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0 pointsffwd21d ago0 comments

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).

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eszed21d ago· 2 in thread

I proposed in another comment that consciousness and self-awareness are at least close cousins, and perhaps the same phenomenon. If that's true, then that's an axis upon which you might create comparative measures. Yes, hamsters are conscious, but they don't have a sense of self to the same degree that gorillas do. If you posit capacity for language as another emergent property of sufficiently-complex networks, then you have another measure.

LLMs, then, are particularly unintuitive to us, because they've got to the language part first, long before they've reached even hamster-level self-awareness. They're not, however, biological networks, so there's no reason these properties need arise in the same order, or indeed in the same ways.

I'm not entirely convinced by that second paragraph, but I think the logic holds together.

ffwdOP21d ago

I'm not sure consciousness and self-awareness are the same thing. First is we can be conscious when we sleep/during REM sleep, where it's arguable we are not self-aware. And if not that, we can even do it when awake, for example when we think about a movie, or a philosophical problem, we can have conscious thoughts that are not related to the self. This leads me to believe consciousness is separate from self-awareness. Self-awareness is _one thing_, among many, that the brain can think about and be conscious of.

eszed21d ago

Sure, but capacity for self-awareness? I'd guess that hamsters dream, and that their subconscious processes (eg, desires for food and sleep and sex), and maybe even emotions, run much like ours. It's just that humans, with more complex neural networks, have more layers added on top. It's similar to how the brain-stems of everything from lizards on "up" function similarly, but humans have more-developed pre-frontal cortexes and so forth. (Don't hold me to those details, please, I'm not a neuro-anatomist! You can see where I'm going with that, though, right?)

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