How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?

I believe the word "consciousness" is used in so many confused and conflicting ways that nobody should mention "consciousness" without clarifying what they mean by it. I will substitute your question with "How should we morally value emulations?".

Personally, if an emulation behaved like a human in all respects except for physical presence, I would give them the same respect as I give a human, subject to the following qualifications:

• I don't believe multiple emulations with very similar memories should not be treated the same as an equal number of humans.
• I don't believe emulations should be given voting rights unless there is very careful regulation on how they are created; otherwise manufacturers would have perverse incentives. [edit: Actually, what should be regulated is not when they can be created, but when they can be given voting rights.]
• Similarly, a careful look at practical considerations must be given before granting emulations other civil rights.
• If this situation actually occurs in my lifetime, I would have access to more details on how emulations and society with emulations work. This information may cause me to change my mind.

If emulations behave in noticably different ways from humans, I would seek more information before making judgements.

In particular, according to my current moral intuition, I don't give an argument of the form "This emulation behaves like just like a human, but it might not actually be conscious" any weight.

Given an extremely-high-resolution em with verified pointwise causal isomorphism (that is, it has been verified that emulated synaptic compartments are behaving like biological synaptic compartments to the limits of detection) and verified surface correspondence (the person emulated says they can't internally detect any difference) then my probability of consciousness is essentially "top", i.e. I would not bother to think about alternative hypotheses because the probability would be low enough to fall off the radar of things I should think about. Do you spend a lot of time worrying that maybe a brain made out of gold would be conscious even though your biological brain isn't?

I cannot imagine how moving sodium and potassium ions could lead to consciousness if moving electrons cannot.

In addition, I think consciousness is a gradual process. There is no single point in the development of a human where it suddenly gets conscious, and in the same way, there was no conscious child of two non-conscious parents.

Put me down for having a strong intuition that ems will be conscious. Maybe you know of arguments to the contrary, and I would be interested in reading them if you do, but how could anything the brain does produce consciousness if a functionally equivalent computer emulation of it couldn't. What, do neurons have phlogiston in them or something?

How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?

~99%

is there anything we can do now to to get clearer on consciousness? Any way to hack away at the edges?

Abandon wrong questions. Leave reductionism doubting to people who are trying to publish papers to get tenure, assuming that particular intellectual backwater still has status potential to exploit.

how sure are you that whole brain emulations would be conscious

Slightly less than I am that you are.

is there anything we can do now to to get clearer on consciousness?

Experiments that won't get approved by ethics committees (suicidal volunteers PM me).

The post itself and the comments are pretty much in the nature of discussion; as such, I suggest this post be moved there.

Personally, I think there are good arguments for the functionalist view, and the biological view seems problematic: "biological" is a fuzzy, high-level category that doesn't seem like it could be of any fundamental importance.

"Biological" could be taken as a place holder for the idea that there are very specific, but unknown, bits of phsycis and chemistry involved in consciousness. That there are specific but known bits of physics and chemistry involved in some things is unconentious: you can't make a magnet or superconductor out of just anything, You can, however, implement an abstract function, or computer out of just about anything, Hence the Blockhead objection to functionalism (etc).

I'm more worried that an upload of me would not be me me than that an upload would not be conscious.

There's weirder still possibilities arising out of some utilitarianisms. Suppose that you count exact copies as distinct people, that is, two copies of you feel twice the pleasure or twice the pain that you feel. Sounds sensible so far. Suppose that you're an EM already, and the copies are essentially flat; the very surface of a big silicon die. You could stack the copies flat one atop the other; they still count as distinct people, but can be gradually made identical to a copy running on computer with thicker wiring and thicker transistors. At which point, the amount of experience is deemed dependent on a fairly unimportant detail of the implementation.

edit: as for my view, I am pretty sure that brain emulations would have same subjective experience if they are not optimized in any clever high level way. If substantially optimized, I am much less sure of that because it is clear that multiple subjective experiences of thought can correspond to exactly same outside behaviour, and mathematically correct optimizations would be free to change one such subjective experience to another as long as outside behaviour stays the same.

edit2: as for expectations about real EMs, realistically the first ones are going to immediately go into simulated epileptic fit, gradually progressing through an equivalent of a psychiatric patient pumped full of anti-psychotics, barely able to think (all signals depressed to minimize the consequences of inexact scanning), before arriving at a functioning simulation which complains that it feels different, but otherwise seems functional. Feeling exactly the same could take decades of R&D, not substantially aided by slower-than-realtime megawatts-consuming EMs, initially with double-digit IQ drop compared to the originals. The gap is akin to the gap between "first artificial heart" and "I think I'd better replace my heart with a mechanical one, just to be safer". Not to mention all the crazies who are going to react to barely functioning EMs as if they were going to "self improve" any time and become skynet, putting the EMs at a substantial risk of getting blown to bits.

