I posit that the human mind is made up of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds/thousands “smaller agents” that work together to create consciousness as an emergent property of the whole, which makes it impossible to isolate and say “this, THIS right here IS concsciousness”.
That does not mean each of those has their own personality, per sé.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat is a fantastic exploration of this idea, focusing on people who have lost specific parts of their brains due to tumors or strokes. The human mind is very much like a complex modern website- take Amazon for example, if everything is working, it’s the website where you buy stuff, but if certain specific systems are offline, you lose specific features, like your order history, or your cart, or your recommended products, etc… Missing one or two of of those components diminishes the site somewhat, but it’s still more or less Amazon. Your brain works the same way!
And the underlying animal is still there too. It’s fully in control at birth, and gets drowned out as we mature (for some people, less than others).
Small children are little more than animals, which is why they’re so unreasonable.
It’s my belief that the reason the written word or things like clocks are usually unreadable in dreams, is because the animal is both illiterate and innumerate. Dreams are the animals understanding of our waking experience. It knows these patterns are important and how they relate to other things, but it has no fucking idea what any of it actually means.
I do find myself reading and writing words in dreams quite a lot.
I’ve never seen a clock though, not as far as I can remember.
But sometimes I can even remember signs with street names or banners / short paragraphs.
Dynamic lighting sadly doesn’t work tho. Light switches do nothing. For example if I turn on the lights in my bathroom in a dream, I can even hear the bathroom fan turn on, but the room remains dark.
Ive heard thst this is apparently quite common though.
I posit this as well. I’m made up of at least 5 or 6 different versions of me with different biases and personalities. There’s a negative narcissistic version, there’s a happy go lucky version, a pragmatic version, a nihilist with a dark sense of humour, a soppy emotional one, and others and they all fight constantly to have their say. I thought everyone was like this 🤪
You would like Global Workspace Theory, basically says your consciousness is the result of components of the brain broadcasting their information to the whole.
I also like Integrated Information Theory which measures the conscious experience of a system by how integrated it is, which means that you can’t reduce the system to the sum of it’s parts without losing the emergent properties.
Yeah, and come to think of it, I bet you that each one has its own characteristics. Perhaps they may be full blown individuals themeselves from another time and place, and I too will one day join them…
No, because LLMs are just a mathematical blender with ONE goal in mind: construct a good sentence. They have no thoughts, they have no corrective motion, they just spit out sentences.
You MIGHT get to passing a Turing test with enough feedback tied in, but then the “conciousness” is specifically coming from the systemic complexity at that point and still very much not the LLMs.
That can’t be because I clearly exist and cannot differentiate between these “smaller agents”, I am either so perfectly unified that I cannot tell, or this emergentism is bullshit
No there’s no need to posit cutesy sounding things, that’s how misinformation starts :) If you have any sources or can cite stuff you’ve read which may point to it, that’s cool though
No, people are allowed to speculate and throw out ideas they have without needing some “expert” or paper to back up what they are saying. The mistake is treating such as if it’s a fact. Sure, there’s always going to be idiots out there that will take ideas like that and run with them, but I reject the idea that we should censor those speculations and random thoughts because idiots might believe them.
The real problem are the con artists who work those idiots up into a frenzy of fear and distrust by deliberately presenting shit they can’t back up as a fact and threat to drive donations or sell snake oil to “protect” from it.
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think.
I agree that hypotheticals and thought experiments are fun, but I disagree that any random speculation is a good idea. Everything should have a kernel of originating known fact, or some reasonable foundation. You can’t do science without starting with some known facts, or stating your assumptions based on such facts.
Edit to say:
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think
Is this speculation harmless? I am not sure we can qualify that, so it’s wrong to assume that it’s harmless.
Anywho, anyone and everyone should be able to participate in a discussion! I just think it’s nice to ground hypotheticals with some kind of known or observed phenomena. The funny thing is that science validates itself, so maybe this person is accurately describing an unknown cognitive model.
To me, good conversation hygiene in science or related fields is rooted in observations 🤷
I agree that science involves more rigor, but we’re not doing science in here, it’s just an online discussion forum. And OP qualified their comment with “I posit” and didn’t present it like an established fact.
I posit that the human mind is made up of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds/thousands “smaller agents” that work together to create consciousness as an emergent property of the whole, which makes it impossible to isolate and say “this, THIS right here IS concsciousness”. That does not mean each of those has their own personality, per sé.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat is a fantastic exploration of this idea, focusing on people who have lost specific parts of their brains due to tumors or strokes. The human mind is very much like a complex modern website- take Amazon for example, if everything is working, it’s the website where you buy stuff, but if certain specific systems are offline, you lose specific features, like your order history, or your cart, or your recommended products, etc… Missing one or two of of those components diminishes the site somewhat, but it’s still more or less Amazon. Your brain works the same way!
