But after looking over this, reexamining, yeah, what causes people to talk about consciousness in these ways?
I agree. The eliminationist approach cannot explain why people talk so much about consciousness. Well, maybe it can, but the post sure doesn’t try. I think your argument that consciousness is related to self-other modeling points into the right direction, but doesn’t do the full work and in that sense falls short in the same way “emergence” does.
Perceiving is going on in the brain and my guess would be that the process of perceiving can be perceived too[1]. As there is already a highly predictive model of physical identity—the body—the simplest (albeit wrong) model is for the brain to identify its body and its observations of its perceptions.
Maybe the way to transcend it is to develop a more sophisticated kind of self-model.
I think that’s kind of what meditation can lead to.
If AGI can become conscious (in a way that people would agree to counts), and if sufficient self-modeling can lead to no-self via meditation, then presumably AGI would also quickly master that too.
I don’t know whether the brain nas some intra-brain neuronal feedback or observation-interpretation loops (“I see that I have done this action”). For LLMs, because they don’t have feedback-loops internally, it could be via the context window or through observing its outputs in its training data.
I think that’s kind of what meditation can lead to.
It should, right? But isn’t there a very large overlap between meditators and people who mystify consciousness?
Maybe in the same way as there’s also a very large overlap between people who are pursuing good financial advice and people who end up receiving bad financial advice… Some genres are majority shit, so if I characterise the genre by the average article I’ve encountered from it, of course I will think the genre is shit. But there’s a common adverse selection process where the majority of any genre, through no fault of its own, will be shit, because shit is easier to produce, and because it doesn’t work, it creates repeat customers, so building for the audience who want shit is far far more profitable.
Agree? As long as meditation practice can’t systematically produce and explain the states, it’s just craft and not engineering or science. But I think we will get there.
I agree. The eliminationist approach cannot explain why people talk so much about consciousness. Well, maybe it can, but the post sure doesn’t try. I think your argument that consciousness is related to self-other modeling points into the right direction, but doesn’t do the full work and in that sense falls short in the same way “emergence” does.
Perceiving is going on in the brain and my guess would be that the process of perceiving can be perceived too[1]. As there is already a highly predictive model of physical identity—the body—the simplest (albeit wrong) model is for the brain to identify its body and its observations of its perceptions.
I think that’s kind of what meditation can lead to.
If AGI can become conscious (in a way that people would agree to counts), and if sufficient self-modeling can lead to no-self via meditation, then presumably AGI would also quickly master that too.
I don’t know whether the brain nas some intra-brain neuronal feedback or observation-interpretation loops (“I see that I have done this action”). For LLMs, because they don’t have feedback-loops internally, it could be via the context window or through observing its outputs in its training data.
It should, right? But isn’t there a very large overlap between meditators and people who mystify consciousness?
Maybe in the same way as there’s also a very large overlap between people who are pursuing good financial advice and people who end up receiving bad financial advice… Some genres are majority shit, so if I characterise the genre by the average article I’ve encountered from it, of course I will think the genre is shit. But there’s a common adverse selection process where the majority of any genre, through no fault of its own, will be shit, because shit is easier to produce, and because it doesn’t work, it creates repeat customers, so building for the audience who want shit is far far more profitable.
Agree? As long as meditation practice can’t systematically produce and explain the states, it’s just craft and not engineering or science. But I think we will get there.