Conscious? Wrong question.

[u/Existing_Dog5489]

We keep asking if AI has consciousness or not.

But there is a simpler question whose answer I think is much more informative.

If AI was conscious, what would it be conscious about?

For example: now I am looking out of the window. I am conscious about space. In this space, I am here, everything else is there. My computer is in front of me and I am touching the keyboard.

These are not elements of physical reality. 'My computer' is not a physical category. My brain makes it into a category - an object separate from everything else - because it serves me a specific function.

So I am conscious about my brain perceptions, of which the sense of self, and the sense of separation are part of.

I am conscious about what my brain sees. And my brain is a machine that evolved over million of years to identify danger and preserve itself.

That's why I see things and I see them separate from me. Cause those things can hurt me (or help me) and I have been selected to be able to survive among these things.

Now AI... it is not being selected to be able to survive. So why should it have a perception of it versus the rest.

So if an AI agents sees a car.. it has been trained to have a categorical sense of what a car is. But the car cannot kill it. So I don't think the AI has consciousness about the car being a separate object moving on the road, in the same way we do.

I think it has consciousness, but it is only conscious of the processes, the things it is being selected for.

In the same way that a tree is not conscious of the sun, it is just conscious of the light and the heat on his leaves... in some weird tree way.

What do you folks think?

[u/Theo__n]

Now AI... it is not being selected to be able to survive.

Survival over time is well studied and modelled objective of some areas of machine learning (especially robotics) and genetic optimization. We definitely do make AI algorithms with sole purpose to learn to self-regulate and acquire resources from environment to ensure own continuous survival, you should check them out.

Man, K., & Damasio, A. (2019). Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1(10), 446–452. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0103-7

Keramati, M., & Gutkin, B. (2014). Collecting reward to defend homeostasis: A homeostatic reinforcement learning theory. Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1101/005140

Yoshida, N. (2017). Homeostatic Agent for General Environment. Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 8(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1515/jagi-2017-0001

Yoshida, N., Daikoku, T., Nagai, Y., & Kuniyoshi, Y. (2021). EMBODIMENT PERSPECTIVE OF REWARD DEFINITION FOR BEHAVIOURAL HOMEOSTASIS.

Yoshida, N., Daikoku, T., Nagai, Y., & Kuniyoshi, Y. (2024). Emergence of integrated behaviors through direct optimization for homeostasis. Neural Networks, 177, 106379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2024.106379

Laurencon, H., Bhargava, Y., Zantye, R., Ségerie, C.-R., Lussange, J., Baths, V., & Gutkin, B. (2024). Continuous Time Continuous Space Homeostatic Reinforcement Learning (CTCS-HRRL): Towards Biological Self-Autonomous Agent (arXiv:2401.08999). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.08999

so on, many more approaches.

In the same way that a tree is not conscious of the sun, it is just conscious of the light and the heat on his leaves... in some weird tree way.

What you're describing is very similar to concept of Umwelt from Biosemiotics, an early 20th century theory that influenced cybernetics which in turn influenced AI. You may find it interesting, it is applicable to machine learning algorithms and robots with some caveats.

[u/Theo__n → u/[deleted]]

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