Stupid brain running micro-services.
At least it’s on-prem, I’d hate to see the AWS bill for running a conscious human brain 24-7
And the underlying animal is still there too. It’s fully in control at birth, and gets drowned out as we mature (for some people, less than others).
Small children are little more than animals, which is why they’re so unreasonable.
It’s my belief that the reason the written word or things like clocks are usually unreadable in dreams, is because the animal is both illiterate and innumerate. Dreams are the animals understanding of our waking experience. It knows these patterns are important and how they relate to other things, but it has no fucking idea what any of it actually means.
I do find myself reading and writing words in dreams quite a lot. I’ve never seen a clock though, not as far as I can remember.
But sometimes I can even remember signs with street names or banners / short paragraphs.
Dynamic lighting sadly doesn’t work tho. Light switches do nothing. For example if I turn on the lights in my bathroom in a dream, I can even hear the bathroom fan turn on, but the room remains dark. Ive heard thst this is apparently quite common though.
I posit this as well. I’m made up of at least 5 or 6 different versions of me with different biases and personalities. There’s a negative narcissistic version, there’s a happy go lucky version, a pragmatic version, a nihilist with a dark sense of humour, a soppy emotional one, and others and they all fight constantly to have their say. I thought everyone was like this 🤪
I’m all alone. Which is likely why I crave social activities.
Plurality is a thing…
You would like Global Workspace Theory, basically says your consciousness is the result of components of the brain broadcasting their information to the whole.
I also like Integrated Information Theory which measures the conscious experience of a system by how integrated it is, which means that you can’t reduce the system to the sum of it’s parts without losing the emergent properties.
Thanks for the links, very interesting indeed!
Yeah, and come to think of it, I bet you that each one has its own characteristics. Perhaps they may be full blown individuals themeselves from another time and place, and I too will one day join them…
Brb gonna go sailing…
So if I run enough different AI LLM models and let them communicate, I can create consciousness?
No, because LLMs are just a mathematical blender with ONE goal in mind: construct a good sentence. They have no thoughts, they have no corrective motion, they just spit out sentences.
You MIGHT get to passing a Turing test with enough feedback tied in, but then the “conciousness” is specifically coming from the systemic complexity at that point and still very much not the LLMs.
So you’re saying it’s not good enough for a sentient personality, but it might be good enough for an average politician?
Oh, if we’re talking about what it takes to replace politicians, technology has been capable of that for years.
Hell, maybe even above average if the model can update itself in real time.
In my opinion you are giving way too much credit to human beings. We are mainly just machines that spit out sentences.
No, you are giving too much credit to LLMs. Thinking LLMs are capable of sentience is as stupid as thinking individual neurons could learn physics.
If you gave them all access to real world, realtime sensor data… Over an extended period of time…hmm
That can’t be because I clearly exist and cannot differentiate between these “smaller agents”, I am either so perfectly unified that I cannot tell, or this emergentism is bullshit
No there’s no need to posit cutesy sounding things, that’s how misinformation starts :) If you have any sources or can cite stuff you’ve read which may point to it, that’s cool though
No, people are allowed to speculate and throw out ideas they have without needing some “expert” or paper to back up what they are saying. The mistake is treating such as if it’s a fact. Sure, there’s always going to be idiots out there that will take ideas like that and run with them, but I reject the idea that we should censor those speculations and random thoughts because idiots might believe them.
The real problem are the con artists who work those idiots up into a frenzy of fear and distrust by deliberately presenting shit they can’t back up as a fact and threat to drive donations or sell snake oil to “protect” from it.
And I’d say even shit like what you said does more harm than good because it can drive those who enjoy harmless speculation but lack the confidence to push back towards the fringes because they think the mainstream wants to tell them how to think.
I agree that hypotheticals and thought experiments are fun, but I disagree that any random speculation is a good idea. Everything should have a kernel of originating known fact, or some reasonable foundation. You can’t do science without starting with some known facts, or stating your assumptions based on such facts.
Edit to say:
Is this speculation harmless? I am not sure we can qualify that, so it’s wrong to assume that it’s harmless.
Anywho, anyone and everyone should be able to participate in a discussion! I just think it’s nice to ground hypotheticals with some kind of known or observed phenomena. The funny thing is that science validates itself, so maybe this person is accurately describing an unknown cognitive model.
To me, good conversation hygiene in science or related fields is rooted in observations 🤷
I agree that science involves more rigor, but we’re not doing science in here, it’s just an online discussion forum. And OP qualified their comment with “I posit” and didn’t present it like an established fact.