> and remained active in a laboratory culture for at least two weeks after being thawed
I’m sure I don’t fully understand the details but this kind of thing both excites and horrifies me when I ponder how much brain might be necessary to sustain the experience of consciousness.
My personal opinion is that it's not just about brain quantity. I think being embedded in an environment is necessary for consciousness. My argument is that there is no such thing as unqualified consciousness -- you have to be conscious of something. You're not born aware of yourself, you spend the first few years of your life figuring out that you are embedded in this thing called a human body that, with considerable practice, you can exercise more-or-less direct control over. After more years you figure out that your body is further embedded in a world full of other things that you have only indirect (at best) control over, or no control at all. Only after all that can you draw a line between you and not-you and become aware of "your" existence.
I would not equate self-awareness with the feeling of being enclosed in some distinct thing called a human body that you can exercise control over. With the latter you are not just self-aware, you are also deconstructing experience into parts according to a particular dualistic approach (“that is my body, this is me”). Such deconstruction may not be required, and whether it is the only or even the best approach to qualifying own being is dubious (some might say you and your body are the same and implicitly treating “you” as “contained in your brain” is a fallacy—from the perspective of natural sciences a good illustration is probably how gut flora changes, non-brain organ transplantation, and such correlate with shifts in your personality).
> how gut flora changes, non-brain organ transplantation, and such correlate with shifts in your personality
Well, yeah, but so what? You can have shifts in your personality and still be you. You can be grumpy one day and happy another and still be you. And those changes can be cause by environmental changes far less radical than organ transplants.
The one thing you cannot swap out and still remain you is your brain.
> You can also not swap out your body and remain yourself.
Why not? Even taking technological limitations into account, there is almost no part of your body that can't be swapped out even today. People have artificial limbs, artificial hearts, artificial ears. They get lung transplants, kidney transplants, face transplants. Give the technology a few more centuries and I don't see any reason why a complete body swap-out should not be possible.
> it is not an easy question to answer
Indeed. But most people would agree that you can get an organ transplant or an artificial limb or a hearing aid or wear glasses -- or any combination of the above -- and still be you. Not so for a brain transplant.
> But most people would agree that you can get an organ transplant or an artificial limb or a hearing aid or wear glasses -- or any combination of the above -- and still be you. Not so for a brain transplant.
I do not think that is relevant in any way. Most people also believe in God; that does not make it a compelling claim.
But sensory deprivation chambers are both known to make people unconscious, don't completely remove all sensation, and still induce hallucinations reliably. The conscious entity has to be conscious of something, and if there's nothing it will create something to be conscious of.
Please, educate us. Why is it garbage? To me and perhaps others, this makes intuitive sense. Why shouldn't it take several years for an intelligence to build self-knowledge before it can develop what we call consciousness? Why shouldn't consciousness be emergent, as an intelligence slowly understands that it is limited to a physical form?
Why shouldn't it be baked into the neural structure that has evolved over the past half billion years? Why should it require years after birth to manifest?
Even the actual entire brain you have right now can't sustain the experience of consciousness during sleep, or while under the influence of sedatives, or during times of sudden trauma.
ANNs can't represent everything involved with a functioning brain, never mind a highly specific ANN architecture. Any consciousness or similar would need to arise via an independent mechanism.
> Any consciousness or similar would need to arise via an independent mechanism.
Probably, but even then only due to there being a lot mechanisms and we don't know which of them is related to the subjective experience of existing that is the meaning of conscious I assume you're using here (there's something like 40 definitions of "consciousness").
But because we don't really know where the capacity for an inner experience even is, it's not impossible that even an LLM, which totally isn't designed with the goal of having it, might nevertheless have it.
(I really hope they don't, I statistically suspect they don't, I just can't rule it out).
> Some modern philosophers advocating pantheism think they just might.
This is a terribly low bar. The map of “ Some modern philosophers” “think [something] just might” [something] is an incoherent patchwork.
