Thank you for the link to the Friston paper. I’m reading that and will watch Lex Fridman’s interview with Joscha Bach, too. I sort of think “illusionism” is a bit too strong, but perhaps it’s a misnomer rather than wrong (or I could be wrong altogether). Clark, Friston, and Wilkinson say
But in what follows we aim not to Quine (explain away) qualia but to ‘Bayes’ them – to reveal them as products of a broadly speaking rational process of inference, of the kind imagined by the Reverend Bayes in his (1763) treatise on how to form and update beliefs on the basis of new evidence. Our story thus aims to occupy the somewhat elusive ‘revisionary’ space, in between full strength ‘illusionism’ (see below) and out-and-out realism
and I think somewhere in the middle sounds more plausible to me.
Anyhow, I’ll read the paper first before I try to respond more substantively to your remarks, but I intend to!
But in what follows we aim not to Quine (explain away) qualia …
“Quining means some thing stronger than “explaining away”. Dennett:
The verb “to quine” is even more esoteric. It comes from The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c, 8th edn., 1987), a satirical dictionary of eponyms: “quine, v. To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.”
I’ve never heard Bach himself calling his position “illusionism”, I’ve just applied this label to his view spontaneously. This could be inaccurate, indeed, especially from the perspective of historical usage of the term.
Instead of Bach’s interviews with Lex, I’d recommend this recent show: https://youtu.be/PkkN4bJN2pg (disclaimer: you will need to persevere through a lot of bad and often lengthy and ranty takes on AI by the hosts throughout the show, which at least to me was quite annoying. Unfortunately, there is no transcript, it seems.)
I found the Clark et al. (2019) “Bayesing Qualia” article very useful, and that did give me an intuition of the account that perhaps sentience arises out of self-awareness. But they themselves acknowledged in their conclusion that the paper didn’t quite demonstrate that principle, and I didn’t find myself convinced of it.
Perhaps what I’d like readers to take away is that sentience and self-awareness can be at the very least conceptually distinguished. Even if it isn’t clear empirically whether or not they are intrinsically linked, we ought to maintain a conceptual distinction in order to form testable hypotheses about whether they are in fact linked, and in order to reason about the nature of any link. Perhaps I should call that “Theoretical orthogonality”. This is important to be able to reason whether, for instance, giving our AIs a self-awareness or situational awareness will cause them to be sentient. I do not think that will be the case, although I do think that, if you gave them the sort of detailed self-monitoring feelings that humans have, that may yield sentience itself. But it’s not clear!
I listened to the whole episode with Bach as a result of your recommendation! Bach hardly even got a chance to express his ideas, and I’m not much closer to understanding his account of
meta-awareness (i.e., awareness of awareness) within the model of oneself which acts as a ‘first-person character’ in the movie/dream/”controlled hallucination” that the human brain constantly generates for oneself is the key thing that also compels the brain to attach qualia (experiences) to the model. In other words, the “character within the movie” thinks that it feels something because it has meta-awareness (i.e., the character is aware that it is aware (which reflects the actual meta-cognition in the brain, rather than in the brain, insofar the character is a faithful model of reality).
which seems like a crux here.
He sort of briefly described “consciousness as a dream state” at the very end, but although I did get the sense that maybe he thinks meta-awareness and sentience are connected, I didn’t really hear a great argument for that point of view.
He spent several minutes arguing that agency, or seeking a utility function, is something humans have, but that these things aren’t sufficient for consciousness (I don’t remember whether he said whether they were necessary, so I suppose we don’t know if he thinks they’re orthogonal).
Thank you for the link to the Friston paper. I’m reading that and will watch Lex Fridman’s interview with Joscha Bach, too. I sort of think “illusionism” is a bit too strong, but perhaps it’s a misnomer rather than wrong (or I could be wrong altogether). Clark, Friston, and Wilkinson say
and I think somewhere in the middle sounds more plausible to me.
Anyhow, I’ll read the paper first before I try to respond more substantively to your remarks, but I intend to!
“Quining means some thing stronger than “explaining away”. Dennett:
I’ve never heard Bach himself calling his position “illusionism”, I’ve just applied this label to his view spontaneously. This could be inaccurate, indeed, especially from the perspective of historical usage of the term.
Instead of Bach’s interviews with Lex, I’d recommend this recent show: https://youtu.be/PkkN4bJN2pg (disclaimer: you will need to persevere through a lot of bad and often lengthy and ranty takes on AI by the hosts throughout the show, which at least to me was quite annoying. Unfortunately, there is no transcript, it seems.)
I found the Clark et al. (2019) “Bayesing Qualia” article very useful, and that did give me an intuition of the account that perhaps sentience arises out of self-awareness. But they themselves acknowledged in their conclusion that the paper didn’t quite demonstrate that principle, and I didn’t find myself convinced of it.
Perhaps what I’d like readers to take away is that sentience and self-awareness can be at the very least conceptually distinguished. Even if it isn’t clear empirically whether or not they are intrinsically linked, we ought to maintain a conceptual distinction in order to form testable hypotheses about whether they are in fact linked, and in order to reason about the nature of any link. Perhaps I should call that “Theoretical orthogonality”. This is important to be able to reason whether, for instance, giving our AIs a self-awareness or situational awareness will cause them to be sentient. I do not think that will be the case, although I do think that, if you gave them the sort of detailed self-monitoring feelings that humans have, that may yield sentience itself. But it’s not clear!
I listened to the whole episode with Bach as a result of your recommendation! Bach hardly even got a chance to express his ideas, and I’m not much closer to understanding his account of
which seems like a crux here.
He sort of briefly described “consciousness as a dream state” at the very end, but although I did get the sense that maybe he thinks meta-awareness and sentience are connected, I didn’t really hear a great argument for that point of view.
He spent several minutes arguing that agency, or seeking a utility function, is something humans have, but that these things aren’t sufficient for consciousness (I don’t remember whether he said whether they were necessary, so I suppose we don’t know if he thinks they’re orthogonal).