemicals swirling around. It’s just not clear to me that consciousness is something that you can abstract away from the stuff that brains and bodies are made out of, and just implemented in the pristine circuits of some other kind of system.... (MORE - rest of interview)
EXCERPTS: I caught up recently with Anil Seth to discuss his work on consciousness, AI, and the worrying intersection of his pair of passions—the possibility of creating conscious AI, machines that not only think but also feel. We discuss why consciousness likely isn’t reducible to brain algorithms, the trouble with AIs designed to seem conscious, why our experience of the world amounts to a “controlled hallucination,” and the evolutionary point of having a mind...
[...] Why do you think that consciousness isn’t some kind of complicated algorithm that neurons implement?
This idea, often called functionalism in philosophy, is a really big assumption to make. Some things in the world, when you simulate them, run an algorithm, you actually get the thing. An algorithm that plays chess, let’s say, is actually playing chess. That’s fine. But there are other things for which an algorithmic simulation is just, and always will be, a simulation. Take a computer simulation of a weather system. We can simulate a weather system in as much detail as we like, but nobody would ever expect it to get wet or windy inside a computer simulation of a hurricane, right? It’s just a simulation. The question is: Is consciousness more like chess, or more like the weather?
The common idea that consciousness is just an algorithm that runs on the wetware of the brain assumes that consciousness is more like chess, and less like the weather. There’s very little reason why this should be the case. It stems from this idea we’re saddled with still—that the brain is a kind of computer and the conscious mind is a program running on the computer of the brain.
But the more you look into the brain, the less like a computer it actually appears to be. In a computer you’ve got a sharp distinction between the substrate, the silicon hardware, and the software that runs on it. That’s why computers are useful. You can have the same computer run a billion different programs. But in the brain, it’s not like that at all. There’s no sharp distinction between the mindware and the wetware. Even a single neuron, every time it fires, changes its connection strength. A single neuron tries to sort of persist over time as well. It’s a very complicated object. Then of course there are chemicals swirling around. It’s just not clear to me that consciousness is something that you can abstract away from the stuff that brains and bodies are made out of, and just implemented in the pristine circuits of some other kind of system.... (MORE - rest of interview)
