We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: «trainable» variables (e.g. bias vector or weight matrix) and «hidden» variables (e.g. state vector of neurons).
Autor: tstadmin
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Kolmogorov theory of consciousness. An algorithmic model of consciousness
Characterizing consciousness is a profound scientific problem with pressing clinical and practical implications. Examples include disorders of consciousness, locked-in syndrome, conscious state in utero, in sleep and other states of consciousness, in non-human animals, and perhaps soon in exobiology [astrobiology] or in machines. Here, we address the phenomenon of structured experience from an information-theoretic perspective.
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We start from the subjective view (“my brain and my conscious experience”):
1 “There is information and I am conscious.”
2 “Reality, as it relates to experience and phenomenal structure, is a model my brain has built and continues to develop based on input–output information.”
Source:
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An organism able to learn and move with no brain, no mouth, no stomach, no eyes and 720 sexes
A Paris zoo is showcasing a mysterious creature dubbed the «blob,» a yellowish collection of unicellular organisms called a slime mold that looks like a fungus, but acts like an animal.
This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on public display on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet can detect food and digest it.
The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.
«The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,» said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.
«It surprises us, because it has no brain but is able to learn (…) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,» David said.
The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.
«We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really [know] if it’s an animal or a fungus,» said David.
«It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom … it has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn.»
Source:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-zoo-blob-1.5325747
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The search for invertebrate consciousness
There is no agreement on whether any invertebrates are conscious and no agreement on a methodology that could settle the issue. How can the debate move forward? I distinguish three broad types of approach: theory‐heavy, theory‐neutral and theory‐light. Theory‐heavy and theory‐neutral approaches face serious problems, motivating a middle path: the theory‐light approach. At the core of the theory‐light approach is a minimal commitment about the relation between phenomenal consciousness and cognition that is compatible with many specific theories of consciousness: the hypothesis that phenomenally conscious perception of a stimulus facilitates, relative to unconscious perception, a cluster of cognitive abilities in relation to that stimulus. This “facilitation hypothesis” can productively guide inquiry into invertebrate consciousness. What is needed? At this stage, not more theory, and not more undirected data gathering. What is needed is a systematic search for consciousness‐linked cognitive abilities, their relationships to each other, and their sensitivity to masking.
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Conversations about the badness of involuntary suffering
I have the intuition that voluntary suffering might not be bad. This is primarily due to personal experience: I often feel sad (sympathy) when I encounter sad stories or sad situations, but I don’t have the intuition that this is bad for me, because I don’t feel like I ought to look away or stop feeling sad in response to these and I often feel like thinking/learning/reading more about these situations even if I feel more sadness because of it (and I usually do). This happens to me with both real and fictional situations (I was a fan of tragedies for a while). Furthermore, sometimes in the past, when I’ve been depressed about my own life, I didn’t want to be happy and even preferred to be miserable.
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It’s suffering that’s bad, intrinsically (though suffering can be instrumentally good)
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I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point.
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Buddhism would say that if you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you don’t suffer from it.
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My intuition is that suffering is bad, but sometimes (all things considered) I prefer to suffer in a particular instance (e.g. in service of some other value). In such cases it would be better for my welfare if I did not suffer, but I still prefer to.
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I think we don’t quite have the words to distinguish between all these things in English, but in my mind there’s something like
- pain – the experience of negative valence
- suffering – the experience of pain (i.e. the experience of the experience of negative valence)
- expected suffering – the experience of pain that was expected, so you only suffer for the pain itself
- unexpected suffering – the experience of pain that was not expected, so you suffer both the pain itself and the pain of suffering itself from it not being expected and thus having negative valence
Of them all, unexpected suffering is the worst because it involves both pain and meta-pain.
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I noticed that reading only «positive» and «joyous» stories eventually feel empty. The answer seem that sad elements in a story bring more depth than the fun/joyous ones. In that sense, sadness in stories act as a signal of deepness, but also a way to access some deeper part of our emotions and internal life.
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Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism
The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.
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How trees secretly talk to and share with each other
Trees secretly talk to each other underground. They’re passing information and resources to and from each other through a network of mycorrhizal fungi—mykós means fungus and riza means root in Greek—a mat of long, thin filaments that connect an estimated 90% of land plants. Scientists call the fungi the Wood Wide Web because ‘adult’ trees can share sugars to younger trees, sick trees can send their remaining resources back into the network for others, and they can communicate with each other about dangers like insect infestations.
Source:
The Wood Wide Web: How trees secretly talk to and share with each other
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A conversation between Brian Tomasik and Luke Muehlhauser
Luke and Mr. Tomasik found that they agreed about the following:
- Physicalism and functionalism about consciousness.
