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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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You can hear whatever the model designed to generate it makes you hear. If the code was designed to generate a kid's voice crying for help - would you try to rescue the kid, fully knowing there's no kid? Your brain is designed to recognize certain patterns. The language model steals these patterns - probably because they are frequently produced by real people in training materials - and regurgitates them at you, and your brain helpfully reacts to them. But there's nothing under these patterns.

OTOH, Peter Watts kinda claims there's nothing under our patterns too. Who knows, maybe so. I prefer to believe there is something, but I can't really prove it.

He does? I thought his whole thing is that consciousness just isn't adaptive, which is why humans in blindsight all get eaten by vampires (apparently? I never read the sequel, but it sounded pretty clear in the ending of the first one, as he listens to the last comm chatter from hunted humans die away)

(Edit: looked up Echopraxia, and apparently it retcons the vampires-eating-everyone interpretation the protagonist had)

As I read it, the whole thing is that the consciousness, as we understand it, is not necessary to produce the effects of complex, adaptive and purposeful behavior, and may be even detrimental to it. The whole being eaten by the vampires thing is not the main thing - the vampires are just having much better hardware and software, so as soon as they got the glitch problem solved (which was inevitable), that was it. The main thing is that this "consciousness" thing we seem to be so proud of may not be anything to be proud of, and in fact may be just an artifact of our hardware that has no particular purpose or benefit. Echopraxia explores those themes in more depth.

Watts used to hold those positions more strongly. I think he has updated his opinions more recently in Nov 2022. His blog has some posts about consciousness and survival

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10307

What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades. If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them.

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10225

Only now—now, as it turns out, maybe sentience implies survival after all. Maybe I’ve had my head up my ass all these years.

I’m not sure I buy it. Then again, I’m not writing it off, either.

I think I understand why an agenda seems important for consciousness - but why must that agenda include a survival instinct?

What is a survival instinct? Does a virus have one?

but why must that agenda include a survival instinct?

... because we're dealing with evolved systems, no? They have to have survival instinct.

Watts is skeptical but not as extreme, and cites Metzinger to show that consciousness/self-awareness based on a first-person biographic narrative is a utilitarian function for lossy self-modeling that could plausibly be dropped if we were capable of looking at our underlying «code» directly. I also think he softened to the idea of consciousness/self-modeling being necessary over the years.

I guess Bakker goes further; his views are in line with La Mettrie.

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