Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brain's Electric Fields

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/consciousness-might-hide-in-our-brains-electric-fields/

by thomasjudge • 2 years ago

40 36 2 years ago

I post this because I think the current neural-net hegemony of AI research underappreciates the importance of consciousness and implicitly assumes that it can just scale its way to AGI

lostmsu2• 2 years ago

At this point even if it turned out the brain operates on subatomic mechanical gears so small we cannot actually see, it would not in any way affect the reasoning that the current approach is going to scale to AGI. The reasoning is not based on closeness of LLMs to the operation mechanics of the human brain, but on the observed capabilities.

chrsw2• 2 years ago

But how far do you have to scale LLMs to get to a conscious system? Would it even be practical?

chrsw2• 2 years ago

Beyond underappreciated, it's essentially being ignored. As far as what is publicly available anyway. I think the explanation for this partially or wholly lies in the goals and values of the people that research these systems vs the goals and values of natural brains. Generally speaking, AI researchers are trying to leverage existing hardware and tooling to demonstrate performance increases on a set of benchmarks. AI founders are trying to apply the research into products to attract investors. Established tech companies are trying to make money. None of these goals and values are anything like what natural brains are trying to do: survive.

If AI researchers, founders and tech companies thought artificial consciousness was the fastest path to any of those goals, they'd put resources into that. But they probably think it's an intractable problem, so it gets passed over for things that are likely to have a real payoff in the short term.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

what natural brains are trying to do

and so much more! "survive" does not acknowledge the inspirational, right?

elevaet4• 2 years ago

I think it's a mistake to conflate consciousness with AGI and vice-versa. It's entirely possible that you can have AGI without anyone being "home" and conversely it's also possible that there is a subjective experience going in much simpler systems. We just don't know, and maybe we never can.

But regardless, I think it's easy to imagine that there could be a machine that is generally intelligent, or super-generally-intelligent. but doesn't experience.

bena4• 2 years ago

It's equally easy to imagine a machine that can't be generally intelligent because it can't experience.

In other words, just because you can imagine it, doesn't mean you get to treat your assumptions as fact.

What we know right now is that we don't have AGI. Therefore, we currently don't know how to achieve AGI. While it is possible that scaling current methods and models will get us there, it is also possible that it never gets us there.

And when you consider that we see examples of general intelligence everywhere, in other people and animals, operating at far less power than it takes to train these models, it's not out of hand to say that we are possibly barking up the wrong tree.

Then there is the matter of actually defining general intelligence. It may also be the definition of consciousness, or at least require it. But currently, there is no mutually agreed upon definition of "general intelligence". Some people try to define it as "has a lot of knowledge". In which case, a hard drive can be considered intelligent. Or even a book. But people generally accept neither as intelligent. So "knowledgeable" is not a fitting definition. Something with intelligence must be able to act on its knowledge.

And I think that's where consciousness would come into play, if it does. It could be that consciousness is needed to direct knowledge. And one's ability to direct that knowledge is what we would consider intelligence.

Which could be why LLMs plateau. They have no internal direction. They are pure knowledge without direction. We supply the direction. And we must navigate the nodes to find the knowledge we can use. LLMs can't really tell truth from falsehoods, we do that. Just like we do internally. We discard untrue things, or things that aren't quite what we were thinking, or some other filter. LLMs just expose that process because now part of our knowledge is contained in the LLM.

So, just because it's easy to imagine, it doesn't mean that it's possible.

evilduck• 2 years ago

As far as I'm aware there's no scientific consensus on what consciousness is, how to measure it, what exact mechanisms are in play, or if it even exists at all.

Before bothering with the topic of consciousness in AI and AGI, we really need to nail down that definition for humans before squabbling over its presence or absence in something else.

proc0• 2 years ago

This is interesting but I wonder if it just moves the substrate from neuron spikes to that EM field, if it is involved in cognition. Additionally I don't think it would offer anything new in terms of explaining the hard problem of C.

I think it's premature to dismiss figuring out the neural code architecture, which has a lot of evidence it is the probable cause (mainly through brain damage and its correlations), but it's good they are looking elsewhere.

nabla9• 2 years ago

That should be easy to test. Not trivially easy, but still.

bijant• 2 years ago

There is no indication of EM-Fields involvement in biological functions. The observation of EM-fields where voltages spike and currents flow seems to be another case of the meta-scientific phenomenon of researchers in one discipline re-discovering the results of their colleagues from a neighbouring discipline. In this case biologists "discovering" Maxwells Equations.

dekhn3• 2 years ago

I probably misunderstand your comment but electric potentials play many roles in biological functions (example: proton gradient). As for magnetism, it's certainly speculated that some migratory animals can detect the earth's magnetic field.

valine• 2 years ago

You can induce an activation potential with an external EM field. That’s the entire basis for deep brain stimulation.

stcredzero• 2 years ago

A rediscovery is also a discovery. No need for the quotes here.

EDIT: Finding more evidence for convergence between scientific fields is also worthy. (Though the delta is very small at this point.)

throwuxiytayq• 2 years ago

Consciousness is clearly hiding in the smells. Scientists just haven’t properly looked at the olfactory chemistry happening in the air around us all the time. The neurons do the raw computation, but the subtle chemical exchanges and releases are what actually drives cognitive qualia and the sense of smelf. This also explains why smell is so important to memory.

exe343• 2 years ago

no, consciousness is in proprioception, that's why we store memories spatially!

dekhn3• 2 years ago

"sense of smelf". underappreciated comment.

tim333• 2 years ago

This is true. My friend lost her sense of smell for a year due to covid and became a philosophical zombie during that period in spite of outwardly seeming normal.

keybored• 2 years ago

Are they (the writers or scientists) trying to find the 21 grams?

dekhn3• 2 years ago

No,because that's not a thing. Scientists are trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness based on entirely physical, detectable, and scientifically understandable concepts, not pseudospiritualism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment) amplified by poor journalism.

davorak• 2 years ago

What I see in this article is something like "ephaptic" effects in neurons are mysterious, consciousness is also mysterious so maybe "ephaptic" effects can explain consciousness.

Ephaptic coupling[1] sounds cool and interesting but the article did not convince me that it is linked it to consciousness.

The involvement of consciousness in the article is not a hook for me and I would rather it not be in the article at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling

jacobdelong• 2 years ago

I'm struggling to understand the leap from ephaptic neurons to the explanation or location of consciousness. This assumes that consciousness can be located in the brain.

DonnyV• 2 years ago

Michael Levin has been doing research activating certain types of cell growth based on certain field frequencies. I wonder if this ties together. https://youtu.be/p3lsYlod5OU?si=BY6DRnqUZtc12wFH

I wonder if neurons are actually the hard drive and ephaptic fields are the software or network the software runs on.

Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brain's Electric Fields

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