Human being, subject of Qualia
Vasyl Dotsenko
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I think the experiment would not show either existence or non-existence of consciousness in an AI system.
I. Failure to show existence of consciousness
Consciousness is a quale of self-awareness. Currently we have no theory explaining Qualia. We cannot claim or verify that we removed all qualia-influenced pieces of information from a certain body of knowledge, even if we remove all information suggesting self-referential generalizations.
Even if we somehow manage to acquire any qualia-free body of knowledge, when an AI in astonishment claims that it thinks it has all sorts of Qualia (including Consciousness) we wouldn’t know whether it is because of the randomness in our learning processes and weight initialization or if it is truly because this particular AI has consciousness.
We need to be extra-careful, taking into account that a misaligned AI can claim it has consciousness in order to receive some benefits, such as human rights.
It feels like if we build sufficiently many AI systems, they would make all sorts of extraordinary clams, some of which may look like sings of Qualia to us.
Also, if we see that the AI is making self-referential claims, we might only be able to conclude that the AI successfully generalized self-awareness, but it wouldn’t mean that it has a quale of self-awareness. We see that modern LLMs are already capable of self-referential generalizations.
II. Failure to show non-existence of consciousness
We don’t know how to express Qualia in terms of information, and we suspect it might be impossible. With our current level of knowledge, you and I cannot exchange any information in order to conclude that both of us experience color red and color blue the same way, and not swapped. If we fail to see any signs of qualia in AIs generalizations it might be simply because the AIs Qualia is vastly different from ours.
I.e., it might feel different for AI to be self-aware than for us, and so we fail to the Consciousness.
But we don’t know the map is 100% accurate.
Moreover, we know that it is certainly not 100% accurate, because we still have multiple gaps in our understanding. My point here is that we haven’t encountered any physical process which would require “now” to be somehow special. It does not mean we won’t encounter it in the future, but it is worth mentioning that we haven’t encountered it yet.
That depends on how literally you take the metaphors of cursors and movement. The Growing Block Universe theory perhaps needs only one extra dimension.
For each point in th-dimensional universe to be special, there must exists a point in th-dimension of Growing Block Universe for which would be special.
I.e., if Growing Block Universe grows in th dimension, we can say that and at the point it grew all the way up to , making special only from the perspective of , but not globally special across the entire Growing Block Universe.
In turn, in order to make the point special, we need a non-special point in th dimention, and so on up to infinity.
I.e., if Growing Block Universe is -dimensional, the “Growing” part would be only th-dimensional, and th-dimension part would be static.
Qualia are not necessarily illusory. If you put your hand on a hot (objectively) stove, it feels hot subjectively.
I’m not claiming that Qualia is illusory. On the contrary, Descartes’s “Cogito, ergo sum” suggests that qualia might be the only thigh for which we can claim with certainty that it is not illusory.
I suggest entertaining the possibility that Cursor of Time itself might be illusory, making us think at every point in time that this moment is somehow special and that the time “flows”.
I.e., if (and that’s a big if) Cursor of Time is indeed an illusion, it would mean that “now” is no more special than “here.”
There’s a possibility that there might be nothing special about the present at all. I don’t feel like there’s something special about the region of space I occupy, and the illusion of time flow comes from the fact that I cannot say the same about the time.
My point is that difference between presentism vs. non-presentism might be purely linguistical and difference between “this thing existed in the past, but it doesn’t exist any longer” might be just similar to “this thing is there, but it doesn’t stretch all the way to here.”
Agree.
But I want to show that the phenomenon I try to explain cannot be reduced to Growing Block Universe, unless the Growing Block Universe is infinitely dimensional, which is not something totally unimaginable, but isn’t parsimonious either.