Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12

[smcder]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1008961482804154368

"Depersonalization is a state in which you perceive yourself from a third person perspective as a character in a dream. It is hard to cure because it is literally true. Your mind is just not supposed to remember that it is the author of the dream that your self experiences."
11:35 PM - 18 Jun 2018 Joscha Bach

I added the italics

 

[smcder]

Bach on the hard problem...

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper29.pdf

Abstract

"Dealing with the Hard Problem It seems that if Artificial Intelligence is pursued as a cognitive science, it cannot avoid to account for the arguably most elusive and mercurial property of the human mind: the conscious experience of phenomenal states. While I have tried to account for some of the functional properties of machine consciousness elsewhere (Bach 2018a, 2018b, 2009), this contribution avoids technical and formal arguments and instead tries to offer a brief introduction into some of the most relevant conceptual intuitions with regard to understanding consciousness as a property of an intelligent system. Modeling perception, memory, decision making, reward based motivation provide challenges to cognitive science, yet nothing about these faculties seems mysterious. The same applies to extending AI systems with reflexive and metacognitive capabilities. But how could an AI model ever hope to explain the feeling of what-it’s-like? David Chalmers (1995) characterizes this as the Hard Problem of Consciousness: The ability of an organism to be the “subject of experience”. To further specify what that means, Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch (2015) have offered five axioms, which I would briefly summarize as follows: "

SPOILER ALERT

"it's all a dream!"




"...and you were there and ..."

 

[Constance]

Try this one too, a workshop presentation entitled "The Cortical Conductor Theory: Towards Addressing Consciousness in AI Models".

http://cadia.ru.is/workshops/aga2017/proceedings/AGA_2017_Bach.pdf

 

[Constance]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1008961482804154368

"Depersonalization is a state in which you perceive yourself from a third person perspective as a character in a dream. It is hard to cure because it is literally true. Your mind is just not supposed to remember that it is the author of the dream that your self experiences."
11:35 PM - 18 Jun 2018 Joscha Bach

I added the italics

This one is interesting. It might explain where Bach is coming from:

Joscha Bach

@Plinz
·
Jun 20, 2018

In my dreams, everything can happen. Depersonalization is frequent, but I don't experience it during the day. Apparently, people experiencing depersonalization may sometimes also lose access to all their personhood (even third person).

 

[Soupie]

Where is the logic in that sentence/claim?

Robots with artificial intelligence and simulations would be derivative of humans with intelligence and consciousness.

 

[Soupie]

Where is the logic in that sentence/claim?

Robots with artificial intelligence and simulations would be derivative of humans with intelligence and consciousness.

 

[smcder]

Bach on the hard problem...

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2287/paper29.pdf

Abstract

"Dealing with the Hard Problem It seems that if Artificial Intelligence is pursued as a cognitive science, it cannot avoid to account for the arguably most elusive and mercurial property of the human mind: the conscious experience of phenomenal states. While I have tried to account for some of the functional properties of machine consciousness elsewhere (Bach 2018a, 2018b, 2009), this contribution avoids technical and formal arguments and instead tries to offer a brief introduction into some of the most relevant conceptual intuitions with regard to understanding consciousness as a property of an intelligent system. Modeling perception, memory, decision making, reward based motivation provide challenges to cognitive science, yet nothing about these faculties seems mysterious. The same applies to extending AI systems with reflexive and metacognitive capabilities. But how could an AI model ever hope to explain the feeling of what-it’s-like? David Chalmers (1995) characterizes this as the Hard Problem of Consciousness: The ability of an organism to be the “subject of experience”. To further specify what that means, Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch (2015) have offered five axioms, which I would briefly summarize as follows: "

SPOILER ALERT

"it's all a dream!"




"...and you were there and ..."

"From the perspective of physicalism, Frankish and Dennett appear to be correct, and the solution to the Hard Problem is clear: a physical system, such as an organism, cannot actually have phenomenal experience. Thus, what needs to be explained is not how an organism can have phenomenal experience, but why it appears to us that we do!"

"While the idealist and physicalist positions are at odds with each other when we understand them as ontological statements about reality, they are complementary with respect to the mind: We do live in a dream, each one of us in a separate one, and the dream, including all its inhabitants, is generated by a brain of an organism living in a physical universe. The reason why we experience things in a particular way is the same why a character in a novel does: because the contents of our experience and the fact of the experience itself are written in exactly this way by its author. Like a character in a novel, we generally also don’t notice that we are not real, as long as the author does not write the discovery that we are not real into our story. (The psychological phenomenon known as “derealization/depersonalization disorder” may represent and exception from this rule.) Our phenomenal experience is very real to ourselves, but our selves are not real. In other words, when Tononi and Koch (2015) argue that only a physical organism can have conscious experience, but a simulation cannot, they got it exactly backwards: a physical system cannot be conscious, only a simulation can. "

 

[Soupie]

How are they identical ontologically?

I think the mind is the way in which the body perceives itself. Therefore they are ontologically identical, but not conceptually (?) identical.

 

[Soupie]

We do live in a dream, each one of us in a separate one, and the dream, including all its inhabitants, is generated by a brain of an organism living in a physical universe.

My question for Bach will be whether he thinks base reality (the reality being simulated) is physical.

For me, the fact that base reality appears physical is a product of the simulation, not veridical.
This seems to be too egregious of an error, so I’m wondering how he thinks of this. Haven’t gotten an answer yet.

