The Nonlinear Library LW - My intellectual journey to (dis)solve the hard problem of consciousness by Charbel-Raphaël
Apr 7, 2024
46:22
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My intellectual journey to (dis)solve the hard problem of consciousness, published by Charbel-Raphaël on April 7, 2024 on LessWrong.
Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool's Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool's Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years.
I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present you with my current position. Theoretically, this should be easy to follow; this post has already been beta-tested.
We'll go through a pre-awakening phase, during which I was unfamiliar with the theory of mind literature, then an awakening to the problem of consciousness, followed by a presentation of some essential elements of the scientific literature on consciousness, and finally, a phase of profound confusion before resolving the problem. The chronology has been slightly adapted for pedagogical purposes.
Why do I think this is important? Because I think more and more people will be confused by this notion as AI progresses, I believe it is necessary to be deconfused by it to have a good model for the future. I think one of the main differences in worldview between LeCun and me is that he is deeply confused about notions like what is true "understanding," what is "situational awareness," and what is "reasoning," and this might be a catastrophic error.
I think the tools I give in this blog post are the same ones that make me less confused about these other important notions.
Theoretically, at the end of the post, you will no longer ask "Is GPT-4 conscious or not?" by frowning your eyebrows.
Oh, and also, there is a solution to meta-ethics in the addendum.
If you're already an Eliminativist, you can skip right to Chapter 7, otherwise, well, you'll have to bear with me for a while.
Chapter 1: Pre-awakening, before stumbling upon the hard problem
In high school, I was a good student; in philosophy class, I was just reciting my knowledge to get good grades. We discovered Freud's framework on the conscious/preconscious/unconscious. At the time, I heard people say that consciousness was mysterious, and I repeated that consciousness was mysterious myself. Still, I hadn't really internalized the difficulty of the problem.
As a good scientist, I was trying to understand the world and had the impression that we could understand everything based on the laws of physics. In particular, I thought that consciousness was simply an emergent phenomenon: in other words, atoms form molecules that form organs, including the brain, and the brain gives rise to various behaviors, and that's what we call consciousness.
Cool, it's not so mysterious!
In the end, it's not that complicated, and I told myself that even if we didn't know all the details of how the brain works, Science would fill in the gaps as we went along.
Unfortunately, I learned that using the word emergent is not a good scientific practice. In particular, the article "The Futility of Emergence" by Yudkowsky convinced me that the word emergence should be avoided most of the time. Using the word emergence doesn't make it possible to say what is conscious and what is not conscious because, in a certain sense, almost everything is emergent.
To say that consciousness is emergent, therefore, doesn't make it possible to say what is or what is not emergent, and thus isn't a very good scientific theory. (Charbel2024 now thinks that using the word 'emergence' to point toward a fuzzy part of the map that tries to link two different phenomena is perfectly Okay).
So we've just seen that I've gradually become con...
Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool's Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool's Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years.
I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present you with my current position. Theoretically, this should be easy to follow; this post has already been beta-tested.
We'll go through a pre-awakening phase, during which I was unfamiliar with the theory of mind literature, then an awakening to the problem of consciousness, followed by a presentation of some essential elements of the scientific literature on consciousness, and finally, a phase of profound confusion before resolving the problem. The chronology has been slightly adapted for pedagogical purposes.
Why do I think this is important? Because I think more and more people will be confused by this notion as AI progresses, I believe it is necessary to be deconfused by it to have a good model for the future. I think one of the main differences in worldview between LeCun and me is that he is deeply confused about notions like what is true "understanding," what is "situational awareness," and what is "reasoning," and this might be a catastrophic error.
I think the tools I give in this blog post are the same ones that make me less confused about these other important notions.
Theoretically, at the end of the post, you will no longer ask "Is GPT-4 conscious or not?" by frowning your eyebrows.
Oh, and also, there is a solution to meta-ethics in the addendum.
If you're already an Eliminativist, you can skip right to Chapter 7, otherwise, well, you'll have to bear with me for a while.
Chapter 1: Pre-awakening, before stumbling upon the hard problem
In high school, I was a good student; in philosophy class, I was just reciting my knowledge to get good grades. We discovered Freud's framework on the conscious/preconscious/unconscious. At the time, I heard people say that consciousness was mysterious, and I repeated that consciousness was mysterious myself. Still, I hadn't really internalized the difficulty of the problem.
As a good scientist, I was trying to understand the world and had the impression that we could understand everything based on the laws of physics. In particular, I thought that consciousness was simply an emergent phenomenon: in other words, atoms form molecules that form organs, including the brain, and the brain gives rise to various behaviors, and that's what we call consciousness.
Cool, it's not so mysterious!
In the end, it's not that complicated, and I told myself that even if we didn't know all the details of how the brain works, Science would fill in the gaps as we went along.
Unfortunately, I learned that using the word emergent is not a good scientific practice. In particular, the article "The Futility of Emergence" by Yudkowsky convinced me that the word emergence should be avoided most of the time. Using the word emergence doesn't make it possible to say what is conscious and what is not conscious because, in a certain sense, almost everything is emergent.
To say that consciousness is emergent, therefore, doesn't make it possible to say what is or what is not emergent, and thus isn't a very good scientific theory. (Charbel2024 now thinks that using the word 'emergence' to point toward a fuzzy part of the map that tries to link two different phenomena is perfectly Okay).
So we've just seen that I've gradually become con...