If No Consciousness Exists, By What Right Does The Universe?

[river]

I believe in proto- consciousness. i.e. responses to sensory stimulation already present in very primitive organisms. The fundamental fight or flight response has evolved in so many different ways. It always comes down to natural selection of that behavior which gives the organism a higher survival probability. Time does the rest.
Consider a cuttlefish which has the perfect dual technique of shape shifting in a perfect blend with the environment, successfully hiding from predators and at the same time offer a hunting advantage of ambush.

According to the GPT3 developers the limit has not yet been reached and they believe that with more capacity and inter-referential connections, an AI may acquire a form of consciousness that is not necessary connected to emotional chemistry, but more on a logical level, what Vulcans strived to attain in StarTrek

I think that the breakthrough occurred with the concept of text based algorithms, where the AI can access any definitions, synonyms, and antonyms of words and sentences and learn to use express itself in "context", rather than pure binary number data processing.

Ask a GPT3 to design a welcome page with a Google logo and it will design it, but at the same time it will write the code that designs it and when modifications are desired of the original, the AI will promptly execute the requested modification along with a modification in the code. It will design a number of pictures based on a simple premise, such as "design a chair that looks like an avocado.

GPT3 is not anything like Siri or Alexa . GPT3 learns from illustrated text books just like humans and applies what it learns in real time responses. What is there to stop GPT3 from acquiring artificial conscious intelligence?

I believe consciousness intelligence is not only an ability to observe, but also very much connected with understanding the thing that is being observed. And I believe AI can rise to that level if it is taught as if it were human. It takes a human to learn conscious intelligence (IQ) some 18 years to fully develop. Give GPT3 that amount of time and large numbers of Memory and RAM and it will essentially gain the same "understanding" as humans.

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So AI is based on Human Understanding . So AI can not go beyond what information is being fed into it by Humans .

 

[Write4U]

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So AI is based on Human Understanding . So AI can not go beyond what information is being fed into it by Humans .

What other information is there? But humans do not feed it information, the AI searches for it, so it may occasionally come up with some different conclusions than human accepted truths.

 

[C C]

I believe that the concept of unconscious self-reference has an implied potential for an evolving conscious self-awareness.

Ok, so do you believe that there is a gradient of consciousness, so that the more complex a system is, the more conscious it is? Would a computer then, using that logic, have some primitive consciousness? Or does it have to scale to the complexity of brains? [...] Ok, given your premises, it makes sense that you should believe that. Do you think that this building block of cause & effect that consciousness eventually emerge from when scaling up to complex brains, could also scale up to, for example, the earth (as one system of great complexity)? What could we do to prove/disprove that?

The concept of "universe" as well as a direct manifestation of planets, stars, and galaxies (in imagined, thought-like fashion) would not be the case for primitive degrees of consciousness. Construing potentially unknown, pre-biological qualia as composing any kind of objects at all would not be possible due to lack of a memory system and the qualitative presences probably not being spatially extended (as they are in visual and tactile modes).

Indeed, while the first hunter-gatherer societies might have possessed a dim idea of the land they walked on as a "world", even the scope and nature of the cosmos for the earliest civilizations was hopelessly erroneous. So much the worse for non-human animals and on down the descending levels of cognitive complexity.

IOW, inferior consciousness neither represents nor confirms a universe existing, and the human mind itself did not quite know what it was babbling about until it reached the point of recent centuries.

This concept or interpretation -- as well as presentation -- of a "universe" might be the denizen of some grunting, armpit scratching substrate, from the perspective of a technological singularity or a vastly superior intellect and multi-dimensional manifestation producer.

 

[Write4U]

The concept of "universe" as well as a direct manifestation of planets, stars, and galaxies (in imagined, thought-like fashion) would not be the case for primitive degrees of consciousness. Construing potentially unknown, pre-biological qualia as composing any kind of objects at all would not be possible due to lack of a memory system and the qualitative presences probably not being spatially extended (as they are in visual and tactile modes).

Are you assuming that non biological chemistry cannot have memory? When I speak of potential it mean a future possibility. As I mentioned before biology is a naturally evolved expressed potential of the universe . Abiogenesis is an accepted mainstream hypothesis. Once we have biology then any prior mechanical fundamental forces may become discernible to the organism and its just a matter of time before self-referential electro-chemical exchanges become self aware sensory abilities.

Indeed, while the first hunter-gatherer societies might have possessed a dim idea of the land they walked on as a "world", even the scope and nature of the cosmos for the earliest civilizations was hopelessly erroneous. So much the worse for non-human animals and on down the descending levels of cognitive complexity.

