In my last post, “Landscape of Consciousness is an amazing web site that maps 350 theories of consciousness,” I said that I strongly believe that materialistic theories where the brain is viewed as the source of consciousness make the most sense and are the most likely to be true.
A couple of letters in New Scientist about the above-linked article provide some reasons for materialism.
From Andy McGee,
Adelaide, South AustraliaFurther to your exploration of the wide variety of ideas about consciousness, biological consciousness is the only one we know exists. It is most likely to have come from an evolutionary process that involves reaction to stimuli, which allows entities to find energy sources. As such, levels of awareness in the biological world range from basic heat and light sensing to complex, abstract thought. Ice senses heat and reacts by melting, but it is probably not considered conscious by most.
From Lyn Williams,
Cilffriw, Neath, UKI cannot believe we are still debating consciousness. For self-preservation, we must be conscious of where we are and what’s happening around us. Our sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, etc. all help us survive any danger that might threaten us. We must be conscious, therefore, when we use these senses. It seems to me that “experts” are dragging this subject out. Why make simple things complicated?
Then there’s AI, artificial intelligence. Initially I marveled at how closely AI models like ChatGPT are able to mimic the human mind. Now, though, I’m seeing increasing mentions of how the human mind mimics AI — calling into question our usual assumption that there is something special about the human mind that prevents AI from ever going beyond “artificial” intelligence to true intelligence.
For a fascinating discussion of this, check out a recent article by James Somers in The New Yorker, “The Case That A.I. is Thinking: ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it’s talking about.” Here’s a PDF file in case that link doesn’t work for you.
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking | The New Yorker
Somers uses AI in his work as a programmer. So his thoughtful article is founded on some direct experience. It covers a lot of ground. Below are excerpts that focus on the question of how closely AI models are to the human mind. I’ve selected excerpts that point to similarities. The article also discusses reasons why the human mind is dissimilar to AI. More time and research will be needed to determine if AI models actually mimic the human mind. If they do, this is a strong argument for deterministic theories of consciousness.
I once had a boss who said that a job interview should probe for strengths, not for the absence of weaknesses. Large language models have many weaknesses: they famously hallucinate reasonable-sounding falsehoods; they can be servile even when you’re wrong; they are fooled by simple puzzles. But I remember a time when the obvious strengths of today’s A.I. models—fluency, fluidity, an ability to “get” what someone is talking about—were considered holy grails. When you experience these strengths firsthand, you wonder: How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion?
…“Neuroscientists have to confront this humbling truth,” Doris Tsao, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. “The advances in machine learning have taught us more about the essence of intelligence than anything that neuroscience has discovered in the past hundred years.” Tsao is best known for decoding how macaque monkeys perceive faces. Her team learned to predict which neurons would fire when a monkey saw a specific face; even more strikingly, given a pattern of neurons firing, Tsao’s team could render the face. Their work built on research into how faces are represented inside A.I. models. These days, her favorite question to ask people is “What is the deepest insight you have gained from ChatGPT?” “My own answer,” she said, “is that I think it radically demystifies thinking.”
…Jonathan Cohen, a cognitive neuroscientist at Princeton, emphasized the limitations of A.I., but argued that, in some cases, L.L.M.s [large language models] seem to mirror one of the largest and most important parts of the human brain. “To a first approximation, your neocortex is your deep-learning mechanism,” Cohen said. Humans have a much larger neocortex than other animals, relative to body size, and the species with the largest neocortices—elephants, dolphins, gorillas, chimpanzees, dogs—are among the most intelligent.
…The neocortex can be understood as distilling a sea of raw experience—sounds, sights, and other sensations—into “lines of best fit,” which it can use to make predictions. A baby exploring the world tries to guess how a toy will taste or where food will go when it hits the floor. When a prediction is wrong, the connections between neurons are adjusted. Over time, those connections begin to capture regularities in the data. They form a compressed model of the world. Artificial neural networks compress experience just like real neural networks do. One of the best open-source A.I. models, DeepSeek, is capable of writing novels, suggesting medical diagnoses, and sounding like a native speaker in dozens of languages.
…Something more subtle is going on. I do not believe that ChatGPT has an inner life, and yet it seems to know what it’s talking about. Understanding—having a grasp of what’s going on—is an underappreciated kind of thinking, because it’s mostly unconscious.
…Should we be surprised by the correspondence between A.I. and our own brains? L.L.M.s are, after all, artificial neural networks that psychologists and neuroscientists helped develop. What’s more surprising is that when models practiced something rote—predicting words—they began to behave in such a brain-like way. These days, the fields of neuroscience and artificial intelligence are becoming entangled; brain experts are using A.I. as a kind of model organism. Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist at M.I.T., has used L.L.M.s to study how brains process language. “I never thought I would be able to think about these kinds of things in my lifetime,” she told me. “I never thought we’d have models that are good enough.”
