Comment by exe34

Comment by exe34 3 days ago

14 replies

View on Hacker News

> Obviously I'm conscious

I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know? What does consciousness mean to you? Do you experience "qualia"? When you notice something, say "the toast is burning", what goes on in your mind?

> but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.

Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something? What sort of reactions can they exhibit in your mind?

Sorry if these questions are invasive, but you're as close to an alien intelligence as I'll ever meet unless LLMs go full Prime Intellect on us.

Lerc 2 days ago

>I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know?

That was kinda what my point about zombies was about. It's much easier to assert you have consciousness than to actually have it.

More specifically I think in pragmatic terms most things asserting consciousness are asserting what they have whatever consciousness means to them with a subset of things asserting consciousness by dictate of a conscious entity for whatever consciousness means to that entity. For example 10 print "I am conscious" is most probably an instruction that originated from a conscious. This isn't much different from any non candid answer though. It could just be a lie. You can assert anything regardless of its truth.

I'm kind of with Dennett when it comes to qualia, that the distinction between the specialness of qualia and the behaviour that it describes evaporates from any area you look at in detail. I find the thought experiment compelling about what is the difference between having all your memories of red an blue swapped compared to having all your nerve signals for red and blue swapped. In both instances you end up with red and blue being different from how you previously experienced them. Qualia would suggest you would know which would have happened which would mean you could express it and therefore there must be a functional difference in behaviour.

By analogy,

5 + 3 = 8

3 + 5 = 8

This --> 8 <-- here is a copy of one of those two above. Use your Qualia to see which.

>Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something?

Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", When thinking about what people will do I am better amongst those who I play games with in knowing which decision they will make. When I play games with my partner we use Scissers, Paper, Stone to pick the starting player, but I always play a subgame of how many draws I can manage, It takes longer but more randomly picks the starting player.

It's all very iocane powder. I guess when I think about it I don't process a simulation to conclusion but just know what their reactions will be given their mental state, which feels very clear to me. I'm not sure how to distinguish the feeling of thinking something will happen and imagining it happening and observing the result. Both are processing information to generate the same answer. Is it the same distinction as the Qualia thing? I'm not sure.

Reply View 13 replies
  • simonh 2 days ago

    I’ve thought about this a bit as my wife substantially has anendophasia and aphantasia, though not total. Even having a rich inner voice myself, I realise that it’s not absolute.

    Many, in fact probably most experiences and thoughts I have are actually not expressed in inner speech. When I look at a scene I see and am aware of the sky, trees, a path, grass, a wall, tennis courts, etc bout none of those words come to mind unless I think to make them, and then only a few I pay attention to.

    I think most our interpretation of experience exists at a conceptual, pre-linguistic level. Converting experiences into words before we could act on them would be unbelievably slow and inefficient. I think it’s just that those of us with a rich inner monologue find it’s so easy to do this for things we pay attention to that we imagine we do it for everything, when in fact that is very, very far from the truth.

    Considering how I reason about the thought processes, intentions and expected behaviour of others, I don’t think I routinely verbalise that at all. In fact I don’t think the idea that we actually think in words makes any sense. Can people that don’t know how to express a situation linguistically not reason about and respond to that situation? That seems absurd.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • the_gipsy 2 days ago

    > Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action",

    That is the internal monologue.

    Reply View 10 replies
    • Lerc a day ago

      I don't think that as words. I'm just aware of the facts simultaneously. It's rather hard to type my awareness without converting it to words though.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • the_gipsy a day ago

        I'm interested in this "simultaneous awareness of facts".

        How simultaneous is it really? A 100% as in, the whole chain of thoughts is condensed into one "symbol"? Or simply less elements or "atoms"? Or is it equally long but just connects faster than words? Or something else entirely?

        And a second question, how do you expect the inner monologue to be like? An audible hallucination? A different person talking in your head? Something else?

        Reply View 0 replies
    • roxolotl 2 days ago

      An internal monologue is when that sentence is expressed via words as if you are hearing it said by yourself inside your head. Someone without an internal monologue can still arrive at that conclusion without the sentence being “heard” in their mind.

      Reply View 7 replies