[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

Tue May 3 10:57:39 UTC 2022

On Fri, Apr 29, 2022 at 9:31 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:.

>
>> Is this register-by-register and time-step by time-step record of
>> synaptic and axonal activity conscious when stored in RAM? In a book?
>>
>
> A record, even a highly detailed one as you describe, I don't believe is
> conscious. For if you alter any bit/bits in that record, say the bits
> representing visual information sent from the optic nerves, none of those
> changes are reflected in any of the neuron states downstream from that
> modification, so in what sense are they consciousness of other information,
> or the firing of neighboring neurons, or the visual data coming in, etc.
> within the representation?
>
> There is no response to any change and so I conclude there is no awareness
> of any of that information. This is why I think counterfactuals are
> necessary. If you make a relevant change to the inputs, that change must be
> reflected in the right ways throughout the rest of the system, otherwise
> you aren't dealing with something that has the right functional relations
> and organizations. If no other bits change, then you're dealing with a bit
> string that is a record only, it is devoid of all functional relations.
>

### This is a good point. Consciousness is a process, not a 3d structure.
An alteration of a record of a brain which fails to preserve the usual
causal relationships between the recorded brain parts is not likely to
create conscious experience. The altered record does not propagate the
change through its structure in the way that would happen in a functioning
brain - it is just like a frozen brain.

So we could say that for consciousness to exist there must be a timelike
sequence of states of a material object, and these states must have a
proper causal relationship as to model something. That something is the
subject, or content, of consciousness - you are either conscious of a
subject, or else you are not conscious at all. There is no pure
consciousness, all consciousness has a subject.

----------------------------

>
> I don't think "running" is the right word either, as relativity reveals
> objective time as an illusion. So we must accept the plausibility of
> consciousness in timeless four dimensionalism. It then must be the
> structure of relations and counterfactuals implied by laws (whether they be
> physical or mathematical or some other physics in some other universe) that
> are necessary for consciousness.
>

### I am reading "Out of Time" by Baron et al - awfully boring and pedantic
philosophy but the idea that all you need for time to exist is to have a
causal structure, which may be imprinted on a block universe, sounds pretty
reasonable. Now putting together the causal theory of time and the above
thought experiments on consciousness I seem to discern a connection between
time and consciousness.

The block universe is the set of all states that could be in some way
described. There are places in the block universe that have a causal
structure - you can derive each state from another state through the
application of some sort of a potentially quite simple rule, which defines
the physics of each such place. If the rule is unidirectional, the physics
of that place may be said to contain causality - one state causes another
by application of the rule. Causality in the block universe is equivalent
to time, and of course there is an infinite number of such causally
connected sets of states, and an infinity of separate streams of time.

Some of small fragments of the states in the timelike series go up one
level - they are not just a result of applying a rule over the preceding
state but also contain higher-order causal relationships, such that these
special states model some content - it may be a model of an object that is
outside the special state and is fed by a stream of sensory input, or it
may be content generated internally within the special state.

So consciousness is something that exists in areas of the block universe
where there are multilevel timelike or causal relationships between states.

I need to mull this sentence over to make sure I understand what I just
wrote :)
-----------------------------

>
> And what if you run the same synaptic model on two computers? Is the
>> consciousness double?
>>
>
> Nick Bostrom has a paper arguing that it does create a duplicate with more
> "weight", Arnold Zuboff argues for a position called Unificationism in
> which there is only one unique mind even if run twice, and there's no
> change in its "weight".
>
> If reality is infinite and all possible minds and conscious experiences
> exist, then if Unificationism is true we should expect to be experiencing a
> totally random (think snow on a TV) kind of experience now, since there's
> so many more random than ordered unique conscious experiences. Zuboff uses
> this to argue that reality is not infinite. But if you believe reality is
> infinite it can be used as a basis to reject Unificationism.
>

### I feel I have bitten off more than I can handle with the above
questions. My guess is that consciousness is local, not global, so copies
of a mind do not have a global meaning, they are just separate minds. So I
guess I am not an Unificationist but then I also don't think there is a
"weight" related to copies of minds, just as there is no global "weight" of
all the different independent minds. Minds are just separate, unless they
exchange information.

