I don’t know the answer, and I’m pretty sure nobody else does either.
I see similar statements all the time (no one has solved consciousness yet / no one knows whether LLMs/chickens/insects/fish are conscious / I can only speculate and I’m pretty sure this is true for everyone else / etc.) … and I don’t see how this confidence is justified. The idea seems to be that no one can’t have found the correct answers to the philosophical problems yet because if they had, those answers would immediately make waves and soon everyone on LessWrong would know about it. But it’s like… do you really think this? People can’t even agree on whether consciousness is a well-defined thing or a lossy abstraction; do we really think that if someone had the right answers, they would automatically convince everyone of them?
There are other fields where those kinds of statements make sense, like physics. If someone finds the correct answer to a physics question, they can run an experiment and prove it. But if someone finds the correct answer to a philosophical question, then they can… try to write essays about it explaining the answer? Which maybe will be slightly more effective than essays arguing for any number of different positions because the answer is true?
I can imagine someone several hundred years ago having figured out, purely based on first-principles reasoning, that life is no crisp category at the territory but just a lossy conceptual abstraction. I can imagine them being highly confident in this result because they’ve derived it for correct reasons and they’ve verified all the steps that got them there. And I can imagine someone else throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t know what mysterious force is behind the phenomenon of life, and I’m pretty sure no one else does, either”.
Which is all just to say—isn’t it much more likely that the problem has been solved, and there are people who are highly confident in the solution because they have verified all the steps that led them there, and they know with high confidence which features need to be replicated to preserve consciousness… but you just don’t know about it because “find the correct solution” and “convince people of a solution” are mostly independent problems, and there’s just no reason why the correct solution would organically spread?
(As I’ve mentioned, the “we know that no one knows” thing is something I see expressed all the time, usually just stated as a self-evident fact—so I’m equally arguing against everyone else who’s expressed it. This just happens to the be first time that I’ve decided to formulate my objection.)
But if someone finds the correct answer to a philosophical question, then they can… try to write essays about it explaining the answer? Which maybe will be slightly more effective than essays arguing for any number of different positions because the answer is true?
I think this is a crux. To the extent that it’s a purely philosophical problem (a modeling choice, contingent mostly on opinions and consensus about “useful” rather than “true”), posts like this one make no sense. To the extent that it’s expressed as propositions that can be tested (even if not now, it could be described how it will resolve), it’s NOT purely philosophical.
This post appears to be about an empirical question—can a human brain be simulated with sufficient fidelity to be indistinguishable from a biological brain. It’s not clear whether OP is talking about an arbitrary new person, or if they include the upload problem as part of the unlikelihood. It’s also not clear why anyone cares about this specific aspect of it, so maybe your comments are appropriate.
What about if it’s a philosophical problem that has empirical consequences? I.e., suppose answering the philosophical questions tells you enough about the brain that you know how hard it would be to simulate it on a digital computer. In this case, the answer can be tested—but not yet—and I still think you wouldn’t know if someone had the answer already.
I’d call that an empirical problem that has philosophical consequences :)
And it’s still not worth a lot of debate about far-mode possibilities, but it MAY be worth exploring what we actually know and we we can test in the near-term. They’ve fully(*) emulated some brains—https://openworm.org/ is fascinating in how far it’s come very recently. They’re nowhere near to emulating a brain big enough to try to compare WRT complex behaviors from which consciousness can be inferred.
* “fully” is not actually claimed nor tested. Only the currently-measurable neural weights and interactions are emulated. More subtle physical properties may well turn out to be important, but we can’t tell yet if that’s so.
I’d call that an empirical problem that has philosophical consequences :)
That’s arguable, but I think the key point is that if the reasoning used to solve the problem is philosophical, then a correct solution is quite unlikely to be recognized as such just because someone posted it somewhere. Even if it’s in a peer-reviewed journal somewhere. That’s the claim I would make, anyway. (I think when it comes to consciousness, whatever philosophical solution you have will probably have empirical consequences in principle, but they’ll often not be practically measurable with current neurotech.)
