On 5/23/2023 6:33 AM, Terren Suydam wrote:
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 7:09 AM Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
As I see this thread, Terren and Stathis are both talking past
each other. Please either of you correct me if i am wrong, but in
an effort to clarify and perhaps resolve this situation:
I believe Stathis is saying the functional substitution having the
same fine-grained causal organization *would* have the same
phenomenology, the same experience, and the same qualia as the
brain with the same fine-grained causal organization.
Therefore, there is no disagreement between your positions with
regards to symbols groundings, mappings, etc.
When you both discuss the problem of symbology, or bits, etc. I
believe this is partly responsible for why you are both talking
past each other, because there are many levels involved in brains
(and computational systems). I believe you were discussing
completely different levels in the hierarchical organization.
There are high-level parts of minds, such as ideas, thoughts,
feelings, quale, etc. and there are low-level, be they neurons,
neurotransmitters, atoms, quantum fields, and laws of physics as
in human brains, or circuits, logic gates, bits, and instructions
as in computers.
I think when Terren mentions a "symbol for the smell of
grandmother's kitchen" (GMK) the trouble is we are crossing a
myriad of levels. The quale or idea or memory of the smell of GMK
is a very high-level feature of a mind. When Terren asks for or
discusses a symbol for it, a complete answer/description for it
can only be supplied in terms of a vast amount of information
concerning low level structures, be they patterns of neuron
firings, or patterns of bits being processed. When we consider
things down at this low level, however, we lose all context for
what the meaning, idea, and quale are or where or how they come
in. We cannot see or find the idea of GMK in any neuron, no more
than we can see or find it in any neuron.
Of course then it should seem deeply mysterious, if not
impossible, how we get "it" (GMK or otherwise) from "bit", but to
me, this is no greater a leap from how we get "it" from a bunch of
cells squirting ions back and forth. Trying to understand a
smartphone by looking at the flows of electrons is a similar kind
of problem, it would seem just as difficult or impossible to
explain and understand the high-level features and complexity out
of the low-level simplicity.
This is why it's crucial to bear in mind and explicitly discuss
the level one is operation on when one discusses symbols,
substrates, or quale. In summary, I think a chief reason you have
been talking past each other is because you are each operating on
different assumed levels.
Please correct me if you believe I am mistaken and know I only
offer my perspective in the hope it might help the conversation.
I appreciate the callout, but it is necessary to talk at both the
micro and the macro for this discussion. We're talking about symbol
grounding. I should make it clear that I don't believe symbols can be
grounded in other symbols (i.e. symbols all the way down as Stathis
put it), that leads to infinite regress and the illusion of meaning.
Symbols ultimately must stand for something. The only thing they can
stand /for/, ultimately, is something that cannot be communicated by
other symbols: conscious experience. There is no concept in our brains
that is not ultimately connected to something we've seen, heard, felt,
smelled, or tasted.
Right. That's why children learn words by ostensive definition. You
point to a stop sign and say "red". You point to their foot and say
"foot". The amazing thing is how a child learns this so easily and
doesn't think "red" means octagon or "foot" means toes. I think we have
evolution to thank for this.
I personally think consciousness is waaay over rated. Most thinking,
even abstruse thinking like mathematical proofs are subconscious (c.f.
Poincare' effect). I think consciousness is an effect of language; an
internalization of communication with others (c.f. Julian Jaynes),
Brent
In my experience with conversations like this, you usually have people
on one side who take consciousness seriously as the only thing that is
actually undeniable, and you have people who'd rather not talk about
it, hand-wave it away, or outright deny it. That's the talking-past
that usually happens, and that's what's happening here.
Terren
Jason
On Tue, May 23, 2023, 2:47 AM Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 15:58, Terren Suydam
<terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 12:32 AM Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 14:23, Terren Suydam
<terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 12:14 AM Stathis
Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 13:37, Terren Suydam
<terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 11:13 PM Stathis
Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:48, Terren
Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 8:42 PM
Stathis Papaioannou
<stath...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:03,
Terren Suydam
<terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
it is true that my brain
has been trained on a
large amount of data -
data that contains
intelligence outside of my
own. But when I
introspect, I notice that
my understanding of things
is ultimately
rooted/grounded in my
phenomenal experience.
Ultimately, everything we
know, we know either by
our experience, or by
analogy to experiences
we've had. This is in
opposition to how LLMs
train on data, which is
strictly about how
words/symbols relate to
one another.
The functionalist position is
that phenomenal experience
supervenes on behaviour, such
that if the behaviour is
replicated (same output for
same input) the phenomenal
experience will also be
replicated. This is what
philosophers like Searle (and
many laypeople) can’t stomach.
I think the kind of phenomenal
supervenience you're talking about
is typically asserted for behavior
at the level of the neuron, not
the level of the whole agent. Is
that what you're saying? That
chatGPT must be having a
phenomenal experience if it talks
like a human? If so, that is
stretching the explanatory domain
of functionalism past its breaking
point.
The best justification for
functionalism is David Chalmers'
"Fading Qualia" argument. The paper
considers replacing neurons with
functionally equivalent silicon chips,
but it could be generalised to
replacing any part of the brain with a
functionally equivalent black box, the
whole brain, the whole person.
You're saying that an algorithm that
provably does not have experiences of
rabbits and lollipops - but can still talk
about them in a way that's
indistinguishable from a human -
essentially has the same phenomenology as
a human talking about rabbits and
lollipops. That's just absurd on its face.
You're essentially hand-waving away the
grounding problem. Is that your position?
That symbols don't need to be grounded in
any sort of phenomenal experience?
It's not just talking about them in a way that
is indistinguishable from a human, in order to
have human-like consciousness the entire I/O
behaviour of the human would need to be
replicated. But in principle, I don't see why
a LLM could not have some other type of
phenomenal experience. And I don't think the
grounding problem is a problem: I was never
grounded in anything, I just grew up
associating one symbol with another symbol,
it's symbols all the way down.
Is the smell of your grandmother's kitchen a symbol?
Yes, I can't pull away the facade to check that there
was a real grandmother and a real kitchen against
which I can check that the sense data matches.
The ground problem is about associating symbols with a
phenomenal experience, or the memory of one - which is not
the same thing as the functional equivalent or the neural
correlate. It's the feeling, what it's like to experience
the thing the symbol stands for. The experience of
redness. The shock of plunging into cold water. The smell
of coffee. etc.
Take a migraine headache - if that's just a symbol, then
why does that symbol /feel/ /bad/ while others feel
/good/? Why does any symbol feel like anything? If you say
evolution did it, that doesn't actually answer the
question, because evolution doesn't do anything except
select for traits, roughly speaking. So it just pushes the
question to: how did the subjective feeling of pain or
pleasure emerge from some genetic mutation, when it wasn't
there before?
Without a functionalist explanation of the /origin/ of
aesthetic valence, then I don't think you can "get it from
bit".
That seems more like the hard problem of consciousness. There
is no solution to it.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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