 

[smcder]

My question for Bach will be whether he thinks base reality (the reality being simulated) is physical.

For me, the fact that base reality appears physical is a product of the simulation, not veridical.
This seems to be too egregious of an error, so I’m wondering how he thinks of this. Haven’t gotten an answer yet.

Here you go:

The world is not a physics engine, or The Death of (Physicalist) Realism

The most important consquence of accepting Bell’s inequality: The world is not a physics engine. Let us look how we need to modify our view of physicalism.

bach.ai

 

[smcder]

"On the other hand, I have no good answer if you ask me for the origin of the system that computes the base reality. Somehow there seems to be a primary transition function operating on some kind of primary state vector, and I see no way how to resolve this existential debt to nothingness."

Do we live in a simulation or in the base reality?

Elon Musk recently suggested that we likely do not live in a base reality, but in a simulation. He even puts the probability at a billion to one. Is he correct?

bach.ai

 

[Constance]

"From the perspective of physicalism, Frankish and Dennett appear to be correct, and the solution to the Hard Problem is clear: a physical system, such as an organism, cannot actually have phenomenal experience. Thus, what needs to be explained is not how an organism can have phenomenal experience, but why it appears to us that we do!"

"While the idealist and physicalist positions are at odds with each other when we understand them as ontological statements about reality, they are complementary with respect to the mind: We do live in a dream, each one of us in a separate one, and the dream, including all its inhabitants, is generated by a brain of an organism living in a physical universe. The reason why we experience things in a particular way is the same why a character in a novel does: because the contents of our experience and the fact of the experience itself are written in exactly this way by its author. Like a character in a novel, we generally also don’t notice that we are not real, as long as the author does not write the discovery that we are not real into our story. (The psychological phenomenon known as “derealization/depersonalization disorder” may represent and exception from this rule.) Our phenomenal experience is very real to ourselves, but our selves are not real. In other words, when Tononi and Koch (2015) argue that only a physical organism can have conscious experience, but a simulation cannot, they got it exactly backwards: a physical system cannot be conscious, only a simulation can. "

So the Holocaust was mutually dreamt by its perpetrators and victims alike?

 

[Soupie]

So the Holocaust was mutually dreamt by its perpetrators and victims alike?

No. No one is suggesting anything like that. That’s why I cringe when you reject these ideas. I’m not sure you fully understand them.

 

[Soupie]

"On the other hand, I have no good answer if you ask me for the origin of the system that computes the base reality. Somehow there seems to be a primary transition function operating on some kind of primary state vector, and I see no way how to resolve this existential debt to nothingness."

Do we live in a simulation or in the base reality?

Elon Musk recently suggested that we likely do not live in a base reality, but in a simulation. He even puts the probability at a billion to one. Is he correct?

bach.ai

But oddly he doesn’t consider this when talking about human consciousness being a simulation.

 

[Soupie]

Here you go:

The world is not a physics engine, or The Death of (Physicalist) Realism

The most important consquence of accepting Bell’s inequality: The world is not a physics engine. Let us look how we need to modify our view of physicalism.

bach.ai

He had this to say recently on Twitter:

“Materialism is an unfortunate term because most people have strong unreflected intuitions about the nature of matter.” Bach

That seems a little Strawsonesque but I doubt he means it that way. Maybe he does. Reading the essay above now.

 

[smcder]

So the Holocaust was mutually dreamt by its perpetrators and victims alike?

These are not my words, this is a quotation. Musk suggested that we live in a simulation, Bach critiques that, says he thinks we live in the "base reality".

 

[smcder]

But oddly he doesn’t consider this when talking about human consciousness being a simulation.

How does he not consider this?

 

[smcder]

He had this to say recently on Twitter:

“Materialism is an unfortunate term because most people have strong unreflected intuitions about the nature of matter.” Bach

That seems a little Strawsonesque but I doubt he means it that way. Maybe he does. Reading the essay above now.

I don't think he means it like Strawson, but let's see what you find out.

 

[smcder]

http://icontology.org/publications/assets/AGI%20Bach.pdf

The philosophy of mind seems to be possessed and enamored by “explanatory gaps” and haunted by the ghosts of the mystical “first person perspective” [1] and “irreducible phenomenal experience” [2], and occasionally even radical substance dualism [3, 4].

[2] Block, N. (2001). Paradox and Cross Purposes in Recent Work on Consciousness. In Dehaene and Naccache: Special Issue of Cognition, Vol. 79, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, 197-219
[3] Chalmers, D. (1996): The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press
[4] Searle, J. R. (1992): The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge

So that rules out substance dualism a la Searle or Chalmers ... and rules out that phenomenal experience is irreducible for Bach.

I think the following is ambiguous, but let's keep it in mind.

AI’s gradual demotion from a science of the mind to the nerdy playpen of information processing engineering was accompanied not by utterances of disappointment, but by a chorus of glee, uniting those wary of human technological hubris with the same factions of society that used to oppose evolutionary theory or materialistic monism for reasons deeply ingrained into western cultural heritage.

 

[Constance]

But oddly he doesn’t consider this when talking about human consciousness being a simulation.

How does he not consider this?

Seconding this question. Wondering if there is some paper or conference presentation in which he attempts to respond to this question, which others surely must ask him. Unless the only people he interacts with all already believe that we live in a virtual reality. You're right above, @Soupie, when you say that I don't really understand what this guy is saying.