I agree, but it is a "hard fact" that very primitive organisms already display sensory responses.

IOW, inferior consciousness neither represents nor confirms a universe existing, and the human mind itself did not quite know what it was babbling about until it reached the point of recent centuries.

Again I agree, but that does not mean that consciousness is not a naturally evolved property of a biological organism that relies on finding energy to sustain its homeostasis.

This concept or interpretation -- as well as presentation -- of a "universe" might be the denizen of some grunting, armpit scratching substrate, from the perspective of a technological singularity or a vastly superior intellect and multi-dimensional manifestation producer.

Yes, but when there is no evidence to contrary, it must be assumed that the fundamental properties of the universe had an inherent long term potential for abiogensis and the emergence of consciousness.

Else we end up with dualism and that is a much more unlikely scenario than a chronological evolutionary process resulting in self-aware biology from single celled organisms to complex brained mammals.

You cannot skip from unconscious to conscious in one giant leap. IMO, this was a very slow a gradually evolving neural pattern over the entire history of the universe.

continued

 

[Write4U]

continued..
The very early universe[edit]

The first picosecond (10−12) of cosmic time. It includes the Planck epoch, during which currently established laws of physics may not apply; the emergence in stages of the four known fundamental interactions or forces—first gravitation, and later the electromagnetic, weak and strong
interactions; and the expansion of space itself and supercooling of the still immensely hot universe due to cosmic inflation.

Tiny ripples in the universe at this stage are believed to be the basis of large-scale structures that formed much later. Different stages of the very early universe are understood to different extents. The earlier parts are beyond the grasp of practical experiments in particle physics but can be explored through other means.

The early universe[edit]

Lasting around 370,000 years. Initially, various kinds of subatomic particles are formed in stages. These particles include almost equal amounts of matter and antimatter, so most of it quickly annihilates, leaving a small excess of matter in the universe.

At about one second, neutrinos decouple; these neutrinos form the cosmic neutrino background (CνB). If primordial black holes exist, they are also formed at about one second of cosmic time. Composite subatomic particles emerge— including protons and
neutrons —and from about 2 minutes, conditions are suitable for nucleosynthesis: around 25% of the protons and all the neutrons fuse into heavier elements, initially deuterium which itself quickly fuses into mainly helium-4.

By 20 minutes, the universe is no longer hot enough for nuclear fusion, but far too hot for neutral atoms to exist or photons to travel far. It is therefore an opaque plasma.

The recombination epoch begins at around 18,000 years, as electrons are combining with helium nuclei to form He+. At around 47,000 years,[2] as the universe cools, its behaviour begins to be dominated by matter rather than radiation. At around 100,000 years, after the neutral helium atoms form, helium hydride is the first molecule. (Much later, hydrogen and helium hydride react to form molecular hydrogen, the fuel needed for the first stars.) At about 370,000 years,[3] neutral hydrogen atoms finish forming ("recombination"), and as a result the universe also became transparent for the first time. The newly formed atoms—mainly hydrogen and helium with traces of lithium—quickly reach their lowest energy state (ground state) by releasing photons ("photon decoupling"), and these photons can still be detected today as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This is the oldest observation we currently have of the universe.

The Dark Ages and large-scale structure emergence[edit]

From 370,000 years until about 1 billion years. After recombination and decoupling, the universe was transparent but the clouds of hydrogen only collapsed very slowly to form stars and galaxies, so there were no new sources of light. The only photons (electromagnetic radiation, or "light") in the universe were those released during decoupling (visible today as the cosmic microwave background) and 21 cm radio emissions occasionally emitted by hydrogen atoms. The decoupled photons would have filled the universe with a brilliant pale orange glow at first, gradually redshifting to non-visible wavelengths
after about 3 million years, leaving it without visible light. This period is known as the cosmic Dark Ages.

Between about 10 and 17 million years the universe's average temperature was suitable for liquid water 273–373 K (0–100 °C) and there has been speculation whether rocky planets or indeed life could have arisen briefly, since statistically a tiny part of the universe could have had different conditions from the rest as a result of a very unlikely statistical fluctuation, and gained warmth from the universe as a whole.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe

While this process may have seemed chaotic, some fundamental constants (natural logical/mathematical laws) were forming along with the dynamic evolutionary processes.

IMO, all confusion is cleared up by the hypothesis that the universe operates in an unconscious, but quasi intelligent mathematical manner based on inherent values and processes, via algebraic functions.

