I wanted to write myself about a popular confusion between decision making, consciousness, and intelligence which among other things leads to bad AI alignment takes and mediocre philosophy.
This post has not got a lot of attention, so if you write your own post, perhaps the topic will have another shot at reaching popular consciousness (heh), and if you succeed, I might try to learn something about how you did it and this post did not!
I wasn’t thinking that it’s possible to separate qualia perception and self awareness
Separating qualia and self-awareness is a controversial assertion and it seems to me people have some strong contradictory intuitions about it!
I don’t think, in the experience of perceiving red, there necessarily is any conscious awareness of oneself—in that moment there is just the qualia of redness. I can imagine two possible objections: (a) perhaps there is some kind of implicit awareness of self in that moment that enables the conscious awareness of red, or (b) perhaps it’s only possible to have that experience of red within a perceptual framework where one has perceived onesself. But personally I don’t find either of those accounts persuading.
I think flow states are also moments where one’s awareness can be so focused on the activity one is engaged in that one momentarily loses any awareness of one’s own self.
there is no intersection between sentience and intelligence that is not self-awarness.
I should have defined intelligence in the post—perhaps i”ll edit. The only concrete and clear definition of intelligence I’m aware of is psychology’s g factor, which is something like the ability to recognize patterns and draw inferences from them. That is what I mean—no more than that.
A mind that is sentient and intelligent but not self aware might look like this: when a computer programmer is deep in the flow state of bringing a function in their head into code on the screen, they may experience moments of time where they have sentient awareness of their work, and certainly are using intelligence to transform their ideas into code, but do not in those particular moments have any awareness of self.
This post has not got a lot of attention, so if you write your own post, perhaps the topic will have another shot at reaching popular consciousness (heh), and if you succeed, I might try to learn something about how you did it and this post did not!
Separating qualia and self-awareness is a controversial assertion and it seems to me people have some strong contradictory intuitions about it!
I don’t think, in the experience of perceiving red, there necessarily is any conscious awareness of oneself—in that moment there is just the qualia of redness. I can imagine two possible objections: (a) perhaps there is some kind of implicit awareness of self in that moment that enables the conscious awareness of red, or (b) perhaps it’s only possible to have that experience of red within a perceptual framework where one has perceived onesself. But personally I don’t find either of those accounts persuading.
I think flow states are also moments where one’s awareness can be so focused on the activity one is engaged in that one momentarily loses any awareness of one’s own self.
I should have defined intelligence in the post—perhaps i”ll edit. The only concrete and clear definition of intelligence I’m aware of is psychology’s g factor, which is something like the ability to recognize patterns and draw inferences from them. That is what I mean—no more than that.
A mind that is sentient and intelligent but not self aware might look like this: when a computer programmer is deep in the flow state of bringing a function in their head into code on the screen, they may experience moments of time where they have sentient awareness of their work, and certainly are using intelligence to transform their ideas into code, but do not in those particular moments have any awareness of self.