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If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

14 points ashergill 1 hour ago 19 comments

yepyoukno 41 minutes ago | parent

Absurdist. The Ship of Theseus in modern prose.

Post modernism abhors objective truth, and now this? Consciousness compressed to conscious compressed to acts like must be like?

Intelligence is not compression, proof of point.

Nothing has been “figured out” here, only mulched for compulsive and over saturated appetites.

PaulHoule 26 minutes ago | parent

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

doing sports photography as-a-fox [1] I am a bit scared of clusters of people screaming hard for their team, like I picture they'll attack me like a pack of wolves. I really gotta get over this and chat them up at half time and get a group photo.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork

trescenzi 18 minutes ago | parent

Yea I’m a weirdo who’s willing to claim that a for loop might be conscious. There’s physical state and comparisons happening after all.

But all that actually does is abuse the question being asked and the definition of consciousness. The question isn’t even “does a for loop have qualia” it’s actually “what does it mean if a for loop has qualia”. The individual asking if LLMs are conscious is concerned about the implication of the answer. To which a yes based upon a very improvised definition doesn’t actually resolve.

stiiv 17 minutes ago | parent

The abstract appeals to a few intuitions, and then vaguely waves toward a kind of slippery slope based on those intuitions, while adding that we ought to not use spatial distribution as bearing on parthood for certain kinds of entities. This has further intuitive appeal for folks who think that consciousness is a kind of emergent property.

It's a little cheeky and seems a little undergrad-ish to me, but I wouldn't call that either absurdist or postmodern.

Also what's wrong with the ship of theseus? If _you're_ tired of hearing that kind of argument, that's fine, but why dismiss it? It's thought-provoking at least, and the kind of thought it provokes has, in my opinion, some practical import

nimih 14 minutes ago | parent

This paper doesn't seem to have much to do with post-modernism at all; it strikes me as much more in line with modern analytic philosophy.

Nor does it make any claims about the nature of intelligence, for that matter.

Did you even read the abstract?

d_theorist 25 minutes ago | parent

I only read the abstract, but this sounds a lot like the dust theory from Greg Egan's books.

This is one of the main things that made me seriously doubt my prior assumption that consciousness supervenes over computation.

robinpie 24 minutes ago | parent

The author frames this as "either accept this highly counterintuitive result, or take it as a reason to doubt materialism, or find a principled criterion that excludes entities like this" but honestly this doesn't really strike me as highly counterintuitive

moomin 22 minutes ago | parent

Pretty sure this is basically the plot to Tales of Arise.

_alternator_ 20 minutes ago | parent

Materialism implies Panpsychism. Not a surprise, but this is put forward in a confrontational way.

The real question for Panpsychism is not whether something is or is not conscious, but conscious of what. If everything is aware, what is this thing we have that a rock doesn't seem to have (but LLMs might have)? I'm basically sold on the premise of Panpsychism, but we do have to recognize that when we say "consciousness", we aren't always talking about the same thing.

wolframhempel 17 minutes ago | parent

I'm perfectly happy to believe that the United States has an awareness of itself in the abstract sense that its a complex system with emerging behaviors that are feedbackloops of itself. I'm also convinced that all mammals and most sea and air creatures have consciousness in this as well as the more general sense.

To me, the fact that an awareness of one self exists isn't particularly stunning - what's stunning to me is that we believe it is something incredibly special and we are the only ones endowed with it.

I think this assumption comes from the same human self confidence that decided it was the only thing "created in gods image" in the universe and so on...

omnicognate 15 minutes ago | parent

> something it's like to be you

This phrase comes up a lot in discussions of consciousness and I've never understood it and never seen why it's supposed to encapsulate the idea.

It isn't "like" anything to be me. There isn't something else I can compare it to. All I know is that I exist and experience and that there is an aspect of that experience that is impossible to communicate, define or share.

ForHackernews 12 minutes ago | parent

Being you is (presumably) like something: it's nice being you, it's miserable being you, it's exhausting being you, it's invigorating being you... whatever it is like, I can't describe it but you experience it.

You have a subjective internal experience. A thermostat does not. An LLM presumably does not. A dog or a bat [0] presumably does.

[0] https://ia800100.us.archive.org/5/items/thomas-nagel-what-is...

delichon 11 minutes ago | parent

No individual wrote the Constitution. It was a collective effort. Yet it has features of a work we would expect from a consciousness, such as a view of itself as embedded in a larger historical context. I don't have a hard time seeing that document as a form of speech emitted by a conscious collective. And not knowing exactly how human individual consciousness works, it isn't very clear whether such collective consciousness is a metaphor or an example.

blfr 5 minutes ago | parent

So are companies, right?