 

[C C]

Are you assuming that non biological chemistry cannot have memory? When I speak of potential it mean a future possibility. As I mentioned before biology is a naturally evolved expressed potential of the universe . Abiogenesis is an accepted mainstream hypothesis. Once we have biology then any prior mechanical fundamental forces may become discernible to the organism and its just a matter of time before self-referential electro-chemical exchanges become self aware sensory abilities. I agree, but it is a "hard fact" that very primitive organisms already display sensory responses. Again I agree, but that does not mean that consciousness is not a naturally evolved property of a biological organism that relies on finding energy to sustain its homeostasis. Yes, but when there is no evidence to contrary, it must be assumed that the fundamental properties of the universe had an inherent long term potential for abiogensis and the emergence of consciousness.

Else we end up with dualism and that is a much more unlikely scenario than a chronological evolutionary process resulting in self-aware biology from single celled organisms to complex brained mammals.

You cannot skip from unconscious to conscious in one giant leap. IMO, this was a very slow a gradually evolving neural pattern over the entire history of the universe.

continued

Even a bent metal clothes hanger is retaining something about a past event. But that simple retention is useless for identifying and understanding its environment. 99.9999...% of everything lacks the organized information storage necessary for cognition, as well the discriminatory apparatus for achieving the rest.

Again, not even humans conceived and apprehended "cosmos" in an adept manner for most of their history. Extremely primitive experiences and vastly primitive intellects do not respectively manifest and comprehend a universe. Or even erroneously represent and construe such as the case if, say, there's nothing but 24 quantum fields and their interactions -- or something as bizarre as entangled qubits on a two-dimensional domain.

Cognition isn't global (though the capacity for interaction is, as a kind of "atom" essential for making it and computation in general possible). This belief is the collateral damage of so many using the term "panpsychism" in their positing of ontological properties that the manifestations of consciousness might developmentally arise from -- brain processes recruiting such for the phenomenal ("shown") content of perceptual and thought experiences. In contrast to, say, alternatively using a term like pan-phenomenalism.

The "psyche" root of panpsychism implies some degree of mind being ubiquitous, a suggestion that intellectual apprehension is universally available in everything from rocks to interstellar gas. That's an astounding error, since the complex equivalent of the maze of intricate and regulated interactions of a brain/body or an AI/robot is necessary for even a rodent equivalent.

Euglena successfully navigating around in water have more systemic, mechanistic procedure than a cloud. But their grasp of "what's going on" beyond the behavior of their survival routines is zilch -- they have no intellectual or conceptual life. Neither does today's autonomous vehicle (despite its technical sophistication, it's not designed for creative thought output).

 

[Write4U]

99.9999...% of everything lacks the organized information storage necessary for cognition, as well the discriminatory apparatus for achieving the rest.

I agree with everything you say, but....nothing needs organized information except those potentials (values) inherent of the object itself. In the abstract, cognition is inherent in 99.9999..% of everything. The minus end of a magnet unconsciously cognizes the positive end of another magnet. When they get close they attract each other into a relationship.
Abstraction,

the cognitive process of isolating, or “abstracting,” a common feature or relationship observed in a number of things, or the product of such a process. The property of electrical conductivity, for example, is abstracted from observations of bodies that allow electricity to flow through them; similarly, observations of pairs of lines in which one line is longer than the other can yield the relation of “being longer than.”

https://www.britannica.com/science/abstraction

Newton's 3 Laws of motion do not require conscious cognition for effective reliable functional dynamics. None of the universal constants require conscious manipulation. The are immutable properties (potentials) of "everything" .

This is why the concept of a God is superfluous. A conscious motivated entity is not required for quasi intelligent processes to allow for evolutionary trends from simple patterns into complex patterns. The mathematical laws which apparently were functional guiding mechanics at the very beginning of spacetime were sufficient for pockets of the universe to self-organize (evolve) into patterns of various dynamical densities, such as stars, earth, abiogenesis, biological life, consciousness, introspection, in that order.

 

[Cyperium]

I believe in proto- consciousness. i.e. responses to sensory stimulation already present in very primitive organisms. The fundamental fight or flight response has evolved in so many different ways. It always comes down to natural selection of that behavior which gives the organism a higher survival probability. Time does the rest.
Consider a cuttlefish which has the perfect dual technique of shape shifting in a perfect blend with the environment, successfully hiding from predators and at the same time offer a hunting advantage of ambush.