I need to let the multilevel timelike causality theory of consciousness
settle in my mind for a while before I can start asking more useful
questions.
 --------------------------------

>
> Is there something special about dissipation of energy,
>>
>
> This is just a reflection of the fact that in physics, information is
> conserved. If you overwrite/erase a bit in a computer memory, that bit has
> to go somewhere. In practice, for our current computers, it is leaked into
> the environment and this requires leaking energy into the environment as
> implied by the Landauer limit. But if no information is erased/overwritten,
> which is possible to do in reversible computers (and is in fact necessary
> in quantum computers), then you can compute without dissipating any energy
> at all. So I conclude dissipating energy is unrelated to computation or
> consciousness.
>

### I agree, although non-dissipating consciousness may have a number of
limitations.

--------------------------------------

>
> or about causal processes that add something special to the digital,
>> mathematical entities represented by such processes?
>>
>
> The causality (though I would say relations since causality itself is
> poorly understood and poorly defined) is key, I think. If you study a bit
> of cryptography (see "one time pad" encryption) you can come to understand
> why any bit string can have any meaning. It is therefore meaningless
> without the context of it's interpreter.
>

### Yes, I think here we are hitting pay dirt!

---------------------------------

>
> So to be "informative" we need both information and a system to be
> informed by or otherwise interpret that information. Neither by itself is
> sufficient.
>

### Yes, multilevel causal structure - base level physics organized into
more complex states that model other states.
 ------------------------

>
>
>> I struggle to understand what is happening. I have a feeling that two
>> instances of a simple and pure mathematical entity (a triangle or an
>> equation) under consideration by two mathematicians are one and the same
>> but then two pure mathematical entities that purport to reflect a mind
>> (like the synapse-level model of a brain) being run on two computers are
>> separate and presumably independently conscious. Something doesn't fit
>> here.
>>
>
> The problem you are referencing is the distinction between types and
> tokens.
>
> A type is something like "Moby Dick", of which there is only one uniquely
> defined type which is that story.
>
> A token is any concrete instance of a given type. For example any
> particular book of Moby Dick is a token of the type Moby Dick.
>
> I think you may be asking: should we think of minds as types or tokens? I
> think a particular mind at a particular point in time (one
> "observer-moment") can be thought of as a type. But across an infinite
> universe that mind state or observer moment may have many, (perhaps an
> infinite number of) different tokens -- different instantiations in terms
> of different brains or computers with uploaded minds -- representing that
> type.
>
> So two instances of the same mind being run on two different computers are
> independently conscious in the sense that turning either one off doesn't
> destroy the type, even if one token is destroyed, just as the story of Moby
> Dick isn't destroyed if one book is lost.
>
> The open question to me is: does running two copies increase the
> likelihood of finding oneself in that mind state? This is the
> Unificationism/Duplicationism debate.
>

### Asking about probability in the context of consciousness is asking for
trouble because our understanding of either - probability and consciousness
is tenuous, and errors explode when you let poorly defined notions
interact.

I distrust the thought experiments in this area of philosophy.
 --------------------------

>
>
> Maybe there is something special about the physical world that imbues
>> models of mathematical entities contained in the physical world with a
>> different level of existence from the Platonic ideal level.
>>
>
> We can't rule out, (especially given all the other fine-tuning
> coincidences we observe), that our physics has a special property necessary
> for consciousness, but I tend to not think so, given all the problems
> entailed by philosophical zombies and zombie worlds -- where we have
> philosophers of mind and books about consciousness and exact copies of the
> conversations such as in this thread, being written by entities in a
> universe that has no conscious. This idea just doesn't seem coherent to me.
>

### Well, if our physics is timelike, and a multilevel causal structure is
needed for consciousness, then you need our physics, or an equivalent, for
consciousness.

It's complicated.

----------------------------

>
> Or maybe different areas of the Platonic world are imbued with different
>> properties, such as consciousness, even as they copy other parts of the
>> Platonic world.
>>
>
> As Bruno Marchal points out in his filmed graph thought experiment, if one
> accepts mechanism (a.k.a. functionalism, or computationalism), this implies
> that platonically existing number relations and computations are sufficient
> for consciousness. Therefore consciousness is in a sense more fundamental
> than the physical worlds we experience. The physics in a sense, drops out
> as the consistent extensions of the infinite indistinguishable computations
> defining a particular observer's current mind state.
>

### I would say otherwise - the causal structure of time in our physics
(the sequence of Platonic states connected by a causal rule) is the thing
that allows consciousness, by being the basis for building additional
levels of causal relationships between Platonic objects

 --------------------------------

>
> This is explored in detail by Markus P Mueller, in his paper on deriving
> laws of physics from algorithmic information theory. He is able to predict
> from these first principles that most observers should find themselves to
> be in a universe having simple, but probabilistic laws, with time, and a
> point in the past beyond which further retrodiction is impossible.
>
> Indeed we find this to be true of our own physics and universe. I cover
> this subject in some detail in my "Why does anything exist?" article (on
> AlwaysAsking.com ). I am currently working on an article about
> consciousness. The two questions are quite interrelated.
>

### Indeed. Are you familiar with Wolfram's Physics Project? I feel his
approach may help us eventually put metaphysics on a firmer ground and
maybe connect physics to the theory of consciousness in a more rigorous way.

Rafal
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