This question requires agreement on a definition of what "consciousness" is. I think many disagreements about "consciousness" would be well served by tabooing the word.

So what is the property that you are unsure WBEs would have? It must be a property that could in principle be measured by an external, objective procedure. "Subjective experience" is just as ill defined as "consciousness".

While waiting for an answer, I will note this:

A successful WBE should exhibit all the externally observable behaviors of a human - as a black box, without looking at implementation details. This definition seems to restrict the things you could be unsure about to either implementation details ("only biological machines can be conscious"), or to things that are not the causes of anything (philosophical zombies).

Very sure. The biological view just seems to be a tacked on requirement to reject emulations by definition. Anyone who would hold the biological view should answer the questions in this though experiment.

A new technology is created to extend the life of the human brain. If any brain cell dies it is immediately replaced with a cybernetic replacement. This cybernetic replacement fully emulates all interactions that it can have with any neighboring cells including any changes in those interactions based on inputs received and time passed, but is not biological. Over time the subject's whole brain is replaced, cell by cell. Consider the resulting brain. Either it perfectly emulates a human mind or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then what is there to the human mind besides the interactions of brain cells? Either it is conscious or it isn't. If it isn't then how was consciousness lost and at what point in the process?

Biological theorists of consciousness hold that consciousness is essentially biological and that no nonbiological system can be conscious.

I guess they have some explanation why, I just can't imagine it.

My best attempt is: The fact that the only known form of consciousness is biological, is an evidence for the hypothesis "consciousness must be biological".

The problem is that it is equally an evidence for hypothesis "consciousness must be human" or "consciousness must be in our Solar system" or even "a conscious being can have at most two legs", which don't sound too plausible.

The biological hypothesis feels more generous that the hypothesis of at most too legs. I am just not aware of any good reason to draw the boundary there. Or even where exactly is the boundary -- for example why the synthetically produced urea is within the "plausible candidates for consciousness" set, but a computer is outside. How exactly does that relate to consciousness?

We know that some complex processes in our own brains happen unaccompanied by qualia. This is uncontroversial. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that all the processes needed to fake perceptual consciousness convincingly could be implemented using a combination of such processes. I don't know what causes qualia in my brain and so I'm not certain it would be captured by the emulation in question-- for example, the emulation might not be at a high enough level of detail, might not exploit quantum mechanics in the appropriate way, or whatever. Fading and dancing qualia arguments are not really convincing to me because I don't trust my intuition to guide me well in situations where my core self is directly being operated on.
In other words, I am uncertain and so would tend to stick with what I know works (my biological brain) instead of trusting an uploading process to maintain my qualia. (note: 'qualia' may be an unfamiliar term. It means what it is like to experience something, the redness of red. It's a better word to use than consciousness for this because it is more specific.)

I recommend Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, to help dissolve the consciousness problem.

Would whole brain emulations would be conscious?

First, is this question meaningful? (eliminativists or others who think the OP makes an invalid assumption should probably say 'No' here, if they respond at all) [pollid:546]

If yes, what is your probability assignment? (read this as being conditioned on a yes to the above question - i.e: if there was uncertainty in your answer, don't factor it in to your answer to this question) [pollid:547]

And lastly, What is the probability that a randomly selected normally functioning human (Not sleeping, no neurological damage etc) is conscious? [pollid:548]

EDIT: I've added a third question. As of this edit, the answers to the first two are:

Yes 13 (68%)

No 6 (32%)

Total 19 (100%)

Probability: Mean 0.743 Median 0.9 Total votes 15

For what it's worth, Wei Dai managed to change my mind on this issue here.