According to the GPT3 developers the limit has not yet been reached and they believe that with more capacity and inter-referential connections, an AI may acquire a form of consciousness that is not necessary connected to emotional chemistry, but more on a logical level, what Vulcans strived to attain in StarTrek

I think that the breakthrough occurred with the concept of text based algorithms, where the AI can access any definitions, synonyms, and antonyms of words and sentences and learn to use express itself in "context", rather than pure binary number data processing.

Ask a GPT3 to design a welcome page with a Google logo and it will design it, but at the same time it will write the code that designs it and when modifications are desired of the original, the AI will promptly execute the requested modification along with a modification in the code. It will design a number of pictures based on a simple premise, such as "design a chair that looks like an avocado.

GPT3 is not anything like Siri or Alexa . GPT3 learns from illustrated text books just like humans and applies what it learns in real time responses. What is there to stop GPT3 from acquiring artificial conscious intelligence?

I believe consciousness intelligence is not only an ability to observe, but also very much connected with understanding the thing that is being observed. And I believe AI can rise to that level if it is taught as if it were human. It takes a human to learn conscious intelligence (IQ) some 18 years to fully develop. Give GPT3 that amount of time and large numbers of Memory and RAM and it will essentially gain the same "understanding" as humans.

To understand something is to know the principles that it follows, in the case of that avocado chair, they train the AI on avocados to make it able to reconstruct an avocado, then it takes the weighs of the avocado and applies those weighs to a chair instead, making it a chair with the weighs of an avocado. Same can be done with faces/etc., it is impressive and will be a useful tool for us. But hardly conscious, and it doesn't really understand anything. GPT3 generates the output one token at a time, completely oblivious to what token came before, it blindly gives the output. We need a different approach to give it understanding. It has to relate principles to one another.

I believe that, given enough development, and given that we understand more about how the brain works, and also given that we continue to try to mimic the brain, it will eventually have understanding, but even then we wouldn't know if it was conscious unless the hard problem of consciousness is solved in the meantime.

I don't think that we will continue to model the AI using the brain though, cause the usage that we will have for an AI is inherently different from the purpose that the brains have (which is primarily to enable us to reproduce, foresee threats and to socialize amongst other purposes), by the time the AI is advanced enough it will ultimately diverge from the brain since it has no survival needs, and no need to socialize, no need to reproduce (since we have no need for it to do those things - even so it will eventually be able to do all those things, just not by modeling the brain).

I think consciousness will continue to be a hard problem into the future, and I don't think even the most advanced AI will be able to understand it. We will probably come to a point where we are unsure of if it is conscious or not, since ultimately we will not know how it actually works, and that is the point when the AI will be given the same rights as us humans. So we'd better start working on solving the hard problem of consciousness.

 

[Cyperium]

The concept of "universe" as well as a direct manifestation of planets, stars, and galaxies (in imagined, thought-like fashion) would not be the case for primitive degrees of consciousness. Construing potentially unknown, pre-biological qualia as composing any kind of objects at all would not be possible due to lack of a memory system and the qualitative presences probably not being spatially extended (as they are in visual and tactile modes).

The holographic model of the universe suggests a kind of memory where all times are encoded in a surface and "projected". We don't even know very much of how our own memory works, it does have characteristics of a holograph being spread out and with each part is a representation of the whole (how big the individual parts are I don't know). So even in regard to memory there could be a equivalent for the universe. Storage capacity for a black hole is the surface area which increases with added mass (information) to the black hole, the same could be said for the universe, if it would have to store more information (as is the case for the black hole) the surface area would just increase, there might be no limit to the potential storage capacity of the universe, as there is perceivably no limit to the storage capacity of a black hole (given that the universe works like a black hole which the holographic theory seem to suggest).

Indeed, while the first hunter-gatherer societies might have possessed a dim idea of the land they walked on as a "world", even the scope and nature of the cosmos for the earliest civilizations was hopelessly erroneous. So much the worse for non-human animals and on down the descending levels of cognitive complexity.

IOW, inferior consciousness neither represents nor confirms a universe existing, and the human mind itself did not quite know what it was babbling about until it reached the point of recent centuries.

This concept or interpretation -- as well as presentation -- of a "universe" might be the denizen of some grunting, armpit scratching substrate, from the perspective of a technological singularity or a vastly superior intellect and multi-dimensional manifestation producer.

