Nice post! The comments section is complex, indicating that even rationalists have a lot of trouble talking about consciousness clearly. This could be taken as evidence for what I take to be one of your central claims: the word consciousness means many things, and different things to different people.
I’ve been fascinated by consciousness since before starting grad school in neuroscience in 1999. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about consciousness, and what insight neuroscience (not the colored pictures of imaging, but detailed study of individual and groups of neurons’ responses to varied situations) has to say about it.
I think it has a lot to say. There are more detailed explanations available of each of the phenomena you identify as part of the umbrella term “consciousness”.
This gets at the most apt critique of this and similar approaches to denying the existence of a hard problem: “Wait! That didn’t explain the part I’m interested in!”. I think this is quite true, and better explanations are quite possible given what we know. I believe I have some, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble to even try to explicate them.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve discussed consciousness less and less. It’s so difficult as to create unproductive discussions a lot of the time, and frustrating misunderstandings and arguments a good bit of the time.
Thus, while I’ve wanted to write about it, there’s never been a professional or personal motivating factor.
I wonder if the advent of AGI will create such a factor. If we go through a nontrivial era of parahuman AGI, as I think we will, then I think the question of whether and how they’re conscious might become a consequential one, determining how we treat them.
It could also help determine how seriously we take AGI safety. If the answer to “is this proto-AGI conscious?” and the honest answer is “Yes, in some ways humans are, and some other ways humans aren’t”, that encourages the intuition that we should take these things seriously as a potential threat.
So, perhaps it would make sense to start that discussion now, before public debate ramps up?
If that logic doesn’t strongly hold, discussing consciousness seems like a huge time-sink taking time that would be better spent trying to solve alignment as best we can while we still have a chance.
Nice post! The comments section is complex, indicating that even rationalists have a lot of trouble talking about consciousness clearly. This could be taken as evidence for what I take to be one of your central claims: the word consciousness means many things, and different things to different people.
I’ve been fascinated by consciousness since before starting grad school in neuroscience in 1999. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about consciousness, and what insight neuroscience (not the colored pictures of imaging, but detailed study of individual and groups of neurons’ responses to varied situations) has to say about it.
I think it has a lot to say. There are more detailed explanations available of each of the phenomena you identify as part of the umbrella term “consciousness”.
This gets at the most apt critique of this and similar approaches to denying the existence of a hard problem: “Wait! That didn’t explain the part I’m interested in!”. I think this is quite true, and better explanations are quite possible given what we know. I believe I have some, but I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble to even try to explicate them.
Over the past 25 years, I’ve discussed consciousness less and less. It’s so difficult as to create unproductive discussions a lot of the time, and frustrating misunderstandings and arguments a good bit of the time.
Thus, while I’ve wanted to write about it, there’s never been a professional or personal motivating factor.
I wonder if the advent of AGI will create such a factor. If we go through a nontrivial era of parahuman AGI, as I think we will, then I think the question of whether and how they’re conscious might become a consequential one, determining how we treat them.
It could also help determine how seriously we take AGI safety. If the answer to “is this proto-AGI conscious?” and the honest answer is “Yes, in some ways humans are, and some other ways humans aren’t”, that encourages the intuition that we should take these things seriously as a potential threat.
So, perhaps it would make sense to start that discussion now, before public debate ramps up?
If that logic doesn’t strongly hold, discussing consciousness seems like a huge time-sink taking time that would be better spent trying to solve alignment as best we can while we still have a chance.