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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: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 26, @04:39PM (5 children)
Yeah, I can't say I've ever read a Bible or Quaran or other religious texts (writings of the Dalai Lama, for example) "cover to cover" as a deep subject of study, but their various versions have been given some amount of my attention from time to time. In the multi-dimensional space of writing and its influences, I would put most of those texts somewhere quite different from comic books and uni textbooks, almost orthogonal to uni textbooks in most cases - sometimes overtly trying to be relatable and entertaining like a comic book, but usually not...
Random thought of the moment: I just saw a trailer for an animated (ages 11+) movie that seems to be trying to faithfully tell the Orwell Animal Farm story... I can't remember the last time I felt "I need to see that" so strongly about a kids' movie.
I'm not sure the science of mass psychology was anywhere near as developed in the 1600s as today. I suspect that the reformation and all that were an inspiration for study of the phenomenon... Related movie reference: The Book of Eli 2010, I've already given more spoiler about it than I probably should... I found it worth the time to stream one dull afternoon with bad weather.
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(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday February 26, @04:55PM (1 child)
In that case, you can also listen to well-produced dramatic readings of 1984 and Animal Farm [youtube.com] with sound effects. Definitely worth checking out.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 26, @05:05PM
Yeah, I'm thinking more in terms of: watch how young minds get molded (and not hate the outcome, for once.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8wLmj9SiKM [youtube.com]
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday February 26, @11:52PM (2 children)
I've done this several times in my life and it's interesting:
1) If you don't agree, its still influential. Its worth knowing for the influence effects alone.
2) Its just plain old interesting. There's a bit of Herodotus's Ants going on where it would seem the people writing it down and copying it were ... not overly educated especially about the topics they were documenting. But you can see past it to some reasonable symbolism. I wouldn't use it as a cosmology textbook as the people originally writing it down barely knew math for example. But WRT social commentary and societal organization patterns, nothing ever really changes, does it? That's what makes it interesting.
3) It tends to read a lot like a philosophy book where a couple lines, paragraphs, maybe chapters really resonate strongly with the reader and the rest... not so much. And that's OK. It doesn't have to feel like an action adventure novel or a western or a sci fi novel to be interesting.
4) In the classical sense of an education giving you something to think about, its an education. Like it or not, agree with or not, it sure gives some topics to think about, which in itself is good and interesting.
Overall, worth the time, would recommend. Yeah I know my own list of "in my infinite spare time" is wildly out of control so suggesting others add to their own "in their infinite spare time" lists is a bit much, but, its just such a good book to read.
I'm attempting to accumulate Sacred Books of the East. Not a category but literally the title of a collection of eastern philosophy/religion books translated to English. It looks so interesting to read and I have so little time to sit around reading. But yeah sometimes its fun to read primary sources.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 27, @02:29AM
I agree, just for some understanding of the (largely hypocritical) world that I live in, familiarity with the Bible is a good thing. I attended Catholic middle school in the late '70s, so I was introduced to "The Good News" version there and then - and also the rather extreme disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the practices of our Principal nun (who was dismissed for "mental instability issues" a couple of years after I graduated - no shocker there.)
If you watch "The Sound of Music" and read between the lines of the screenplay script, they are acknowledging that nuns become nuns for "reasons" - reasons that often have rendered them not-quite-compatible with life outside the protection of the Church, the nuns I interacted with at that school definitely showed signs of that - that were meaningless to a 10 year old, but clear looking back.
For understanding of the broader world (the other 2/3), there is definitely some different perspective in the Quran and Indian / Far Eastern texts, my shallow dive into Buddhism and the rest leaves me feeling that Jesus was "starting to get it" where the Old Testament really hadn't quite matured yet, in terms of the bigger picture of how to live as individuals within a large functional society. I've seen a 3 word summary of the teachings of the Dalai Lama that obviously leaves a few things out while still hitting the mark: "Life is suffering." Expand that with "so at least try not to add to others' suffering while you are here, and maybe help them if and when you can..." and that hits as close to a "mature philosophy" as any I have encountered. I think it fits particularly well with the secular perspective of "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins..." And, as for the Quran - that strikes me as Old Testament mark II - evolved, yet also old school. The writings themselves are more mystical than I expected, heavily interpretable - but most of the common interpretations I have encountered seem to stick with more Talmudic norms of obedience, obeisance and structure - not my scene, easy to see how it should work, but I question the sincerity of societies so rigidly structured - breaking of the rules seems inevitable, and once your people go "off the reservation" it's hard to predict how far they will go once they've decided they're not going to play by the rules anymore.
And, all of this is to say: it's worth knowing how people "tick" - which is an impossible challenge, but still valuable to do the best you can - and those books are a quick route to some (extremely limited) insights into a large number of people's heads - the books themselves largely are exploring what works, and doesn't, in societies of people - and what didn't work 4000-ish years ago basically doesn't work today, so that's worth a read if nothing else.
One of my little trips into King James' land was for my wedding - having been to a number of them in Christian churches of various denominations, I noticed they always read the same 2 passages. So I downloaded a searchable bible and found dozens of other passages referencing marriage, spouses, etc. Fucking horror stories, other than those 2 that they always read at modern weddings, ALL the other references are telling tales of awful events related to life as man and wife. Which is why I believe divorce is a great thing, and got one before my life turned into one of those biblical tales. True to modern statistics, only 50% of my marriages have ended in divorce - and I'm not Mormon, so that should be easy math.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 28, @01:57AM
If you read the Bible it's also interesting that for such a relatively small population the Jews have become the top "protagonists/antagonists" of this world's current period and timeline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews_as_the_chosen_people#Biblical_origins [wikipedia.org]
Epstein files, Nobel Prize winners, getting genocided, genociding others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_American_physicists [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_American_scientists [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_American_composers [wikipedia.org]
Too many of them highlight the "chosen" and "treasure" verses but ignore the other verses:
https://biblehub.com/amos/3-2.htm [biblehub.com]