alt Hacker NewsYeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis is correct, then we eventually will. I'm more scared than pleased by the prospect, but there you are.
Replies
Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons.
What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty.
I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.
Personally I'm not a fan of the emergence story, for a number of reasons. First is, it doesn't really make sense for consciousness to have emerged gradually through natural selection. When we and animals are conscious, the whole brain is coordinated and works to for example turn off consciousness when we sleep. And as someone else mentioned, animals with much fewer numbers seem to have a similar consciousness to us.
If consciousness really evolved gradually, you would expect to see for example dogs or gorillas having less of it, but if they has less of it, why does it function the same way? Like for example animals can be scared, happy, anxious etc, they can experience the full range of emotions and thoughts, so their conscious experience seems just as rich as ours. What I mean by this is, if you can be "less conscious", then what does that mean _exactly_? Is it that you have less content in consciousness, or is it that you feel more like you are asleep? Or something else? We don't have any examples in animals of "less conscious", I would argue.
This makes me think that rather than having emerged gradually, evolution found a mechanism by which consciousness exists, and then some animals have that mechanism and others don't. I think that if it is a mechanism, then this mechanism is located in one part of the brain, not many parts functioning together (though one possibility is that this mechanism coordinates brain activity in such a way to enable consciousness).
Our machines won't have biological systems driving their needs which in turn fuel behaviors like desire and planning for the future. They may imitate them but it won't be innate.
Surely the number of neurons is not the whole story. Human brains have approximately 86 billion and are almost definitely conscious, but there are many other animals with a lot fewer (gorilla: 34 billion, dog: 2-3 billion, guinea pig: 240 million) which appear to be conscious also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?
>consciousness is an emergent property
You would really like Michael Pollan's latest book [1], entirely devoted to his exploration of consciousness researchers' POVs on this exact topic.
My favorite quote is that ~"perhaps Descartes was only half-wrong when suggesting I think, therefore I am; it seems rather closer to I FEEL, therefore I am."~
[1] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...>
----
I've grown thousands of plants; I've read two of the author's other books devoted to plants; in this book Pollan makes compelling arguments for plant sentience (over a much-longer timeframe).
Sure, perhaps plant consciousness is a bit of a stretch, but they're certainly intelligent and curious creatures. He makes both arguments supporting plant volition.
----
If you haven't seen My Octopus Teacher (Netflix), do. I'm a bald 275lb bluecollarguy... and I wept/awed (both). So beautiful, we bundled neurons.
----
Bonus quote ~"color is where reality and magic appear as-if together"~ [color isn't real, but is perceived]. We most-often see what's most-predictable, not necessarily what we actually detected [in the case of color: nothing but nanometers].