I think that theorizing about things without hard evidence has value. What-if’s teach us a lot, by raising important questions, and keep our ideas flexible, preparing us for the next crazy insight that nature reveals.
But that isn’t the same as attributing any reliability to the as yet unproven enthusiasms of philosophers.
There is a clear case for a survival benefit for creatures whose awareness and control extends into their own thinking. Thus a reason consciousness would be one of many strategies evolution may produce.
What natural phenomena is explained by a conscious rock hypothesis? What would cause a rock to organize in such a way? Where is this information about itself encoded and experienced in a rock? It’s not a coherent conjecture.
Natural formation rock consciousness both lacks evidence and is absurd, as there isn’t even a coherent reason to think it might or could.
Your computer processes information, and can be configured to process information about itself. At least the possibility and potential utility exists that conscious computers may one day exist.
That is a breathtakingly pedantic reading of what I said.
I used “natural” to distinguish minerals created via geologic processes, from minerals and elements intentionally processed into machines.
Similarly, evolution’s long process of accumulated innovations separate humans from our constituent elements as found in the geologic environment.
Both technological and evolutionary iterative and self-reinforcing adaptations provide a mechanism for complex coordinated high level information flows to arise aimed at survival (biological or economic) where consciousness has both a potential purpose and a plausible process for coming into being.
A lump of granite or obsidian presents no evidence of consciousness, no purpose for consciousness, and no plausible process for having accreted or transformed into something with consciousness.
The conjecture that such rocks may be conscious stands on equal footing to the conjecture that they are unicorns wearing magical rock-disguise cloaks.
> The conjecture that such rocks may be conscious stands on equal footing to the conjecture that they are unicorns wearing magical rock-disguise cloaks.
Hah! I would love to prove you wrong by imagining the perfect geological formation (many rocks as humans have many complex organs) that can receive and transmit coherent, dense information,
but I am a mere mortal.
For all practical purposes you're right, and for all philosophical purposes The Thinking Rock is an extreme example.
Let's revisit this thread in 5000 years after humans have gone interstellar and see if we can't review some evidence of unconventional life forms.
> Let's revisit this thread in 5000 years after humans have gone interstellar and see if we can't review some evidence of unconventional life forms.
That would be wonderful!
I have no doubt that different chemical foundations, and different environments will yield extreme differences in morphology.
The uncountable differences between humans and the octopus are a vivid example of how little aliens may resemble us.
It would be most interesting to know if life could evolve in oceans under planetary crusts, sunless rogue planets warmed by radioactive decay, in the extreme conditions around magnetars where chemistry takes on different rules, in thick rings or atmospheres around gas giants, or in methane or other non-water “oceans”.
Surely somewhere there are energy conserving hibernating “rocks” that we might be well surprised to discover are sentient!
Oh, in that case I agree. My understanding is LLMs (or at least GPT-architectures) aren't Turing machines, so they can't simulate arbitrary other systems even if you made them very big, and because of this my guess is that it would be extraordinarily unlikely for them to just happen to have the right shape and power for simulating a full human brain.
> Update 3 Jan 2017: This man has a specific type of hydrocephalus known as chronic non-communicating hydrocephalus, which is where fluid slowly builds up in the brain. Rather than 90 percent of this man's brain being missing, it's more likely that it's simply been compressed into the thin layer you can see in the images above. We've corrected the story to reflect this.
In ANNs, pruning 90% of the weights without substantial loss isn't unheard of. I guess this may be analogous: continuous pruning and fine tuning over a lifetime. Though, is removing 90% of the brain more analogous to 90% of weights, or 90% of the rank?
At this point it feels like we’d required the resources of an entire planet to run a single full-fidelity virtual brain. Which leads to interesting science fiction premises.
I’m sure I don’t fully understand the details but this kind of thing both excites and horrifies me when I ponder how much brain might be necessary to sustain the experience of consciousness.