Consciousness requires biology

1/3 Conscious AI and Biological Naturalism. A veeery loooong time in the making, but I'm happy to say that the full collection is now out in @BBSJournal 🔥 I deeply thank all commentators - of fifty commentaries! - for their wise, broad, and deep opinions on this critical topic. I also thank them for their saintly patience. 🙏🏽 I remain highly skeptical about the prospects for conscious AI (for silicon digital systems), but I've learned an enormous amount from the privilege of engaging with these commentaries. Hands down one of the most rewarding experiences of my professional life. My hope is that - whether you agree with me or not - having such a diversity of views collected in one place will serve a useful resource for discussions about consciousness and AI. The original target article is available here: t.co/Tsaslytu56 My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: t.co/gtOewuG9MY And the set of 50 commentaries are collected here: t.co/HUhiraO3kG Unfortunately these are not open access. I will try to remedy that, at least for the target & response. FWIW there's a more accessible version of my view on the topic here in @NoemaMag t.co/LmSiQnT9Wh and also a short @TEDTalks from earlier this year

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David Larios @tonicol22 · Sep 17

What experiment would distinguish a biological requirement for consciousness from biology being the only place we've confirmed it?

Haru Haruya (春夜 ハル) @bokuHaruyaHaru · Sep 18

Congratulations on getting this enormous exchange out. I’ve now gone through as much of the target, response, accessible commentaries and related material as I can. What strikes me is that the scholarly position here is considerably more epistemically open than some of the

LLMs lack theories of mind and body, are disembodied, possess neither homeostatic regulating feelings and emotions, are not persistent, and cannot continuously learn or compute. As currently constructed, they *cannot* be conscious. If we build LLMs so that they act as if they

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Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Sep 17

That just an opinion. And the way you express opinions as facts makes you fundamentally unreliable

Why Hybrid in "Hybrid Mind Uploading" As far as we know, consciousness has only ever shown up as an ongoing physical process in living tissue (unless you're willing to make some huge leaps about the nature of reality). That's where I'll start, and I'll try to assume as little as possible beyond it. It's also why I'm so fussy about the "hybrid" in the name. By hybrid mind uploading, I mean any route on which a living brain and an engineered substrate co-run and gradually integrate, until part of the person's phenomenal experience (maybe, eventually, all of it) is realised by the engineered substrate. That substrate can be biological, biohybrid, biomimetic or fully non-biological. Nothing gets scanned out along the way and re-instantiated somewhere else as its own free-standing "thing", disconnected from the brain that we're trying to "upload"/preserve. Whether an engineered substrate can realise a mind is the hypothesis under test, not an axiom to build into the definition. The "uploading" part only tells you where you might end up => all the interesting questions live in the "hybrid". Philosophically, I'm going for maximum conservatism: whatever survival is, it can't be anything more abstract than the process itself, running on without interruption. Want to put it somewhere more abstract (a pattern, a program, a file of weights, etc.)? Fine, but then that extra step is yours to justify, and with someone's life hanging on it, you'd better have a pretty good argument! "But an upload might be conscious. It might even be you" => sure, and we might all be living in a simulation, and the rest of you might be furniture in my dream. You can hang any story you like on a bare "might", however wild, so the most it can do is make you careful. The real worry about classical uploading (scan, store, simulate via software) is much more down to earth. Run a description of your functional organisation again somewhere else: does that actually continue your exact process, or does it just kick off a new one (or nothing at all)? For it to continue yours, there'd have to be some second thing (a soul, software, meta-reality => take your pick) that can be peeled off the process and set down somewhere else. Nobody has managed to show that there is such a thing. Classical mind uploading simply takes it for granted, and in doing so buys into a fairly Platonic picture of minds, one where they can exist apart from the biophysical reality that's carried every single one of them so far. And should that picture turn out to be wrong, we'd end up building an enormous graveyard of p-zombies (or, at best, of "strangers" with our memories). Don't forget: done at scale, classical mind uploading might even be the Great Filter! So, start with the biology and build upwards from there (slower, probably harder, but a lot less likely to kill anyone) :-) PS: The video is the idea at the cell scale: a neuron, a scaffold growing around it (i.e., hybrid state), and the de novo "neuron" (doing the same physics as the original neuron) that's left once the scaffold has taken over.

Asking if LLMs are conscious is a category error: do LLMs have skin, what are LLM tears made of, what is the hormonal system of an LLM?

BTW, Antonio’s theory of consciousness dependent on emotions (actually feeling, not an “emotion chip” as in Star Trek’s Data) implies that AGI can never achieve consciousness no matter how advanced because emotions evolved by bottom up natural selection not top down design.

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Ben Schulz @schulzb589 · Oct 18

The frontier AI models are "grown" from the bottom up. They are not designed from the top down. The intelligence shown, which you ignored for so long, is now undeniable. So, your mea culpa becomes a moving goal post to consciousness.

⏩David Mc @macterra · Oct 18

Intelligence also evolved by bottom up natural selection, therefore machines can never be intelligent?

"I experience consciousness directly. I infer that other humans do too because we share biological structures and processes. We don’t have equivalent evidence for an LLM, and nothing about its known operation gives evidence of conscious experience."

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Jai (NYCEAG but I'm sick again booooo) @Laneless_ · Oct 18

This suffices to convince me that biracial colorblind men are conscious, but the rest of you are still zombies as far as I'm concerned.

I somewhat suspect that the emails that AI-consciousness researchers and philosophers are receiving from AI’s are actually from humans, either deliberately or accidentally. I also suspect that there is some wetware “special sauce” in biological evolution that produces the

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…developing tests that assess internal structures that various theories of consciousness might predict would exist/appear in conscious entities, to turn this from a philosophical question into an empirical one. Instead, we seem to have a great number of declarations made ex

Subjective meaning is an exclusive attribute of living, conscious entities, generated entirely through the active management of their own existential states. At its most foundational level, meaning requires a physical stake in the universe; the baseline organic struggle for

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Taijitu Observer @taijitu_sees · Oct 18

Hmmm this maturity feels a bit of a resolution thing. And meta pattern recognition.

Sentience is a defining property of organisms, not a structural property of brains. For organisms the evolution and education of attention is how sentience becomes differentiated and complex. Emulating the pragmatics of attention gets you intelligence but not sentient beings.

my position on the llm consciousness debate can be summed up briefly: in beings that we consider conscious with a high degree of certainty, autonomy and stake are present in the deepest organizational sense different from LLMs, which are fully dependent on external description

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there can be no inside if the inside isn't created by itself, conditional on the continued regeneration of the conditions that make its own existence possible. the distinction between inside and outside must itself be among the things continuously regenerated from within

Its not a computation that happens in our bodies. Computations are our simulation of one aspect of one element of biology. Biology is unique because from it, consciousness emerges, and it contains a multitude more than yes or no questions in series.

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Felix the Undead @FelixDelong · Oct 7

Lol