I see similar statements all the time (no one has solved consciousness yet / no one knows whether LLMs/chickens/insects/fish are conscious / I can only speculate and I’m pretty sure this is true for everyone else / etc.) … and I don’t see how this confidence is justified. The idea seems to be that no one can’t have found the correct answers to the philosophical problems yet because if they had, those answers would immediately make waves and soon everyone on LessWrong would know about it. But it’s like… do you really think this? People can’t even agree on whether consciousness is a well-defined thing or a lossy abstraction; do we really think that if someone had the right answers, they would automatically convince everyone of them?
There are other fields where those kinds of statements make sense, like physics. If someone finds the correct answer to a physics question, they can run an experiment and prove it. But if someone finds the correct answer to a philosophical question, then they can… try to write essays about it explaining the answer? Which maybe will be slightly more effective than essays arguing for any number of different positions because the answer is true?
I can imagine someone several hundred years ago having figured out, purely based on first-principles reasoning, that life is no crisp category at the territory but just a lossy conceptual abstraction. I can imagine them being highly confident in this result because they’ve derived it for correct reasons and they’ve verified all the steps that got them there. And I can imagine someone else throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t know what mysterious force is behind the phenomenon of life, and I’m pretty sure no one else does, either”.
Which is all just to say—isn’t it much more likely that the problem has been solved, and there are people who are highly confident in the solution because they have verified all the steps that led them there, and they know with high confidence which features need to be replicated to preserve consciousness… but you just don’t know about it because “find the correct solution” and “convince people of a solution” are mostly independent problems, and there’s just no reason why the correct solution would organically spread?
(As I’ve mentioned, the “we know that no one knows” thing is something I see expressed all the time, usually just stated as a self-evident fact—so I’m equally arguing against everyone else who’s expressed it. This just happens to the be first time that I’ve decided to formulate my objection.)
I think this is a crux. To the extent that it’s a purely philosophical problem (a modeling choice, contingent mostly on opinions and consensus about “useful” rather than “true”), posts like this one make no sense. To the extent that it’s expressed as propositions that can be tested (even if not now, it could be described how it will resolve), it’s NOT purely philosophical.
This post appears to be about an empirical question—can a human brain be simulated with sufficient fidelity to be indistinguishable from a biological brain. It’s not clear whether OP is talking about an arbitrary new person, or if they include the upload problem as part of the unlikelihood. It’s also not clear why anyone cares about this specific aspect of it, so maybe your comments are appropriate.
What about if it’s a philosophical problem that has empirical consequences? I.e., suppose answering the philosophical questions tells you enough about the brain that you know how hard it would be to simulate it on a digital computer. In this case, the answer can be tested—but not yet—and I still think you wouldn’t know if someone had the answer already.
I’d call that an empirical problem that has philosophical consequences :)
And it’s still not worth a lot of debate about far-mode possibilities, but it MAY be worth exploring what we actually know and we we can test in the near-term. They’ve fully(*) emulated some brains—https://openworm.org/ is fascinating in how far it’s come very recently. They’re nowhere near to emulating a brain big enough to try to compare WRT complex behaviors from which consciousness can be inferred.
* “fully” is not actually claimed nor tested. Only the currently-measurable neural weights and interactions are emulated. More subtle physical properties may well turn out to be important, but we can’t tell yet if that’s so.
That’s arguable, but I think the key point is that if the reasoning used to solve the problem is philosophical, then a correct solution is quite unlikely to be recognized as such just because someone posted it somewhere. Even if it’s in a peer-reviewed journal somewhere. That’s the claim I would make, anyway. (I think when it comes to consciousness, whatever philosophical solution you have will probably have empirical consequences in principle, but they’ll often not be practically measurable with current neurotech.)