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gedymin comments on Can science come to understand consciousness? A problem of philosophical zombies (Yes, I know, P-zombies again.) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (41)
The practically relevant philosophical question is not "cam science understand consciousness?", but "what can infer from observing the correlates of consciousness, or from observing their absence?". This is the question that for example anesthesiologists have to deal with on a daily basis.
When formulated as this, the problem is really not that different from other scientific problems where causality must be detected. Detecting causal relations is famously hard - but it's not impossible. (We're reasonably certain, for example, that smoking causes cancer.)
In light of this, maybe Bradford Hill criteria can be applied. For example, if we're presented with the problem of a non-consious AI agent that wants to convince us of being conscious, then it's likely we can reject its claims by applying the consistency criteria. We could secretly create other instances of the same AI agent, put them in modified environments (e.g. in an environemt where the motivation to lie about being conscious is removed), and then obseve whether the claims of these instances are consistent.
Similarly, if the internal structure of the agent is too simple to allow consciousness (e.g. the agent is a Chinese room with table-lookup based "intelligence", or a bipartite graph with a high Phi value), we can reject the claim on the plausibility criteria. (Note that the mechanist for intelligence is not a priori required to be the biological one, or it's emulation. For an analogy, we don't reject people's claims of having qualia just because we know that the don't have the ordinary biological mechanisms for them. Persons who claim to experience phantom pain in their amputated limbs are as likely to be seriously treated by medical professionals as persons who experience "traditional", corporeal pain.)
This only solves half the problem. If the AI has no motivation to say that it is conscious, we have no reason to think that it will. We would assume that both copies were non-conscious, because it had no motivation to convince us otherwise.
I suppose what we need is a test under which an AI has motivation to declare that it is conscious iff it acctully is conscious. Does anyone have any idea for how to actually design such a test?
Surely this is just a particular case of "we want the AI to figure out things about the world, and tell us those things truthfully"? If you can figure out how to get the AI to tell us whether investing more money into AI research is likely to lead to good outcomes, and not lie about this, the same method would work for getting it to tell us whether it's conscious.
How would we define "conscious" in order to ask the question?
The same way we define it when asking other people?
Which is what, specifically?
I think we do it indexicly. I use a word in context, and since you have a parallel expedience in the same context, I never have to make clear exactly (at least in terms of Intension) what I mean, you have the same experience and some can infer the label. Ask an automation "do you have emotions?" and it may observe human use of the word emotion, conclude that "emotion" is an automatic behavioral response to conditions and changes in conditions that affect one's utility function, and declare that, yes it does have emotion. Yet, of course this completely misses what we meant by emotion, which is a subjective quality of experience.
Can you make a being come to understand the concept of subjectivity, it doesn't itself embody a subjective perspective?
This only communicates if the person you are trying to explain "red" to can perceive color.
The problem is, that my subjective experience of red is always accompanied by a particular range of wavelengths of light. Yet, when I say the word red, I don't mean the photons that are of that frequency, I mean the subjective experience that those photons cause. But, since the one always accompanies the other, someone naive of color might think I, mean the mathematical features of the waves reflected from the objects to which I'm pointing.
If you can't express the question then you can't be confident other people understand you either. Remember that some people just don't have e.g. visual imagination, and don't realise there's anything unusual about them.
Now I'm wondering whether I'm conscious, in your sense. I mean, I feel emotion, but it seems to adequately correspond to your "automaton" version. I experience what I assume is consciousness, but it seems to me that that's just how a sufficiently advanced self-monitoring system would feel from the inside.
Yes. I'm wondering if these dispute simply resolve to having different subjective experiences of what it means to be alive. In fact maybe the mistake is assuming that p-zombies don't exist. Maybe some humans are p-zombies!
However,
seems like almost a contradiction in terms. Can a self monitoring system become sufficiently advanced without feeling anything (just as my computer computes, but I suppose, doesn't feel)?
I think not. But I think that makes it entirely unsurprising, obvious even, that a more advanced computer would feel.
If so, I want to know why.
We can identify cancer and make a distinction between cancer and the absence of cancer. We might be wrong sometimes, but an autopsy is pretty reliable, at least after the fact. The same cannot be said of conciseness, since it is in nature (NOT IN CAUSE) non-physical. I realize that I need demonstrate this. That may take some time to write up.