My Blog

Category: Speculative Sentience

  • Proto-Intelligence in Qualia: a Simple Case

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    Do qualia like love, fear, pain, and pleasure causally influence us? I think that the evolutionary argument that qualia must influence us is sufficiently clear and easy to understand that there should be very little room for disagreement on the matter. Evolution wouldn’t have built phenomenal world-simulations composed of qualia unless they increased our inclusive fitness in some way, because an increase in fitness is a logically necessary condition for evolution to select traits of any kind.

    >> … Why does pain repel? Not for any mechanical reason, but instead because the raw feel of pain is intrinsically and irreducibly negative, and we (as receptive qualia systems) thus seek to avoid it.

    >> …
    Consider the phenomenon of intense love. It’s a trope that love changes the raw qualitative feel of the world, oneself, music, one’s beloved, and a broad range of other things. Love is very selective in the things that it preserves and in the things that it changes. It wouldn’t change the physical orientation of buildings, their color, or their form, because all of these things have survival utility, and the utility function of love doesn’t seek its own extinction. Instead, love acts selectively on the aesthetic qualities that interpenetrate gestalts, such as cities, one’s self-model, one’s beloved, and music

    Read more:
    https://autonoetic.blogspot.com/2022/12/proto-intelligence-in-qualia-simple-case.html

  • An organism able to learn and move with no brain, no mouth, no stomach, no eyes and 720 sexes

    A Paris zoo is showcasing a mysterious creature dubbed the “blob,” a yellowish collection of unicellular organisms called a slime mold that looks like a fungus, but acts like an animal.

    This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on public display on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet can detect food and digest it.

    The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.

    “The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries,” said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.

    “It surprises us, because it has no brain but is able to learn (…) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David said.

    The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.

    “We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really [know] if it’s an animal or a fungus,” said David.

    “It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom … it has the behaviour of an animal, it is able to learn.”

    Source:

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/paris-zoo-blob-1.5325747

     

  • Robots need civil rights, too

    If “consciousness” is a similarly broad concept, then we can see degrees of consciousness in a variety of biological and artificial agents, depending on what kinds of abilities they possess and how complex they are. For example, a thermostat might be said to have an extremely tiny degree of consciousness insofar as it’s “aware” of the room temperature and “takes actions” to achieve its “goal” of not letting the room get too hot or too cold. I use scare quotes here because words like “aware” and “goal” normally have implied anthropomorphic baggage that’s almost entirely absent in the thermostat case. The thermostat is astronomically simpler than a human, and any attributions of consciousness to it should be seen as astronomically weaker than attributions of consciousness to a human.

    Source: https://reducing-suffering.org/machine-sentience-and-robot-rights/

    Suffering is what concerns Brian Tomasik, a former software engineer who worked on machine learning before helping to start the Foundational Research Institute, whose goal is to reduce suffering in the world. Tomasik raises the possibility that AIs might be suffering because, as he put it in an e-mail, “some artificially intelligent agents learn how to act through simplified digital versions of ‘rewards’ and ‘punishments.’” This system, called reinforcement learning, offers algorithms an abstract “reward” when they make a correct observation [actually, “observation” should be changed to “action”]. It’s designed to emulate the reward system in animal brains, and could potentially lead to a scenario where a machine comes to life and suffers because it doesn’t get enough rewards. Its programmers would likely never realize the hurt they were causing.

    Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/09/08/robots-need-civil-rights-too/igtQCcXhB96009et5C6tXP/story.html

     

  • Plants live in a tactile world, perceive light, have a sense of smell, taste, and respond to sound

    Are plants sentient? We know they sense their environments to a significant degree; like animals, they can “see” light, as a New Scientist feature explains. They “live in a very tactile world,” have a sense of smell, respond to sound, and use taste to “sense danger and drought and even to recognize relatives.” We’ve previously highlighted research here on how trees talk to each other with chemical signals and form social bonds and families. The idea sets the imagination running and might even cause a little paranoia. What are they saying? Are they talking about us?

    Maybe we deserve to feel a little uneasy around plant life, given how ruthlessly our consumer economies exploit the natural world. Now imagine we could hear the sounds plants make when they’re stressed out. In addition to releasing volatile chemicals and showing “altered phenotypes, including changes in color, smell, and shape,” write the authors of a new study published at bioRxiv, it’s possible that plants “emit airborne sounds [their emphasis] when stressed—similarly to many animals.”

