[ExI] Is Artificial Life Conscious?

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, May 3, 2022 at 5:59 AM Rafal Smigrodzki via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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.
>

I agree. Each bit in the bit in that sequence might as well be stored on a
separate computer, if there is no causal link or interrelation between them.


>
> 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.
>

All computers need a time-like dimension across which to order its
succession of states and to process information, so I think the same is
likely true of our brains.


>
> ----------------------------
>
>>
>> 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.
>

In that case, you might enjoy my video and/or article on the same subject:
https://alwaysasking.com/what-is-time/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC52vRmtQoU

There is also a good PBS Spacetime Episode on causality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YFrISfN7jo


>
> 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.
>

That is how I once saw it. While I still hold the view that the flow of
time is a subjective illusion, I now see the computations implementing mind
states as more fundamental than the physical patterns and regularities
observed by those minds.


>
> 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.
>

The only time this is relevant is when making predictions regarding
expectations of future observations. For example, if you stepped into a
destructive teletransporter, which created one copy of you in NY, one copy
in LA, and one copy in Paris, and I asked, what is the probability you will
find your next conscious moment to be as someone in the United States? If
we are only concerned with matters of what makes a mind or what makes
qualia, and don't care about expectations, then we can ignore the
duplicationism/unificationism debate.


>
> 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.
>
>
Reversible computers built on reversible logic gates are Turing universal,
so they can compute anything a normal computer can. I've sometimes
speculated if it isn't suggestive that our own laws of physics are
reversible. For example, if our universe is a simulation in a higher-level
universe like (or identical to) ours, it could be done efficiently without
leaking information/energy.


> --------------------------------------
>
>>
>> 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.
>

It is certainly a contentious area.



>  --------------------------
>
>>
>>
>> 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
>

I agree. I would also say there could be a single platonic object whose
structure (and its internal time-like sequence) is likewise defined by such
rules. It becomes a matter of taste I guess how to draw the lines between
objects in Plato's heaven.


>  --------------------------------
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
His project to frame physics in terms of cellular automata?

I think his project is, due to a subtle argument, shown to be impossible. A
result by Bruno Marchal implies that if digital Mechanism (in philosophy of
mind) is true, then digital physics cannot be true. And because digital
physics implies digital mechanism, the idea of digital physics leads to
contradiction and so must be false.

Jason
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