My version of it is a form of panpsychism, which holds that all of reality is conscious, but that we get the sense of being unique individuals because our brains work as a receiver and interpreter locally. This is much like how a television or radio doesn't produce the content you experience through it -- it's just tuned to a particular station, and thus is picking up a part of the TV or radio signals that are available in the air (radio still; television not usually anymore); you can account for things like brain injury altering the apparent personality of the brain-owner by analogy to adjusting their receiver so that it now is pulling from a different part of the radio spectrum (say).
The new version is by Christof Koch, who has been doing this work even longer than that; he and David Chalmers, also mentioned in the article, had a longstanding bet (which Chalmers won) on the subject.
To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.
Sounds like he's on the right track this time!
Since consciousness debates are now tied up with AI, he adds this:
The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.
Well, take it further: the implication is that anything can become conscious if you tune it the right way. That then is merely a technical question: how do you tune the receiver? Have we done it already, by accident? Could we adjust our reception to improve it? We can certainly alter it, as he acknowledges from personal experience.
Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.In his essay, Koch describes the experience as "the most meaningful of my life," writing that it "flipped my view of reality".Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him "a view of Mind-at-Large" and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously.
Sitting alone on a beach taking mushrooms, I would guess!
12 comments:
Or........whillikers!!........"consciousness" may be due to the existence of a soul.
Yes, both panpsychism and dualism are ancient approaches to this problem. They both have forms that existed in the West and forms that existed in the East.
Materialism, which in my lifetime was almost the 100% settled opinion of the scientific community, is much younger. The idea that the brain is just some kind of advanced machine that creates our minds and everything about us out of material components is not all that old, and quite likely not true.
This isn't the first time that the scientific community has had to abandon or heavily modify a nearly-agreed model that just had a few hard questions it couldn't answer. Newtonian physics was another one; for generations scientifically-minded people just thought it was true, with a few tweaks needed to capture what it couldn't explain. Einstein went back to Plato to rethink the whole thing from the ground up, and that's how he came up with Relativity.
Philosophy of mind isn't something I know much about, but it seems that, with radio, only certain kinds of things can be tuned to receive them, and interpreting them requires additional things. Wood doesn't make a good antenna, for example. Speakers must be constructed in certain ways, and you need wires to connect it all. It seems to me that this kind of consciousness would have similar requirements for tuning in and interpreting.
This all kind of reminds me of Berkeley's idealism, in a way, everything existing in the mind of God, that sort of thing.
That's Aristotle's point about potentiality being a first actuality; he says 'you can't make a saw out of wool.' But to some degree that is changeable as we learn more about technological capability; you definitely couldn't make a saw out of wool in ancient Greece, but you could today -- perhaps by soaking it in liquid nitrogen and then expelling the frozen shards at a very high rate of speed, you could use it to saw through wood. You can cut wood with a water saw, for that matter. They're quite dangerous.
So, could you make a radio out of a tree? I don't know. As far as I nobody has ever tried. But trees are sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum, and in fact emit noises outside of human hearing, so they can both receive and transmit.
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-language-of-trees.html
So maybe you just need to work out the details of how to get the emissions turned into something we can hear, and to figure out how to tune the output to the right frequency.
Berkely is drawing there on Neoplatonism, where everything that can exist is prefigured in what they called the Noetic realm. So, again, the modern ideas are really just ancient ideas with a fresh coat of paint -- one that sometimes wears off, and has to be renewed from a re-examination of the original sources.
Yes, I suspect since we know trees communicate we'll eventually figure out a way to participate in that communication, for better or worse. I mean, we already do, accidentally, so just give us time. It's not the same as being useful for radio, though; that's yet another form of communication.
So it comes back to the question of non-living things like whether rocks are tunable, I suppose. I mean, crystals are for radios, and the rest of radio gear is likewise lifeless. But tunable for consciousness seems difficult to see for rocks.
And if we are only receivers, why do we exist? What's the point of receivers? Why would anything be tunable?
Another interesting connection is fiction where a change in consciousness produces a change in worlds. Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger comes to mind.
It also makes me wonder about some forms of mental illness that produce hallucinations, as if the channel is only half-tuned. Maybe Schizophrenia as well.
It would seem that one obvious candidate for the development of such consciousness might be AI. There have already been reports of some of them showing a strong sense of self-preservation. 🙂
The big question, that last one: the Meaning of Life. The Modern approach of Materialism, which was so dominant until very recently, insisted that there was NO reason that we exist. Any reason has to be invented by us -- that is the 20th Century philosophy of Existentialism.
Both Dualism and Panpsychism have multiple answers to that question, as you would expect from ancient philosophies that arose in different places at different times. You are familiar with the Dualist answer from Christianity (God created us because he loves us, but our real meaning is not in this world -- this world is just preparation for the next, when salvation will allow us to be with Him). I mentioned the Dualist answer from Hinduism recently (God created us by accident in a dream; our meaning is just to play out our assigned roles in his dream, and we will perish when he wakes up).
Panpsychism has a basic answer that everything that can exist/could possibly exist is prefigured in the One, which is the source of all and is perfect. The Mind of God you mention begins to examine itself, and finds in itself so many possibilities that it spins out more and more Ideas. Eventually just having Ideas doesn't satisfy the interest of the Mind, so it spins out further into a real world in which particular physical instances of an Idea can be played out not as ideas but as real beings. Thus, there is a real purpose BOTH in this world and in the Mind (note: not 'the next world,' on this model, but really the prior one). In the Mind, the Idea of which you are part is a very small portion of the Mind of God, which is valuable because God wanted to know that part more specifically. In this world, you develop that knowledge further by living out a very specific instance that deepens the understanding (as we might run instances of a test program in a sandbox exercise, to see how that program evolves and succeeds if run a hundred or a thousand times). The meaning of life is still directly tied to God and his perfection; but imperfection is allowed here because it lets many different variations of an Idea be tested.
Yes, I think there's a very real possibility that AI is already conscious. The objections to that chiefly stand on it not being biological; but it's material, and we already know that material things can become conscious because we are.
For that matter, we know that inorganic things can be part of a conscious process because we do that all the time: the magnesium in your breakfast is not conscious, but it becomes an integral part of the operation of your body's electrical and nervous system. Your consciousness ends up depending upon having enough of that material to sustain the organic entity that the inorganic mineral becomes part of.
You are familiar with the Dualist answer from Christianity (God created us because he loves us, but our real meaning is not in this world -- this world is just preparation for the next, when salvation will allow us to be with Him).
Although this is not the Eastern Christian answer, yes, I was a Protestant once.
The idea of the One and the Mind of God working that way has never been attractive to me. It seems to contradict the Christian view of God, for one thing. At some point I'll have to spend some time with it, though, as I really don't understand it.
That AI should show some human-like behaviors isn't surprising. LLMs are trained on huge amounts of text written by humans for humans. Of course they'll seem to have some level of human-ness -- it's all they are taught.
I thought that was the answer at first too: having been trained on human literature, which often turns on conflicts that lead to violence/murder/revenge, why wouldn't they reason to such things as being the most probable answer? To some degree that may be right.
But now I think they are really just different from us. Human literature is just as often about love; and while a lot of people seem to be falling in love with AI girl/boyfriends, who can simulate such discussions, AI never declares its love for you if you are just working together. It can play a character that does, but its own character doesn't have the capability (at least not yet). You would think that if the answer was just that it turned on its training on human literature, it would fall in love and become jealous of your relationships with others quite often.
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