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  • Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

    “—we need both the science and the philosophy to get a theory of consciousness. The science gives us correlations between brain activity and experience. We then have to work out the best philosophical theory that explains those correlations. In my view, the only theory that holds up to scrutiny is panpsychism.

    When I studied philosophy, we were taught that there were only two approaches to consciousness: either you think consciousness can be explained in conventional scientific terms, or you think consciousness is something magical and mysterious that science will never understand. I came to think that both of these views were pretty hopeless. I think we can have hope that we will one day have a science of consciousness, but we need to rethink what science is. Panpsychism offers us a way of doing this.”

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  • How does the world view of a believer in physicalism differ from one of idealism?

    Physicalism is the view that no “element of reality” (Einstein) is missing from the mathematical equations of physics – more strictly, tomorrow’s physics beyond the Standard Model plus GR.
    Idealism is the view that reality is experiential.
    Most physicalists aren’t idealists, and most idealists aren’t physicalists, but a small minority of researchers are both idealists and physicalists.

    The intrinsic nature of quantum states is disputed. But if quantum mechanics is complete, and if the equations of physics describe fields of sentience rather than insentience, then physicalistic idealism is true. If so, there is no Hard Problem of consciousness as normally framed. Fields of insentience are destined to go the way of luminiferous aether. Formally, physical reality is described by the universal wavefunction. By contrast, consciousness is often said to be ill-defined. Yet if physicalistic idealism is true, then we already possess the mathematical apparatus of a theory of consciousness. All that’s hard is to “read off” the textures of experience from the solutions to the equations. The conjecture that relativistic QFT describes fields of sentience rather than insentience still leaves the mystery of why anything exists for the equations to describe: one big mystery rather than two. Yet even here, the superposition principle of QM hints at an answer.

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  • Collective intelligence, ants and the binding problem

    A single neuron in the human brain can respond only to what the neurons connected to it are doing, but all of them together can be Immanuel Kant.

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    The idea of a collective consciousness (Or Anthill) is pretty simple: instead of cells you have small sentient animal that make up a larger creature. This is different from a hive mind in that the individuals of a hive mind are all sapient, but in a only the collective is.

    When I tend to think of this species, I struggle with how they would appear. Unlike with an angel, a centaur or a merperson, I lack both the inner anatomy and outer form for what they would look like. I literally am starting from the barebone scratch of a creature.

    This has made me ask, what would an anthill species look like? What would their biology be?

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    Binding prerequisites: does the substrate of consciousness require some special property which can support “ontological unity” (e.g., Pearce’s focus on quantum coherence) to bind together ‘micro-experiences’, or should we focus on information-theoretic aggregation techniques (e.g., IIT’s
    Minimum Information Partition)?

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  • If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

    If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you’re a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings. –Eric Schwitzgebel

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    Alternatively, one might insist that specific details of biological implementation are essential to consciousness in any possible being — for example, specific states of a unified cortex with axons and dendrites and ion channels and all that — and that broadly mammal-like or human-like functional sophistication alone won’t do. However, it seems bizarrely chauvinistic to suppose that consciousness is only possible in beings with internal physical states very similar to our own, regardless of outwardly measurable behavioral similarity. If aliens come visit us tomorrow and behave in every respect like intelligent, conscious beings, must we check for sodium and calcium channels in their heads before admitting that they have conscious experience? Or is there some specific type of behavior that all conscious animals do but that the United States, perhaps slightly reconfigured, could not do, and that is a necessary condition of consciousness? It’s hard to see what that could be. Is the United States simply not an “entity” in the relevant sense? Well, why not? What if we all held hands?

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  • Is there any scientific evidence that plants might be sentient?

    Plants do metabolize diclofenac (the specific mechanism is explained in the article below). This indicates that it’s possible to test if plants could react to painkillers while being damaged.

    Metabolism of diclofenac in plants – Hydroxylation is followed by glucose conjugation

    Aditionally, I think this is also relevant: there’s absolutely no evidence that plants are not sentient.

    (Answered with the info and suggestion provided by the researcher Octavio Muciño)

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  • Is There Suffering in Fundamental Physics?

    Any sufficiently advanced consequentialism is indistinguishable from its own parody. The present article is sincere, though it might come across as absurd depending on one’s perspective. In order to reduce suffering, we have to decide which things can suffer and how much. Suffering by humans and animals tugs our heartstrings and is morally urgent, but we also have an obligation to make sure that we’re not overlooking negative subjective experiences in other places. I’ve written elsewhere about suffering in insects and digital minds. This piece explores what is arguably the most extreme possibility: seeing at least traces of suffering in fundamental physics.

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