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5min chapter
Is There Really a Hard Problem of Consciousness? - Dr. Joscha Bach, Artificial Intelligence Researcher
The DemystifySci Podcast
The Complexity of the Utility Function
When you find something meaningful, it means that you can also describe it. So for instance, if your meaning is to serve God, it mean that you are projecting some higher level agent in a similar way as a cell as part of an organism. That creates meaning that is more important than your individual existence. And so the reason that the robot isn't conscious is because the robot has such a narrow scope of options available to it that it's too simple. The minute that you create it is consciousness is the feeling of what it's like. This is what you need to produce. But hold on. Say I don't buy the idea that your uncertainty about whether you're going to reproduce is
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Episode notes
Speaker 1
But it might
Speaker 3
not be a higher utility, it might actually be a terrible idea to go and do MMA if you're the best soccer player in the world. But you just want to do it because you love MMA. Oh,
Speaker 2
that's a great point. Humans don't perform along these sorts of utility functions. Somebody can do something that doesn't maximize utility. They do it all the time. I think
Speaker 1
that is complicated philosophical decision. It's usually a reason that you find something more meaningful and important to do something when you do it. Or it's a compilation which means you realize you have a long game, but you are unable to play it because that mechanism in your brain is overriding it and you're forced to follow an impulse to play a short game. But when you find something meaningful, it means that you can also describe it. Or somebody could describe it with the utility function. So for instance, if your meaning is to serve God, it means that you are projecting some higher level agent that you're part of in a similar way as a cell as part of an organism. And you're serving that transcendental agency. And that creates meaning that is more important than your individual existence because you don't conceptualize yourself as the top root node of the universe, but just as a cell that is serving some larger organism. And you can try to figure out the relevance of that with respect to getting a sandwich instead. So suddenly getting a sandwich is instrumental to serving this higher meaning to some degree.
Speaker 2
I think that we've kind of stumbled onto something important here, which is that the complexity of the utility function and the ability to have multiple competing short term and long term goals. And this freedom of space in which to decide the way in which you will chain those actions together in order to achieve a goal that you have decided as utilitarian is the thing that you would then probably call consciousness. And so the reason that the robot isn't conscious is because the robot has such a narrow scope of options available to it that it's too simple.
Speaker 1
The minute that you create it is consciousness is the feeling of what it's like. This is what you need to produce. So just what is the reason complexity is not producing a feeling.
Speaker 2
But hold on. So if you're saying that everything that a human does can be reduced to a utility function, if you have a sufficiently complex understanding of their internal landscape, then what feelings are is they are the experience of the utility function. The utility function causes some kind of chemical change inside of you that can be modulated either with neurotransmitters. It can be modulated with the potassium sodium balance at the membranes. It can be modulated by the harmonics of your brainwaves. And when you're doing that thing, you have this full body electrochemical state that is the experience. It is the experience lives inside of the body. And so your feeling of a decision that you make is the result of everything that happens inside of your body as you are making the decision. That's what feeling is. It's the sum total of the whole electrochemical state of the entire body as it does something.
Speaker 3
With respect to the rest of the universe.
Speaker 2
I would. Yeah.
Speaker 1
It's very poetic, but it's not convincing to me because it's still just clockwork and would not explain why there is an agent that experiences itself experiencing something.
Speaker 2
Well, because the agent has to be the agent has to be able to say, I'm experiencing this and this is good and I will keep experiencing it because the agent's job is to make sure that the internal state is such that it can reproduce. That's the agent's job. The agent's job is that life is a state of matter that aims towards complexity. And your job is the agent is to make sure that this crystalline structure of life survives for long enough to make more of itself. And if you fuck that up by feeling bad all the time, you're not going to make that goal. And if you don't make that goal, you've failed at your mission. And so the feeling is the agent who's responsible for enacting the goal, checking in to be like, Hey, are we on the right track?
Speaker 1
I don't buy the idea that your uncertainty about whether you're going to reproduce is reflecting uncertainty about whether your conscious or not.
Speaker 2
Hold on. Say it again.
Speaker 1
You just connected it to reproduction. And at the beginning of our conversation, you did mention uncertainty about whether you intend to reproduce. This does not reflect uncertainty about your consciousness, right? Your consciousness is completely uncorrelated to this.
Speaker 2
No,
Speaker 3
but your feelings are correlated. But my feelings
Speaker 1
are some of them. Some of them are, but not the ability to feel it itself. The ability to feel itself has to be the result of some course or process that a lot of people find it confusing to get at because it is not apparent how a physical system would feel. It seems to me that feeling is a property that you can only dream. And what we have to explain is how a physical system is able to produce dreams.
Speaker 2
I think that the question of how a physical system can produce dreams is a really interesting question, but it might be a good place for us to pause because we've been
Speaker 3
going.
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