The Nautilus One Question

Plus: Did you read? The Webb Telescope, tech shamanism, and surprising your friend. July 19, 2022   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. ONE QUESTION Does an AI’s Ability to Talk Mean It’s Conscious? INTERVIEW BY BRIAN GALLAGHER One question for [Raphaël Millière](, a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University, where he conducts research on the philosophy of cognitive science.   Simply talking to a large transformer model like LaMDA and looking at its answers—like the Google engineer Blake Lemoine did—isn’t the right kind of target, or potential evidence, for consciousness. The capacity to talk at all, or to talk about consciousness in particular, is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for being conscious. A lot of animal species are capable of having conscious experiences—your pets, apes, or cephalopods. They react to noxious stimuli in ways that seem absolutely consistent with having consciousness. Animals also share a lot of neurobiological structures with us. Yet they cannot speak about their feelings. It’s also not sufficient precisely because of what happens with cases like LaMDA, where the model is very good at mimicking, giving the illusion of speaking about sentience, or about their feelings. But they don’t really have feelings. We ought to consider a broader cluster of evidence that includes looking at the kind of structures that biological and artificial systems have, and seeing whether these systems can sustain the kind of computation, or computational complexity, that we find in humans associated with conscious experiences or sentience. In the brain you have all sorts of recurrent connections, feedback loops, all sorts of specialized circuits and subnetworks, and modules that you don’t find in these large transformer models that are conceptually very simple. You could describe fairly easily the basic building blocks of these models. On the other hand reverse engineering the architecture of the human brain is extremely complex. Children learn in a very different way from what current transformer based algorithms learn. The way current algorithms learn is completely passive. They are just fed a torrential stream of data, bombarded with text data and images. They don’t roam the world and causally interact with the world in the way humans do. My sense is that causal interaction with the world is crucial for the way in which children learn to develop the right kinds of representations about the world across different senses—not just vision but also tactile, auditory, and other modalities. This is how they learn to represent the causal structure of the world, not just correlations between events. Children can also learn from relatively scarce data, whereas current models need a huge amount of data, orders of magnitude more data than children, to even have the slightest chance at doing as well in solving tasks. We are only still scratching the surface in neuroscience. It’s complicated because we don’t yet have a fully worked out scientific theory of consciousness. There are various competing theories, and the science of consciousness is still young. The best we can do right now is look at what kind of predictions our best theories make, both in terms of behavior and information-processing complexity. That, all taken together, would be a better guide to start making some speculations about sentience in both biological and artificial systems than just looking at linguistic outputs.   Related Nautilus Stories   [TECHNOLOGY]( [Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall]( BY GARY MARCUS Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016. [Continue reading →](           [TECHNOLOGY]( [Your Next New Best Friend Might Be a Robot]( BY YONGDONG WANG One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). [Continue reading →](   [TECHNOLOGY]( [How Long Until a Robot Cries?]( BY NEIL SAVAGE When Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. [Continue reading →](           [TECHNOLOGY]( [Is Artificial Intelligence Permanently Inscrutable?]( BY AARON M. BORNSTEIN Dmitry Malioutov can’t say much about what he built. [Continue reading →](   [TECHNOLOGY]( [Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious]( BY JOEL FROHLICH The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you and me yet lack subjective experience. [Continue reading →](     Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TO NAUTILUS](   [( [Learn From Best-Selling Nonfiction Books in Just 15 Minutes]( Life gets hectic, giving us little time to learn new things. With [Blinkist](, you can use those small windows of time to glean important insight into the world’s best nonfiction books. In just 15 minutes, discover powerful ideas from over 5,000 best-selling books on science, nature, tech, and more. [Sign up for Blinkist]( now to start your 7-day free trial and get 25% off your subscription. [Get 25% Off + Free Trial](   DID YOU READ THIS? Our favorite stories this week outside Nautilus   [The First Images from the James Webb Telescope Are Breathtaking—and Significant]( The Hubble Deep Field images suggest the observable universe could contain a [whopping two trillion galaxies](. I’m eagerly anticipating an update on that figure with the new Webb Telescope, the first images from which were released last week, notably Webb's first Deep Field. Marcia Rieke, the astrophysicist who took the picture, said Webb is so powerful, even short exposures were revealing new galaxies astronomers weren’t even looking for, which her team took to calling “photobombers.” Their beauty caught Rieke off-guard: “I didn’t expect them to be so absolutely stunning.” [The New Yorker→](   [The “Shamanification” of the Tech CEO]( The leaders of Silicon Valley companies are an odd breed—they fast intermittently and meditate, take psychedelics, deprive themselves of certain pleasures, and follow eccentric diets. This may seem like a new trend, but for the anthropologist Manvir Singh, it’s an old pattern. Singh, with Harvard’s [Joe Henrich]( as his advisor, wrote his doctoral dissertation on [shamanism and witchcraft](, based on field research, and to his eye, tech CEOs are, wittingly or not, following an archetypal script: “As long as people search for miracles, others will compete to look like miracle-workers, forever resurrecting ancient and time-tested techniques.” [Wired→](   [The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More Than We Think]( After you’ve taken in today’s newsletter, [call up a good friend](, one who you don’t see or talk to quite as often as you’d like. Odds are they’ll appreciate hearing from you much more than you expect. In a new study, researchers led by the University of Pittsburgh’s Peggy Liu found that how much friends appreciate getting a phone call is linked to how surprising it is for you to reach out to them. [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology→]( –Brian Gallagher, associate editor   [BECOME A SUBSCRIBER]( [Apparel That Will Protect Our Oceans]( Nautilus and Jungles have teamed up to release a limited-edition line of stunning apparel. The [Nautilus x Jungles collection]( will benefit the 30x30 initiative—a global effort to protect 30% of our oceans by 2030. These distinctive pieces feature captivating imagery from the Schmidt Ocean Institute and provocative quotes from legendary biologist and environmentalist Roger Payne. [Subscribe to Nautilus]( and save 50% on a piece from the Nautilus x Jungles collection. [Claim This Offer](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2022 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 To view in your browser, [click here]( . Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe]( .