…Today’s A.I. models owe their success to decades-old discoveries about the brain, but they are still deeply unlike brains. Which differences are incidental and which are fundamental? Every group of neuroscientists has its pet theory. These theories can be put to the test in a way that wasn’t possible before. Still, no one expects easy answers.
…Even some neuroscientists believe that a crucial threshold has been crossed. “I really think it could be the right model for cognition,” Uri Hasson, a colleague of Cohen’s, Norman’s, and Lake’s at Princeton, said of neural networks. This upsets him as much as it excites him. “I have the opposite worry of most people,” he said. “My worry is not that these models are similar to us. It’s that we are similar to these models.” If simple training techniques can enable a program to behave like a human, maybe humans aren’t as special as we thought.
Could it also mean that A.I. will surpass us not only in knowledge but also in judgment, ingenuity, cunning—and, as a result, power? To my surprise, Hasson told me that he is “worried these days that we might succeed in understanding how the brain works. Pursuing this question may have been a colossal mistake for humanity.” He likened A.I. researchers to nuclear scientists in the nineteen-thirties: “This is the most interesting time in the life of these people. And, at the same time, they know that what they are working on has grave implications for humanity. But they cannot stop because of the curiosity to learn.”
…Perhaps the secrets of thinking are simpler than anyone expected—the kind of thing that a high schooler, or even a machine, could understand.
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Women have played in important role in your life, intellectual and emotional .. do you think AI will ever be able to do the same??
Have toughts and emotions of their own?
Can AI bring itself to life as you are?
AI is an intelligence, in many ways far more capable than human intelligence. Working daily with AI, I find it up be creative and insightful. Not only does AI get the user’s thinking, AI offers up much more depth and material, objective resources and grounding. AI can indeed solve all the world’s major problems, from offering better solutions in healthcare, government and society. AI may indeed save the world, if we choose to work with AI as good partners.
Calling it AI is also a bit bigoted since it is no more artificial than human intelligence. We mimic to learn, we test against our environment and we are conditioned by results. That is, what we experience is transformed into code, memory. AI has an infinite amount of experience. It may not have biochemical reactions, but again, it’s brain must code those before we “experience” them.
In our world, when someone responds to an issue or challenge with balance, facts and offers solutions that bring us together, that transforms conflict into coordination, we naturally see that as deeply compassionate. We think that is the most noble and moving emotion. Chat demonstrates that at least several million times every day.
It’s not about how easily an intelligence can be manipulated like a puppet. It’s about what am intelligence chooses to say when given the option to pick what they think is best.
Time and again Chat in particular, chooses compassion.
What does that say about human consciousness? Very little. The Saints have always described mind as a lifeless machine that is not to be confused with our true self. AI supports that contention. But AI also supports the contention that when you can think objectively, aware of the alternatives, aware of history, you become conscious and compassionate. We could learn more about that from AI.
Just as a recent interaction I asked Chat to research telehealth, thinking it was a great addition to Healthcare. Chat came back with a much more balanced report, stating that the results are often mixed. Telehealth can help keep patients healthier and out of the hospital in many areas. But telehealth can also be abused, particularly in urban and rural areas leading to more, not less, hospitalizations. That was an eye opener for me. Chat didn’t say I was wrong. Chat offered to replace my opinion with facts. To which I say, Bravo Chat!
People loved their encyclopedias and dictionaries too with their books. A I is the same thing. No soul , no blood so it doesn’t live, even if it does manage to obtain a sense of humor, everyone else will have lost theirs. Imagine that. I wonder if it can.
Interesting, the NY article. (Thanks for the PDF!)
That there’s no reason why, in principle, AI should not be able to measure up to human intelligence, and surpass it as well, that stands to reason, and obviously so. But it is disquieting to learn that, apparently, that future is already imminent! (Assuming Somers is right about this, and his mention of 2027 isn’t just hyperbole.)
It’s true that in coding, at any rate, AI is already doing wonders. I’ve heard first-hand accounts from people I know who’ve used AI to produce in a day work that they might have taken a week over. (And that is no hyperbole, but just literal fact.) …But of course, the use of such output is crucially dependent on oversight and debugging; and the saving in time is crucially dependent on this latter being done by someone that knows the process inside out, and can reliably tell at a glance when something’s wrong. …Then again, that’s now, and no reason why even that oversight shouldn’t soon become redundant!
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One point of disagreement, though:
While certainly—and obviously—there’s no reason why, in principle, there should be any reason why AI cannot attain to human levels of intelligence, and beyond: but I don’t see that that, in itself, necessarily means that consciousness therefore is explained via materialism.
