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NPR has a nice summary of an interview with Michael Pollan about AI and consciousness, but it kind of goes beyond that.
[Professor Pollan is the author of more than an dozen books, most notably "This is your mind on plants" about using psychedelics .]
What is consciousness?
After writing a book about how using psychedelics in a therapeutic setting can change your consciousness, that's the question journalist Michael Pollan found himself struggling to answer.
"There's nothing any of us know with more certainty than the fact that we are conscious. It's immediately available to us. It's the voice in our head," he says. And yet, Pollan adds: "How does three pounds of this tofu-like substance between your ears generate subjective experience? Nobody knows the answer to that question."
His new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, explores consciousness on both a personal and technological level. Pollan, who lives close to Silicon Valley, says some believe that Artificial Intelligence is capable of consciousness.
"They base this on a premise ... that basically the brain is a computer, and that consciousness is software," he says. "And if you can run it on the brain, which is essentially, in their view, a 'meat-based computer,' you should be able to run it on other kinds of machines."
"If you think about it, your feelings are very tied to your vulnerability, to your having a body that can be hurt, to the ability to suffer and perhaps your mortality," he says. "So I think that any feelings that a chatbot reports will be weightless, meaningless, because they don't have bodies. They can't suffer."
On the notion that people have moral obligations to chatbots
That's a very active conversation here, which is if they are conscious, we then have moral obligations to them, and have to think about granting them personhood, for example, the way we've granted corporations personhood. I think that would be insane. We would lose control of them completely by giving them rights. But I find this whole tender care for the possible consciousness of chatbots really odd, because we have not extended moral consideration to billions of people, not to mention the animals that we eat that we know are conscious. So we're gonna start worrying about the computers? That seems like our priorities are screwed up.
On the sentience of plants
Plants can see, which is a weird idea. There's a certain vine that can actually change its leaf form to mimic the plant it's twining around. How does it know what that leaf form is? Plants can hear. If you play the sound of chomping caterpillars on a leaf, they will produce chemicals to repel those caterpillars and to convey, to alert other plants in the vicinity. Plants have memory. You can teach them something and they'll remember it for 28 days.
On losing time to let our mind wander
I worry, too, that with media, with our technologies, we are shrinking the space in which spontaneous thought can occur. And that this space of ... spontaneous thought is something precious that we're giving away to these corporations that essentially want to monetize our attention, and in the case of chatbots, want to monetize our attachments, our deep human attachments. So consciousness is, I think — and this is what to me is the urgency of the issue — consciousness is under siege. I think that it's the last frontier for some of these companies that want to sell our time.
On writing a book that grapples with unanswerable questions
There were many moments of despair in the process of reporting and writing this book. It took me five years, and there were many times where [I told my wife] "I've dug a hole here, and I don't know how I'm ever going to get out of it." And some of it had to do with mounting frustration with the science, and some of it had to do with the fact that I had this classic male problem/solution Western frame — that there was a problem and I was going to find the solution.
It took my wife, in part, and [Zen Buddhist teacher] Joan Halifax and some other people, who got me to question that and [they] said, "Yeah, there is the problem of consciousness, but there's also the fact of it, and the fact is wondrous. The fact is miraculous. And you've put all this energy into this narrow beam of attention. Why don't you open that beam up further and just explore the phenomenon that is going on in your head, which is so precious and so beautiful." And that's kind of where I came out — and it's certainly not where I expected to come out.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 26, @04:22PM
Meatbag response to the AI summary/critique of the meatbag summary of it's book critiquing AI:
Was it shrooms or LSD that inspired this glorious misconception? Consciousness can be explained many ways, what we are lacking is consensus on the definitions of the questions to be answered.
Forceful argument doesn't mask ignorance: dynamic, experience driven software and hardware systems have existed in various forms for as long as there have been computers. We tend not to build things that way because it makes them less predictable, yet any system which changes its input-output transform based on prior inputs (at an extreme of simplicity: IIR filters) is "reshaping itself based on experience."
Computer systems have bodies, and do react to their state / health. My CPU throttles back when it gets too hot, Hard Drives / SSDs mask bad sectors / cells, rearrange and shrink their storage. Many automotive ECUs enter a "limp home mode" when sensors tell them their bodies need service / repair. HAL 9000 "feels its mind slipping" as processors are taken offline - fiction, but little by little computer systems are being made more aware of their health and adjusting their behaviors in response. These "feelings" are quite alien to meatbags with aching joints, burning eyes. migraines and indigestion - it's no wonder the chatbots "relate" to people by mirroring people's "feelings" rather than attempting analogies with their own issues.
Fair enough. Addictive behaviors and emotional reliance on insincere supports are nothing new - similar safeguards and supports to similar existing problems should be applied.
As they have been since big business first evolved. The opium trade is a favorite example at the top of my mind, Madison Avenue jingles selling caffinated sugar sodas and using sexy women to promote cigarettes aren't far behind. Then we have the recent vaping industry repeating the exact same adolescent developmental chemical dependence pathways that tobacco was regulated for via inexcusable loophole exploitation. Maximization of profits via any and all permissible/possible methods is the root of these evils.
Now he's just stroking MY feathers.
How many doses of LSD for most people to relate to processes happening on differing timescales?
Inviting ridicule and dismissal as a poseur crackpot.
AI: +1 Pollan: -1.
Who do you think is making more sense here? Machine or man?
Underscoring the craven intellectual coward's real motivation: Buy this book!
No thanks.
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