It's my perception of what Write4U believes, not actually what I believe, I believe everything is conscious, not because of complexity at all but because it is a kind of "ground truth" or a foundation for everything that exists. It is what it is to exist, that is consciousness. Makes sense to me that it should apply to all that exists, not just humans. But in what form? Maybe of the form that it consists of. A human get human consciousness. Would that mean that a corpse has consciousness? Not human consciousness, cause what form it takes also depend on the processes taking place. A corpse has the same processes that the ground it rests in, whatever form that consciousness has, is the form that the corpse has. So it doesn't just depend on the shape (maybe it doesn't depend on the shape at all? But only on the processes taking place?) but also on everything that exists within that space. If you have a glass and fill it with water, it takes the shape of the glass. The water in the sea takes the shape of the whole sea.

 

[Michael 345]

conscious

• having knowledge of something; aware.
• "we are conscious of the extent of the problem"

• painfully aware of; sensitive to.
• "he was very conscious of his appearance"

• the rock lay there for hundreds of years on Mars itself doing nothing as the wind and dust acted on it
• "but it was conscious"

Attention all dictionaries and translation books. Are you aware of this new definition of conscious?

 

[Write4U]

if it would have to store more information (as is the case for the black hole) the surface area would just increase, there might be no limit to the potential storage capacity of the universe, as there is perceivably no limit to the storage capacity of a black hole (given that the universe works like a black hole which the holographic theory seem to suggest).

According to Solms all conscious activities occur at the surface area of the brain, the Cerebral Cortex;

The cerebral cortex, also known as the cerebral mantle,[1] is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals. The cerebral cortex mostly consists of the six-layered neocortex, with just 10% consisting of allocortex.[2] It is separated into two cortices, by the longitudinal fissure that divides the cerebrum into the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres are joined beneath the cortex by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system.[3] It plays a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex

To understand something is to know the principles that it follows, in the case of that avocado chair, they train the AI on avocados to make it able to reconstruct an avocado, then it takes the weighs of the avocado and applies those weighs to a chair instead, making it a chair with the weighs of an avocado. Same can be done with faces/etc., it is impressive and will be a useful tool for us. But hardly conscious, and it doesn't really understand anything. GPT3 generates the output one token at a time, completely oblivious to what token came before, it blindly gives the output. We need a different approach to give it understanding. It has to relate principles to one another.

It created the chairs as requested . Which means it understood the request. If the request had been design an avocado that looks like a chair, would the AI have come up with a different set of designs? Or would it understand the context in which the terms chair and shape of avocado are used in the request.
The brain works exactly like that, when it is presented a with a novel idea for it has two separate memories it will proceed in the exact same logical fashion as the AI. It makes a "best guess" from among several potential solutions. (Anil Seth). AFAIK, that is exactly how the text based GPT3 functions.

IMO, unconscious understanding need not be a random process. In fact 1 + 1 = 2 is an unconscious deterministic logical operation which does not require a brain at all. It's an abstract mathematical function, always arriving at the correct answer, unless the input is incorrect.
"Input <--> Function <--> Output"........ and........"Garbage in <--> Garbage out".

This is why binary (purely mathematical) computers are so accurate but unable to improvise, while text (dictionary definition) based computers have much greater freedom of choice and select for what it believes is the correct next word in the algorithm (string). That is why the GPT3 can not only present a range of solutions, but also writes the exact algorithm for every solution. That is pretty remarkable, IMO. Not quite human but close to "insect"?

The GPT3 developers claim that the limit of GPT3 evolution has not yet reached a ceiling, and if we compare the GPT3 neural net consisting of 175 billion switches, it is still a baby compared to the 125 trillion neural synapses of the brain.

125 trillion synapses

In particular, the cerebral cortex -- a thin layer of tissue on the brain's surface -- is a thicket of prolifically branching neurons. "In a human, there are more than 125 trillion synapses just in the cerebral cortex alone," That's roughly equal to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies, said Smith.Nov 17, 2010

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101117121803.htm#

The current limit lies in packaging trillions of artificial neural synapses into a small package which IMO, is the true miracle of large scale pattern complexity into a small scale pattern density of the brain.

A typical healthy human brain contains about 200 billion nerve cells, or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of tiny contacts called synapses. It is at these synapses that an electrical impulse traveling along one neuron is relayed to another, either enhancing or inhibiting the likelihood that the second nerve will fire an impulse of its own. One neuron may make as many as tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons, said Stephen Smith, PhD, professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of a paper describing the study, to be published Nov. 18 in Neuron.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101117121803.htm#

Continued....

