Before finishing (or perhaps as a sequel?) you should make sure to watch Cristof’s Koch’s “neural correlates of consciousness” talk. He’s been giving variations on this talk for something like 10 years that I know of and its pretty polished. Its gotten better over the years and the speaker is the source of my current working definition of consciousness (quoted below). Which is not about language I/O and compression but about internal experiences themselves and what systems implement them.
The core insight is that you can show someone a visual trick (like the faces or goblet image) and you can go back and forth “seeing different interpretations”. When you’re in one or the other state “internal state” this is you having different kinds of “qualia”, and presumably these distinct perceptual states have “biological correlates”.
Manipulation of these internal mental states and study of the associated physical systems become the “object of study” in order to crack the mind-body problem. Once you’ve got the neural level you can ask about high level issues like algorithms or ask about deeper mechanisms like neurotransmitters and genes and so on. Full understanding would imply that we could create mutant “zombie mice” and that they would have no qualia (of certain sorts) and be incapable of whatever behavior was “computed” in a way that involved (that sort of) qualia.
Ideally we would have a theory to predict and and explain such phenomenon and perhaps we’d be able to invent things like a pill that lets you “become a p-zombie” for an hour (though I suspect part of that would involve shutting down enough memory formation processes that you would not be able to remember the experience except via something external like videotape).
The Q&A has much more sophisticated objections/questions than you usually get on the subject of minds. The final question ends with Koch’s working theory which sounds about right to me. Quoting Koch when asked why he thinks bees are probably conscious and why he became vegetarian:
Rather than endless speculation there has to be some complex behavior, so forget about plants or even simple single celled organisms. If they do very simple stereotypical things I see no reason to ascribe consciousness to them. This may be wrong ultimately, but I think right now that’s my index for consciousness: reasonably complex, non-stereotypical behavior that involves online dynamic storage of information.
My summary above cuts to what I think is the core insight about focusing clearly and experimentally on exactly the elements of interest: consciousness and neurons. The talk itself is a summary of the main points of many papers with different points and some demonstrations of the experimental manipulations.
The talk itself (rather than the intros) starts about 4 minutes in. I recommend just watching it. Koch is a pretty good speaker and this is sort of his “dog and pony show” where he summarizes an entire research program in a way that’s been iteratively optimized for years. Your 60 minutes will not be wasted :-)
Before finishing (or perhaps as a sequel?) you should make sure to watch Cristof’s Koch’s “neural correlates of consciousness” talk. He’s been giving variations on this talk for something like 10 years that I know of and its pretty polished. Its gotten better over the years and the speaker is the source of my current working definition of consciousness (quoted below). Which is not about language I/O and compression but about internal experiences themselves and what systems implement them.
The core insight is that you can show someone a visual trick (like the faces or goblet image) and you can go back and forth “seeing different interpretations”. When you’re in one or the other state “internal state” this is you having different kinds of “qualia”, and presumably these distinct perceptual states have “biological correlates”.
Manipulation of these internal mental states and study of the associated physical systems become the “object of study” in order to crack the mind-body problem. Once you’ve got the neural level you can ask about high level issues like algorithms or ask about deeper mechanisms like neurotransmitters and genes and so on. Full understanding would imply that we could create mutant “zombie mice” and that they would have no qualia (of certain sorts) and be incapable of whatever behavior was “computed” in a way that involved (that sort of) qualia.
Ideally we would have a theory to predict and and explain such phenomenon and perhaps we’d be able to invent things like a pill that lets you “become a p-zombie” for an hour (though I suspect part of that would involve shutting down enough memory formation processes that you would not be able to remember the experience except via something external like videotape).
The Q&A has much more sophisticated objections/questions than you usually get on the subject of minds. The final question ends with Koch’s working theory which sounds about right to me. Quoting Koch when asked why he thinks bees are probably conscious and why he became vegetarian:
Thanks for the pointer! This will help me to connect my speculations to the existing literature.
Any text version/transcript of this lecture, or paper that explains the points in the talk?
My summary above cuts to what I think is the core insight about focusing clearly and experimentally on exactly the elements of interest: consciousness and neurons. The talk itself is a summary of the main points of many papers with different points and some demonstrations of the experimental manipulations.
The talk itself (rather than the intros) starts about 4 minutes in. I recommend just watching it. Koch is a pretty good speaker and this is sort of his “dog and pony show” where he summarizes an entire research program in a way that’s been iteratively optimized for years. Your 60 minutes will not be wasted :-)