Can software be conscious?
NOTE: This developed into something a bit better. It took a while though. see: philosophy
No. Why would logic gates in silicon feel like anything other than electrified silicon?
The odds
Say I flip a coin 10 times in a row and you see me get heads every time, you can either believe I’m using an unfair coin or you just witnessed a 1 in 1000 chance event. If you trust me 100% and I swear that I’m being honest, and I flip that coin 30 times in a row, that’s a billion to one chance. With those odds, completely crazy things are more likely than it actually happening. Maybe you’re dreaming this whole thing, I’m an impostor or someone is forcing me to lie. Perhaps someone is messing with both of us or a brain illness is changing my personality – these are all far more likely than a billion to one.
Each theory has its own likelihood of being true, and if you muliply the odds together you can have a rough idea of which is most likely.
Let’s say you have two theories like:
a. evolution created the diversity of life (99% sure)
b. through the will of God (99.99999999% sure)
The likelihood of a*b will always be less than a no matter how sure you are
about God’s will, so if you can use Occam’s razor to shave away the second
statement and you will always be more likely to be correct. There could be other
reasons for God to exist and for this to be His will, but once evolution can
explain life then the God bit gets shoved aside. Dawkins calls this shoving
process “the God of the gaps”, and I’m going to try to use this to explain why
LLMs aren’t conscious, at the same time as pushing my own ridiculous take on
metaphysics down your throat.
Panpsychism is most likely
The only thing we know with absolute certainty is that mind exists. We know this because we feel it, we are it – nothing here has changed since Descartes. All we know has been fed to us through this lense of subjective experience.
General relativity and quantum physics both describe a reality that is, at its core, both relative and subjective. And like we know that mind stuff exists we know that subjectivity exists too. Objective reality is a nice idea, but it’s not something that has been shown to actually exist. It’s safer to assume that reality is built upon subjective experience, rather than the other way around.
Philosophers have struggled with the paradox of free will and determinism for centuries. If all stuff obeys the laws of physics then how can we mere stuff change the outcome of any events at all? Is free will an illusion, and we are mindless automata, or do we break the laws of physics with our will? We know that will exists because we have it, that we can choose to do one thing rather than another. And we know that making decisions is pretty important from an evolutionary perspective, and that the rich tapestry of our mind’s eye is a very expensive thing to maintain. We humans spend 1/3 of our time resting it and a quarter of our years growing it, and put 20% of our energy into running it. It’s pretty illogical to assume that this is for nothing, that our ability to choose is an illusion that has no bearing on the future, that the detailed world inside our heads is a side effect of some other unknown decision making thing, rather than the thing itself.
The belief that minds are made from rule-abiding matter is well respected yet there’s not one shred of evidence that there’s a “matter stuff” that exists separate from “mind stuff”.
Another thing that has not proved its existence is infinity. There appears to be a start to the universe and a point in time when matter will have ceased to exist. We have fundamental particles that make up the tiniest possible things, and there’s a smallest possible distance in time and in space. So the idea of anything at all being infinite looks pretty unlikely, so we should consider infinities and continua abstract concepts and avoid putting our faith in them. They are useful ideas, but they aren’t supported by anything that we have actually measured.
Why do rational people default to the belief in an infinte universe, objective reality that follows rigid physical law? Why do we think think that mind is a special case that needs to be explained away? The answer is cultural and religious.
Judeo-Christian dualism underpins all of Western science. It’s historically a search by humble and meek souls to understand His Creation, for humble and meek souls to know His Law.
God used to be part of day-to-day life and a way to explain the unknown, but has been pushed aside as our knowledge of the world has grown; “god of the gaps”. We don’t consider lightning, storms, earthquakes or disease the wrath of our God anymore as we have scientific explanations for these. The creation of the world is now the natural consequence of physical laws that we’ve observed, biology is now explained by evolution rather than God’s grand design, and even when people pray for a cure it’s delivered through evidence-based medicine rather than begging for divine intervention.
Rationality and physicalism have squished ideas about ghosts, demonic possession, spirit realms and an afterlife, but the focus on physical stuff has pushed “mind stuff” into the gaps in a similar way to God. If you actually step back and look at it then it really ought to have been the other way around; a “stuff of the gaps” is much more logical than a “mind of the gaps”. We search for theories as to what the nature of mind is, how it might emerge from a world made up of physical stuff, but this objective reality is just the “physical realm” dressed in a lab coat. The same can be said of infinities and continua, the set of real numbers,
The most logical explanation is that natural law is a description of how mind stuff acts, that physical things are a side-effect; a manifestation of feeling, of will and of choice.
I’d better clarify that I’m not saying that there’s a magical universal consciousness that has desires and makes choices for us. I’m saying that the physical things around us are like they are because that’s what they feel like. A rock is a rock because on average, the countless trillions of experiences it’s made of are in a cycle of choosing to interact and combine and bounce off each other in a way that, on average, it carries on looking a rock.
If this still all sounds like a load of abstract rubbish and spiritualist woo, there’s actually one good, concrete reason why this is the most likely explanation of nature. Unlike competing theories it actually makes the evolution of nervous systems and selves likely.
The nerve of it
Assuming Descartes demon isn’t a thing and this isn’t some elaborate ruse, you all exist as well as me, and it’s pretty safe to assume that humans are conscious. We put a lot of effort into this, like in humans we spend 1/3 of our life resting our brains and 1/3 of our life growing one in the first place, and it eats about 250kcal a day. So our biology reckons keeping the thing going is worth at least 55% of our time and 20% of our energy. The point of it seems to be making decisions about what to do next, and the mind is a simulation of the world around us so it can do just that. The ability to choose is pretty important from a survival perspective, and it’s not something we should assume is a by-product of some other process or a mirage.
I’m pretty sure my parents are conscious, that theirs were too and theirs before them and so on. Look at the great apes and they look pretty conscious to me, they act like they feel similar things to us. Same with dogs and cats, and birds, so it must have evolved before reptiles. And if you keep going back, there’s no clear line between animals that are conscious and those that aren’t. Crabs seem to have desires, and their ancestors branched off with the insects. Going back a bit further you’ve got hydra and corals, which seem to express at least as much choice as an insect. This, on grounds of invention by natural selection puts us dangerously close to saying that plants and fungi have feeling. I’m not going to go that far, but by this point we’re pretty close to the origins of the nerve, and either feelings and choices were invented by the very first nerves, or they existed before they did. And if you look at the behaviour of an amoeba, you’ll be forgiven for attributing will to it.
So the idea that the capacity to feel anything at all rather than nothing only comes about when huge numbers of information processing cells magic this into being, that it “strongly emerges” at some level of complexity is just the soul being pushed into the gaps. We have no good reason to believe anything other than mind stuff exists, so it’s likely that evolution used structured experience to give rise to selves; to enslave matter to feel like it wants to reproduce, starting at the first self-replicating protiens, rather than at the cellular level or above.
That’s what I reckon anyway. I might be wrong, but I think it’s most likely.