 

[Write4U]

continued....

Purkinje Cells

Transverse section of a cerebellar folium. (Purkinje cell labeled at center top.)

These cells are some of the largest neurons in the human brain (Betz cells being the largest),[3] with an intricately elaborate dendritic arbor, characterized by a large number of dendritic spines. Purkinje cells are found within the Purkinje layer in the cerebellum.

Purkinje cells are aligned like dominos stacked one in front of the other. Their large dendritic arbors form nearly two-dimensional layers through which parallel fibers from the deeper-layers pass.

These parallel fibers make relatively weaker excitatory (glutamatergic) synapses to spines in the Purkinje cell dendrite, whereas climbing fibers originating from the inferior olivary nucleus in the medulla provide very powerful excitatory input to the proximal dendrites and cell soma.

Parallel fibers pass orthogonally through the Purkinje neuron's dendritic arbor, with up to 200,000 parallel fibers[4] forming a Granule-cell-Purkinje-cell synapse with a single Purkinje cell.

Each Purkinje cell receives approximately 500 climbing fiber synapses, all originating from a single climbing fiber.[5] Both basket and stellate cells (found in the cerebellar molecular layer) provide inhibitory (GABAergic) input to the Purkinje cell, with basket cells synapsing on the Purkinje cell axon initial segment and stellate cells onto the dendrites.

Purkinje cells send inhibitory projections to the deep cerebellar nuclei, and constitute the sole output of all motor coordination in the cerebellar cortex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell

Allowing for extremely sophisticated self-referential brain processes.
As I understand it, this ability is still lacking in the GPT3, but with more neurons and artificial synapses, this intricate self-referential data processing ability should improve and the GPT3 should be able to make better guesses, perhaps even as efficient as an early hominid?

.....................................................................
Chimpanzee 2.8×1010 neurons plus ? synapses.


Orangutan 3.26×1010 neurons plus ? synapses.


Gorilla 3.34×1010 neurons plus ? synapses.


Human 8.6×1010 neurons plus ~1.5×1014 synapses for average adult


African elephant 2.57×1010 neurons plus ? synapses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_cell

 

[Write4U]

The concept of "universe" as well as a direct manifestation of planets, stars, and galaxies (in imagined, thought-like fashion) would not be the case for primitive degrees of consciousness

That is an important observation and it's true. Yet there is clearly a large scale overall organizational product, made up from non-conscious individual particles.

Lest we forget, humans are fundamentally an self-organized pattern of non-conscious particles. And to particles we are a universe.

Our brains alone contain as much data processing synapses as stars in 1500 Milky Way sized galaxies. I am sure that each individual synapse is not conscious, but it seems to be hard fact that 259 trillion non-conscious data processors are causal to the emergence of consciousness.

Again I come back to Tegmark's hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent quality of specific patterns and specifically data processing patterns . And AFAIK all objects in the universe process fundamental data of one kind or another. Gravity, E/M, Attractive and Repulsive forces, etc.

What exactly do the terms self-referential (equations) and self-organizational (patterns) mean? Is that a form of quasi intelligent function, which under the right conditions may acquire consciousness? Like most life on earth and on other similar planets elsewhere in the universe? Is consciousness an inherent universal potential, i.e. "that which may become reality". It had to be an inherent or emergent probability, else it could not have happened .....

 

[Write4U]

To understand something is to know the principles that it follows, in the case of that avocado chair, they train the AI on avocados to make it able to reconstruct an avocado, then it takes the weighs of the avocado and applies those weighs to a chair instead, making it a chair with the weighs of an avocado.

No I believe that is a limited view of what is actually happening. No one instructs the GPT3 in any of the detailed parts. The request is "make a chair using an avocado" The GPT looks all details of avocados and chairs up on the internet and "educates itself in "tokens" just like humans. All human generated information consists of symbolic tokens (text or pictures) to begin with. And while the GPT3 is not designed to process mathematics it can learn to do many mathematical functions all by itself, gleaned from what's mathematical instruction is available on the internet.

GPT3 is a non-biological self-learning organism, just like a child going on-line and learning stuff....

Seems to me that the only thing we need to program is "motivation" and "curiosity". The AI will do all the hard work.

 

[Write4U]

IOW, inferior consciousness neither represents nor confirms a universe existing, and the human mind itself did not quite know what it was babbling about until it reached the point of recent centuries.