- Specifically, Mr. Tomasik endorses “Type A” physicalism, as described in his
article “Is There a Hard Problem of Consciousness?” Luke isn’t certain he
endorses Type A physicalism as defined in that article, but he thinks his
views are much closer to “Type A” physicalism than to “Type B” physicalism. - Consciousness will likely turn out to be polymorphic, without a sharp dividing
line between conscious and non-conscious systems, just like (say) the line
between what does and doesn’t count as “face recognition software.” - Consciousness will likely vary along a great many dimensions, and Luke and
Mr. Tomasik both suspect they would have different degrees of moral caring
for different types of conscious systems, depending on how each particular
system scores along each of these dimensions.
A core disagreement
In Luke’s view, a system needs to have certain features interacting in the right way in order to qualify as having non-zero consciousness and non-zero moral weight (if one assumes consciousness is necessary for moral patienthood).
In Mr. Tomasik’s view, various potential features (e.g. ability to do reinforcement learning or meta-cognition) contribute different amounts to a system’s degree of consciousness, because they increase that system’s fit with the «consciousness» concept, but all things have non-zero fit with the “consciousness” concept.
Luke suggested that this core disagreement stems from the principle described in Mr. Tomasik’s «Flavors of Computation are Flavors of Consciousness«:
It’s unsurprising that a type-A physicalist should attribute nonzero consciousness to all systems. After all, «consciousness» is a concept — a «cluster in thingspace» — and all points in thingspace are less than infinitely far away from the centroid of the «consciousness» cluster. By a similar argument, we might say that any system displays nonzero similarity to any concept (except maybe for strictly partitioned concepts that map onto the universe’s fundamental ontology, like the difference between matter vs. antimatter). Panpsychism on consciousness is just one particular example of that
principle. -
Can GPT3 or a later version of it experience suffering?
And if so, should we be continuing to develop it?
I have to admit that I don’t know much about how the system works, but I’m genuinely curious: how do we know that it doesn’t feel anything? I’m just concerned because I’m seeing more and more articles about its creation and the many amazing things it’s been able to do so far but none that tell us about the ethical implications of its creation or that reassure me that the fact that it exists is entirely not a bad thing. It seems to me that the system is now able to do many complex things and it’s worrying me that it might also (eventually) be able to experience something akin to suffering.
Se also: Is gpt-3 a step to sentience?
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What if a panpsychist view of consciousness encourages us to have more babies?
Danny Donabedian wrote:
Assuming a pan-psychist view of consciousness for a moment, with the potential for suffering subroutines to extend to fundamental physical particles and the simplest of physical systems, I am unsure if more complex systems like those found in living creatures and their neural networks or even unicellular organisms increase or decrease net suffering.
If it turns out that net universal suffering decreases when matter is incorporated into more complex (life-like) systems, I guess we must switch it to have more babies.While I don’t necessarily believe that, I do believe that it can’t be excluded as a possibility due to the significant s-risk involved with making such a mistake if it turns out to be true. I guess a third option would be that the suffering of simple systems is no greater or less than complex systems.
Though if I had to give a reason per say why one might think simple systems contain more suffering, perhaps a cessation of suffering, a tranquilism, or knowledge/certainty of its attainment, is only observed in certain complex systems and is an emergent property of those systems.Timothy Chan wrote:
Does that idea that complexity decreases net suffering rely on the consciousnesses of simple systems being cancelled by being incorporated into a complex one though? If that’s the idea I’m not too sure about the intuition behind that. It seems difficult to draw a boundary around a system and say that it’s the ‘terminal’ system that cancels everything simpler.
Danny Donabedian wrote:
Even if their consciousnesses weren’t fully canceled during such an incorporation, perhaps the simpler systems are affected in some other positive manner (with the suffering component of consciousness broadcasted upstream?). But I agree with you that carving up boundaries is challenging and at least not possible for the time being.
Manu Herrán wrote:
Another (scary) very similar hypothesys is that the basic state of simple matter is intense suffering and it thrives to more complex systems in an attempt to avoid that suffering. I put that idea long ago on lyrics of a song called Hypothesis Mass of a Death Metal band called Mortem Tirana.
Danny Donabedian wrote:
That’s similar to but a better/updated model reminiscent of the buddhist approach to realms where hellishness seems to be very simple and correlates with decreased complexity and intense craving, and its converse, happy godliness is associated with max complexity and less overall craving compared to the lower realms.
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This conversation takes place in July 2020 in a thread started by Wolf Bullmann in the «Sounds like something Brian Tomasik would be against but ok» private facebook group. Excerpts taken with the consent of the authors.