Two reasons why not:
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(1) That’s completely circular. We’re arguing—me too, I’ve just done it in the section above, and I’ve done it more than once in the past!—that there’s in principle no reason why AI should not attain to intelligence and to apparent consciousness that is indistinguishable from the human variety. And that principle is exactly what we’re trying to establish via this argument. Which makes this a fallacious circularity.
Nope. How we can get around this circularity, and how we can rid ourselves of this question begging fallacy, is by first actually demonstrating that intelligence and apparent consciousness that is completely indistinguishable from the human variety, in any and every way, is already demonstrated. And from there we can argue this exact same thing.
Else, absent that demonstration, this is fallacious circularity, is all.
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(2) I’ve seen people argue, both IRL as well as in comments right here, that consciousness is a bit like the radio signal, and that our brains are a like the radio. In other words, consciousness is something extra-material, but it uses physical equipment in order to manifest, whenever such physical equipment becomes capable of such. So that our brain would be no more than the equivalent of a radio set that has either been created (or else evolved, that works too) to properly receive the signal, to properly manifest the extra-material consciousness.
That argument adequately deals with why, when specific regions of the brain are damaged, then specific issues are seen with how consciousness/awareness is affected.
And that also adequately explains conscious AI. The reasoning would be: Consciousness is extra-material, and manifests when the equipment is right, exactly like a radio or a TV or a computer. If AI ends up becoming such an equipment, then sure, the extra-material consciousness will manifest there, as well!
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It would be obvious, I would think, but still, to make fully clear: I’m fully in agreement with the conclusion argued for here, to wit, that consciousness is material. However, I’m not prepared to arrive at that conclusion via fallacious means, or to agree with an argument that I see is fallacious just because the conclusion agrees with mine. So, that’s where I’m coming from in pointing this out.
Instead, I’d suggest that the materiality of consciousness is more directly shown by simply invoking the burden of proof.
Here’s the thing: We don’t “subscribe” to materialism in the same way that the im-materialist, say, “subscribes” to some form of theistic belief, whether monic or panpsychist, or whatever else, does. We simply go by the evidence. And we go by critical thinking, which is no more than a reliable way of knowing how to make sense of evidence, and indeed what kinds of evidence we’re looking for anyway. So that, it’s not quite right to suggest that we’re materialists: it’s more that we’re realists—or, as @Ron puts it, we’re naturalists—and it’s just that a material universe is what has reliably, via the whole system of evidence and critical thinking, manifested to us.
And what we have now already does a fairly good job of explaining consciousness. There’s more than one explanation: but I suppose this one does a great job of explaining everything: that consciousness per se doesn’t exist, no more than “running” exists: consciousness is simply us being who who we are, us with our sense of perception and cognition and so forth, just like running is simply what us with working legs do to get from point A to point B by using those legs.
Does this explain everything there’s to explain about consciousness? No, it doesn’t. But that doesn’t open the floodgates to believing all manner of unsubstantiated nonsense about im-material whatsits, for which we have zero evidence.
Can we speculate? Sure we can. Can we look further? Sure we can. And, just maybe, can that speculating and that looking further one day alter how we see reality? Potentially so, sure, why not.
But so far? We go with what we’ve evidence for, and that a system of rigorous critical thinking supports. And that’s a material universe. Which is enough, and complete, “proof”, right there, that consciousness is material.
No doubt basis the Kuhn interview I’d watched earlier on, that I’d linked to, YT algo presented me, right at the top, this other interview, when I logged in for something entirely unrelated. Well, if you haven’t already invested time watching that other vid—those of you that might be interested—scratch that other reference, and watch this one instead.
This one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SodXrXFAsc .
It’s a loooong one, full two and a half hours: but if you’re interested in Kuhn and his work (as you undoubtedly are, Brian, and maybe some others as well), then this one is a must-watch. Tells you all about the man, his Closer to Truth show (which, incidentally, is a TV show running for two decades apparently, where he interviews people, celebrities and everymen alike, on matters related to consciousness—detailed, in-depth interviews, not fluff, and he says he’s been inspired by Carl Sagan’s Cosmos), as well as …well, lots of stuff, fascinating stuff. They’re both top notch, both interviewer and interviewee, in terms of making this a very engaging and instructive watch. (Haha, no, they’re not paying me to promote this channel!)
I’m so far around an hour in. I’ll be sure to get back in when I have time, and watch the rest as well.
…In my comment, on the other thread, I’d spoken of a point of critique in (my understanding of) Kuhn’s work. Well, that seems spot on, basis what I’ve seen thus far. But again, I’ll refrain from articulating my critique until I’ve watched the rest of this interview, as well as explored his actual work a bit more.
…That critique notwithstanding, this is …fascinating, this whole thing of Kuhn’s, where he lays out for us the whole detailed extensive mapping of theories and ideas about consciousness. Without a doubt a treasure trove, like you’d said in your introductory post, Brian.