I don’t feel like I fall super hard into one of these camps or the other, although I agree they exist. I think from the outside folks would probably say I’m a very camp 2 person, but as I see it that’s only insofar as I’m not willing to give up and say that there’s nothing of value beyond the camp 1 approach.
This is perhaps reflected in my own thinking about “consciousness”. I think the core thing going on is not complex, but instead quite simple: negative feedback loops that create information that’s internal to a system. I identify signals within a feedback circuit as the core thing we care about when we talk about qualia. Humans just happen to be made up of very complex circuits layered on top of each other to create very complex, multi-circuit signals that combine in ways to create the relatively complex sorts of experiences we have, and this causes all kinds of confusion.
I think folks of both camps dislike this sort of thing though because, if we reduce consciousness to this, it implies pansychism, but not pansychism of the kind most panpsychist proponents put forward. Thus, everyone is pissed off. Still, I don’t see a better option.
I wrote about these ideas in some depth a while back as part of trying to figure out some things about AI alignment. I’m not sure I was very successfully on the figuring out things about AI alignment part, but I feel pretty good about the understanding consciousness stuff 5 years later, especially given everything we’ve since seen about the mind thanks to evidence suggesting something like perceptual control theory is probably close to right.
I don’t feel like I fall super hard into one of these camps or the other, although I agree they exist. I think from the outside folks would probably say I’m a very camp 2 person, but as I see it that’s only insofar as I’m not willing to give up and say that there’s nothing of value beyond the camp 1 approach.
This is perhaps reflected in my own thinking about “consciousness”. I think the core thing going on is not complex, but instead quite simple: negative feedback loops that create information that’s internal to a system. I identify signals within a feedback circuit as the core thing we care about when we talk about qualia. Humans just happen to be made up of very complex circuits layered on top of each other to create very complex, multi-circuit signals that combine in ways to create the relatively complex sorts of experiences we have, and this causes all kinds of confusion.
I think folks of both camps dislike this sort of thing though because, if we reduce consciousness to this, it implies pansychism, but not pansychism of the kind most panpsychist proponents put forward. Thus, everyone is pissed off. Still, I don’t see a better option.
I wrote about these ideas in some depth a while back as part of trying to figure out some things about AI alignment. I’m not sure I was very successfully on the figuring out things about AI alignment part, but I feel pretty good about the understanding consciousness stuff 5 years later, especially given everything we’ve since seen about the mind thanks to evidence suggesting something like perceptual control theory is probably close to right.