I agree as to the limited observational ability of primitive organisms, but to a paramecium it's universe is the water it swims in and the obstacles it bumps into, which change the directional thrust of its flagella and allow it to avoid obstacles. But AFAIK even paramecium exhibit rudimentary memory.

Paramecium

Paramecium feeding on Bacteria

Paramecium (also Paramoecium) is a genus of eukaryotic, unicellular ciliates, commonly studied as a representative of the ciliate group. Paramecia are widespread in freshwater, brackish, and marine environments and are often very abundant in stagnant basins and ponds. Because some species are readily cultivated and easily induced to conjugate and divide, it has been widely used in classrooms and laboratories to study biological processes. Its usefulness as a model organism has caused one ciliate researcher to characterize it as the "white rat" of the phylum Ciliophora.[2]

.....more

However, a study published in 2006 seems to show that Paramecium caudatum may be trained, through the application of a 6.5 volt electric current, to discriminate between brightness levels. This experiment has been cited as a possible instance of cell memory, or epigenetic learning in organisms with no nervous system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramecium#

No brain, no nervous system, yet it can learn? How on earth does it do that?.....

Epigenetics

Description

In biology, epigenetics is the study of heritable phenotype changes that do not involve alterations in the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix epi- in epigenetics implies features that are "on top of" or "in addition to" the traditional genetic basis for inheritance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_of_neurodegenerative_diseases

 

[Write4U]

This may be pertinent to our discussion the subconscious distribution of pain signals and the conscious experience of pain. This is worthy of close attention. It's awesome in scope and delivery.

 

[C C]

The holographic model of the universe suggests a kind of memory where all times are encoded in a surface and "projected". [...]

It's my perception of what Write4U believes, not actually what I believe, I believe everything is conscious, not because of complexity at all but because it is a kind of "ground truth" or a foundation for everything that exists. It is what it is to exist, that is consciousness. Makes sense to me that it should apply to all that exists, not just humans. But in what form? Maybe of the form that it consists of. A human get human consciousness. Would that mean that a corpse has consciousness? Not human consciousness, cause what form it takes also depend on the processes taking place. A corpse has the same processes that the ground it rests in, whatever form that consciousness has, is the form that the corpse has. So it doesn't just depend on the shape (maybe it doesn't depend on the shape at all? But only on the processes taking place?) but also on everything that exists within that space. If you have a glass and fill it with water, it takes the shape of the glass. The water in the sea takes the shape of the whole sea.

Forms or configurations in general rudimentarily fill an existential slot, they lack secondary levels ABOUT themselves, that reflect on themselves, that conceive themselves. Any simple and common retentions of the past located "out there" are not being used for cognition, it's not information for either psychological or artificial computational purposes. Just as 99.999...% of matter arrangements in the universe are not biological or technological, they also lack organization for systemic storing, retrieval, creative manipulation of information.

The "manifestation" or experiential characteristic of consciousness would be some ontological property of matter that science can't cope with, IF it is not amenable to technical formulation and becoming a facet of physics. Just like interaction and structure in general, it really doesn't have anything to do with consciousness until the brain or some equivalent agency recruits that capacity to build complex sensory and thought exhibitions.

Memory and cognitive processes are required to verify that the manifestations associated with a brain are even present, which would include manipulating them to reciprocally reference each other in a circular manner. For instance, I "know" that my vision features images as content because an audible-like narrative appears in my thoughts that either directly or indirectly states just that (for another person it might vary). But it's different modes of manifestation playing back and forth with each other as if to say "Oh, you are there" and ping back "You are, also", all manipulated by the hidden substrate of neural operations.

 

[C C]

That is an important observation and it's true. Yet there is clearly a large scale overall organizational product, made up from non-conscious individual particles.

Lest we forget, humans are fundamentally an self-organized pattern of non-conscious particles. And to particles we are a universe.

Our brains alone contain as much data processing synapses as stars in 1500 Milky Way sized galaxies. I am sure that each individual synapse is not conscious, but it seems to be hard fact that 259 trillion non-conscious data processors are causal to the emergence of consciousness.

Again I come back to Tegmark's hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent quality of specific patterns and specifically data processing patterns . And AFAIK all objects in the universe process fundamental data of one kind or another. Gravity, E/M, Attractive and Repulsive forces, etc. [...]

We don't call atoms "proto-humans" or "proto-organisms" because there are countless non-biological things they overwhelmingly constitute, including rocks. Similarly, most interacting patterns (structure, information) in the universe are not cognitive activity. Although an elemental precursor for cognition and intellect, 99.999... percent of what both static and dynamic configurations instantiate is not that.

