Tag: Berggreun Essay Prize

Consciousness and Uncertainty Schematization

Mark DavisLeave a comment

If consciousness is an evolved function, the immediate question is what exactly is the currency of evolutionary selection in terms of traits and functions? In almost all of these kinds of arguments there is an explicit requirement that there is on average (or slightly greater than on average) value to survival that results in the maintenance and promotion of the relevant functions. In my Berggruen essay, I argued for a primarily social role to consciousness. Consciousness is a central monitoring framework for the complex web of social interactions that creates a reflective model of a person (and partially and uniquely in certain other species) that can be used to evaluate and plan for sexual pairing and other life choices related to status within social hierarchies. There are other hypotheses, as well, like the idea that predator-prey planning and avoidance is enhanced by a central consciousness experience, including some intriguing work on dreaming (when there is no active consciousness) that shows enhanced dreams for game players who are in the role of being prey within the game context as well as other forms of cognitive activation.

Abstractly, evolution is a distributed adaptation and learning algorithm that is the only robust solution to the complexity of natural environments. Wasteful though it may be, it is the invisible hand that drives forward enhanced prediction and survival using the knobs of genetics and the social relationships that are an extended phenotype in social species. There are a few theories of abstract learning that can be brought to bear on this topic, with the obvious candidate being inductive optimality via Kolmogorov complexity: minimize the model parameters to bottleneck against overtraining and avoid overfitting. This is central to all distributed learning but has layered complexity when considering the how to predict larger, more distal patterns, both temporal and spatial in activation and extent.… Read the rest

Consciousness as Functional Information

Mark Davis1 Comment

 

Congratulations to Anil Seth for winning the Berggruen essay prize on consciousness!  I didn’t learn the outcome until I emerged from one of the rare cellular blackout zones in modern America. My wife and I were whale watching south of Yachats (“ya-hots”) on the Oregon coast in this week of remarkable weather. We came up bupkis, nada, nil for the great migratory grays, but saw seals and sea lions bobbing in the surf, red shouldered hawks, and one bald eagle glowering like a luminescent gargoyle atop a Sitka spruce near Highway 101. We turned around at the dune groupings by Florence (Frank Herbert’s inspirations for Dune, weirdly enough, where thinking machines have been banned) and headed north again, the intestinal windings of the roads causing us to swap our sunglasses in and out in synchrony with the center console of the car as it tried to understand the intermittent shadows.

Seth is always reliable and his essay continues themes he has recently written about. There is a broad distrust of computational functionalism and hints of alternative models for how consciousness might arise in uniquely biological ways like his example of how certain neurons might fire purely for regulatory reasons. There are unanswered questions about whether LLMs can become conscious that hint at the challenges such ideas have, and the moral consequences that manifold conscious machines entail. He even briefly dives into the Simulation Hypothesis and its consequences for the possibility of consciousness.

I’ve included my own entry, below. It is both boldly radical and also fairly mundane. I argue that functionalism has a deeper meaning in biological systems than as a mere analog of computation. A missing component of philosophical arguments about function and consciousness is found in the way evolution operates in exquisite detail, from the role of parasitism to hidden estrus, and from parental investment to ethical consequentialism.… Read the rest