[...] but people in fact mean a whole slew of wildly different things when they talk about “consciousness”.
Just because you have a different name for a concept doesn’t necessarily mean that the concept isn’t instrumentally convergent. It might be that there is a whole set of concepts that different people label with the same word, or the same concept that people have different names for.
In one video Judea Pearl was talking about consciousness as a kind of self-model that an agent could have. This is completely different from defining consciousness as there is some subjective experience. I.e. a system is conscious if it’s like something to be a particular system, as Sam Harris would say it.
This means that we can run into a situation where we have the name “Consciousness” is a pointer to “A system has a model of itself” and “It’s like something to be a system”. But hypothetically Sam Harris might have the same concept of “A system has a model of itself” and Judea Pearl might have the concept of “It is like something to be this system” but label them with different names. Or actually not have any labels at all.
I have noticed within myself very often that I create new concepts that I do not label, which is bad, because later on I then realize that this concept already exists and somebody has thought about it, but because I didn’t label it, I had just this very vague, fuzzy object in my mind that I couldn’t really put my finger on precisely and therefore it was hard to think about, making me not cash out the insights that I could have cashed out that seem pretty obvious once I read about what other people have thought about that particular concept.
So, with concepts, there might be a lot more conversions that is visible at first glance, because of different labels.
Just because you have a different name for a concept doesn’t necessarily mean that the concept isn’t instrumentally convergent. It might be that there is a whole set of concepts that different people label with the same word, or the same concept that people have different names for.
In one video Judea Pearl was talking about consciousness as a kind of self-model that an agent could have. This is completely different from defining consciousness as there is some subjective experience. I.e. a system is conscious if it’s like something to be a particular system, as Sam Harris would say it.
This means that we can run into a situation where we have the name “Consciousness” is a pointer to “A system has a model of itself” and “It’s like something to be a system”. But hypothetically Sam Harris might have the same concept of “A system has a model of itself” and Judea Pearl might have the concept of “It is like something to be this system” but label them with different names. Or actually not have any labels at all.
I have noticed within myself very often that I create new concepts that I do not label, which is bad, because later on I then realize that this concept already exists and somebody has thought about it, but because I didn’t label it, I had just this very vague, fuzzy object in my mind that I couldn’t really put my finger on precisely and therefore it was hard to think about, making me not cash out the insights that I could have cashed out that seem pretty obvious once I read about what other people have thought about that particular concept.
So, with concepts, there might be a lot more conversions that is visible at first glance, because of different labels.