"Human consciousness is intrinsically abstract, and not necessarily implemented on meat."
Alex,
thanks for your work on this. I am forever grateful to professionals such as yourself, who bring more public awareness to topics I consider an idiosyncratic hobby which I really got into in college, but avoided as a professional.
Let me raise some points for your consideration, as you research this topic. A caveat, it is intentionally brief, I only skimmed your paper and am replying to what I understand ( perhaps wrongly ) to be the gist of it.
All in, terrific effort, glad you're doing it. Just want to hand-over some drive-by commentary.
Your model :
- i. [ A. Physics / noumena → B. Consciousness / phenomena → C. Concepts → D. Computation ]
- ii. "ABC are continuous, and only D is discretising"
- iii. "B and C are homomorphically invariant", roughly therefore, "the qualia"
- iv. "qualia cannot be truly represented by computation due to the discretising loss of information"
- v. "we can't separate between the observer, and the observed"
Where I agree with you :
- ... point iv., broadly;
- ... point v. broadly (*** E3 below);
- ... certainly, the trendy LLMs today do not implement anthropomorphic consciousness;
however in the weeds ...
Where I disagree with you :
... your discretisation of { B, C }, AND your discretisation of { C, D }; I would propose a model where you don't draw these distinctions exactly like that because they are not logically necessary. In fact I'd propose a completely different paradigm over the substrate.
My model :
- vi. [ A. Physics / noumena -> E. sensory data structures, subject to specific data operations -> F and G. a pair of memory buffers which we can nominally refer to as "conscious", and "subconscious" ]
- vii. Since E is construed merely as data, it becomes useful to talk about consciousness in terms of memory buffers, such as F and G.
- viii. It is important at this point to note the concept of gestalten, or how we mechanistically "arbitrarily demarcate and recognise" subsets of sensory data as "being a thing". We do not "simply see cups in the world," rather we "learn to cluster our external data streams into cup-like, and non-cup-like boundaried-things".
KEY POINTS : Thoughts from the comparison of our models.
1. "Computation" may be limited to "algorithms", but "information processing" is the superset which is not.
2. Meat brains are already doing information processing, whether we choose to call it computation or not.
3. Consciousness is a memory buffer. The qualia of this memory buffer, are the types of data in it.
4. Machines can most certainly implement the same sensory data structures, in machine memory. The continuous / discreteness of the underlying implementation, and the question of NAND gates or cells, software or brain networks, is not a necessary component of the definition of consciousness. Consciousness is software. ( Can agree to disagree. LOL )
5. It is unreasonable to believe that once 4. is done, that a machine processes information any differently than a human.
6. To implement anthromorphic consciousness requires the proper assembly of a few types of programs, in a not yet trendy architecture :
- - sensory data types in physics engines,
- - ATPs for logic programming,
- - SLMs (neural networks) for most domain-specific sensory or verbal computation,
- - LLMs possibly for scale-up, though not necessary.
- I always say even just glueing SLMs to silly little game physics engines operating on 1st-order data, would be a million times more efficient than having 2nd-order-data-only LLMs reinvent logic fuzzily, from NAND gates to Chinese room physics.
7. The anthropomorphic distinction between conscious and subconscious memory, makes all the difference in determining how machine implementations will behave.
Lesser Points of Elaboration :
E1. Our difference is that, I'm more of a basic boring robot Kantian, and perhaps you're more into the post-Kantian language which asserts that in addition to the quantifiable Kantian qualia, there are also unquantifiable qualia. To you perhaps, the unquantifiable is an intrinsically distinct element of experience. Whereas to me, any conscious experience is 100% encompassed and embedded in the basic boring transcendental idealism. Whereas "transcendental aesthetic" refers in modern terms to "sensory data types" and "transcendental analytic" refers in modern terms to "permitted operations upon the sensory data types". I've snuck in assertive definitions, here, which differentiate our paradigms.
E2. Where I'm coming from : so in college I had a bit too much time, and actually worked out how to map each of my own conscious experiences, one sense modality at a time, to quantifiable data structures. This was somewhat mindblowing, as it decisively answered the question ( for only myself ) about whether consciousness can or cannot be digitised without loss of information. ( Me : yup. Most other people : either never thought about it, or decided it can't be done. ) So for me, the question of qualia is purely metaphysical, an incidental curiousity which I have no access to manipulate ... and thus generally ignore ... whereas everything I see, smell, feel, and touch, in my imagination or otherwise, I DO know how to quantify, physically.
*** E3. One of my favourite learnings, about cybernetics, is that "control and communication" are two words to describe the same thing; another is that "governance" is just the way business people talk about cybernetics.