 

[Write4U]

We don't call atoms "proto-humans" or "proto-organisms" because there are countless non-biological things they overwhelmingly constitute, including rocks. Similarly, most interacting patterns (structure, information) in the universe are not cognitive activity. Although an elemental precursor for cognition and intellect, 99.999... percent of what both static and dynamic configurations instantiate is not that.

I don't think I used "prot0-xxxx" in such general terms.
I believe I said that some specific atomic and molecular patterns have the "potential" to form biological life. This is what David Bohm called; "the Implicate Order". IOW when you assemble a set of values, the result (Bohm's Explicate) may well be larger than the sum of the individual values. This is the implicated but as yet enfolded order of an emergent value.

Even a bent metal clothes hanger is retaining something about a past event. But that simple retention is useless for identifying and understanding its environment. 99.9999...% of everything lacks the organized information storage necessary for cognition, as well the discriminatory apparatus for achieving the rest.

I agree with your general statement, I do think you may be limiting the conclusion.

To wit; A piece of wire has the potential for a host of "implied" uses, such as "coat-hanger", if shaped into a specific pattern which allows clothes to be stored off the ground. However a shaped coat hanger also proved to be useful as a rudimentary antenna for certain TV wave-lenghts.
One might say that a coat hanger has the potential to be used as a TV antenna. It is a proto-antenna. With some clever reshaping of the pattern a coat hanger can be explicated (unfolded order) into a relatively effective multichannel TV receiver.

So when I use the term "proto-xxxx", I mean that some of the required properties for a specific use already exist in a rudimentary form and not necessarily being used for that specific purpose, yet! But give natural selection sufficient time and it will find a use for every inherent (enfolded) potential in just a few fundamental elements .

I believe Bohm fashioned one of the most elegant postulates in science.

Implicate and explicate order

Implicate order and explicate order are ontological concepts for quantum theory coined by theoretical physicist David Bohm during the early 1980s. They are used to describe two different frameworks for understanding the same phenomenon or aspect of reality. In particular, the concepts were developed in order to explain the bizarre behavior of subatomic particles which quantum physics struggles to explain.

In Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order, he used these notions to describe how the appearance of such phenomena might appear differently, or might be characterized by, varying principal factors, depending on contexts such as scales.[1] The implicate (also referred to as the "enfolded") order is seen as a deeper and more fundamental order of reality. In contrast, the explicate or "unfolded" order includes the abstractions that humans normally perceive. As he wrote:

"In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the "explicate" or "unfolded" order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders" (Bohm 1980, p. xv).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicate_and_explicate_order

In a mathematically functioning universe all this makes perfect sense. That's why the concept appeals to me

 

[Write4U]

But hardly conscious, and it doesn't really understand anything. GPT3 generates the output one token at a time, completely oblivious to what token came before, it blindly gives the output. We need a different approach to give it understanding. It has to relate principles to one another.

In what way do you believe GPT3 cannot understand something "in context of relational principles" that sets it non-trivially apart from humans?

I think you are underestimating the subtlety of the GPT3's ability to understand context.
Don't forget, it has access to wikipedia and the definition of every word in context of its variously related principles.

In this interview, GPT3 clearly explains its thought processes and how it arrives at its "best guess". It's very similar to how the human brain arrives at its best guess. GPT3 does not employ pre-recorded data. It constructs it's answers on the fly just like humans. Sometimes it can be wrong , but humans are also wrong, sometimes.

The way it processes information is basically the same as humans . It finds in what context the request is posed and answers "in context" of the question. This is a "best guess", but in case you missed this important aspect of the human brain is that it also can only make "best guesses" of what it believes are the pertinent principles implied by the question. (Anil Seth).

According to Seth, the brain makes an initial model of the incoming data and assembles an initial "projection". It then re-verifies this projection against the incoming data and finds confirmation of its initial projected pictorial or textural answer or not, a "controlled hallucination".

Does our brain create reality?

Abstract.

It is well established that perception is not a reliable copy of the external world, but only part of it composed by external stimuli, while the rest is constructed by the brain. This means, that the brain creates only the reality it is interested in for the survival of the organism. This means that Reality in capitals, the ontological reality, as philosophers call it, does not exist.

Constructivism, the philosophical movement that is closest to the results of modern neuroscience, suggests that we do not construct reality objectively, but we subjectively invent it. Constructivism in reality is thus about deconstructing our confidence in the objectivity of the world that surrounds us.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16524238/