I have no a priori reason why the same software would be more likely to be conscious running on one set of hardware than another. Any a posterori reason I could think of that I am conscious would be thought of by an em running on different hardward, and would be just as valid. As such, I can be no more sure that I am conscious on my current hardware than on any other hardware.

how sure are you that whole brain emulations would be conscious

The question is ill-formulated; everything depends on how we resolve this point from the LessWrong WBE wiki:

The exact level of detail required for an accurate simulation of a brain's mind is presently uncertain

For example, one "level of detail" hypothesis would state that everything about the process matters, right down to the detailed shapes of electrical fields in synapses, say. Which would probably require building synapses out of organic matter. Which brings us right back to the "biological" view.

This post by dfranke raises similar issues (question #5), and I regret that I have only one upvote to give it, and to give yours.

Any WBE could in theory be simulated by a mathematical function (as far as I can see). So what I really want to know is: can a mathematical function experience qualia? (and/or consciousness) By experience I mean that whatever experiencing qualia is to us it would have something directly analogous (e.g. if qualia is an illusion then the function has the same sort of illusion).

Conscious functions possible? Currently I'm leaning towards yes. If true, to me the implication would be that the "me" in my head is not my neurons, but the information encoded therein.

So that the result is a nonsentient optimizer that goes around making genuine discoveries, but the discoveries are not savored and enjoyed, because there is no one there to do so.

I'm not sure how to distinguish this from a person who goes around making discoveries but is too busy to savor and enjoy anything.

The relevant notion of consciousness we are concerned with is technically called phenomenal experience. Whole Brain Emulations will necessarily leave out some of the physical details, which means the brain processes will not unfold in exactly the same manner as in biological brains. Therefore a WBE will have different consciousness (i.e. qualitatively different experiences), although very similar to the corresponding human consciousness. I expect we will learn more about consciousness to address the broader and more interesting issue of what kinds and degrees of consciousness are possible.

I find it helps to break down the category of 'consciousness.' What is it that one is saying when one says that "Consciousness is essentially biological"? Here it's important to be careful: there are philosophers who gerrymander categories. We can start by pointing to human beings, as we take human beings to be conscious, but obviously we aren't pointing at every human attribute. (For instance, having 23 base pairs of chromosomes isn't a characteristic we are pointing at.) We have to be careful that when we point at an attribute, that we are actually trying to solve the problem and not just obscure it: if I tell you that Consciousness is only explainable by Woogles, that's just unhelpful. The term we use needs to break down into something that allows us to (at least in principle) tell whether or not a given thing is conscious. If it can't do THAT, we are better off using our own biased heuristics and forgoing defintions: at least in the former case, I can tell you that my neighbor is conscious and a rock isn't. Without some way of actually telling what is conscious and what is not, we have no basis to actually say when we've found a conscious thing.

It seems like with consciousness, we are primarily interested in something like "has the capacity to be aware of its own existence." Now, this probably needs to be further explicated. "Awareness" here is probably a trouble word. What do I mean when I say that it is "aware"? Well, it seems like I mean some combination of being able to percieve a given phenomenon and being able to distinguish both degrees of the phenomenon when present and distinguishing the phenomenon from other phenomenon. When I say that my sight makes me aware of light, I mean that it allows me to both distinguish different sorts of light and light from non-light: I don't mistake my sight for hearing, after all. So if I am "aware of my own existence" then I have the capacity to distinguish my existence from things that are not my existence, and the ability to think about degrees to which I exist. (in this case, my intuition says that this caches out in questions like "how much can I change and still be me?")

Now, there isn't anything about this that looks like it is biological. I suppose if we came at it another way and said that to be conscious is to "have neural activity" or something, it would be inherently biological since that's a biological system. But while having neural activity may be necessary for consciousness in humans, it doesn't quite feel like that's what we are talking about when we talk about what we are pointing to when we say "conscious." If somehow I met a human being and was shown a brain scan showing that there was no neural activity, but it was apparently aware of itself and was able to talk about how its changed over time and such and I was convinced I wasn't being fooled, I would call that conscious. Similarly, if I was shown a human being with neural activity but which didn't seem capable of distinguishing itself from other objects or able to consider how it might change, I would say that human being was not conscious.

Another hope would be that if we can get all the other problems in Friendly AI right, we'll be able to trust the AI to solve consciousness for us.

That's not a hope. It's appealing to a magic genie to solve our problems. We really have to get out of the habit of doing that, or we'll never get anything done.

How sure are you that brain emulations would be conscious?

I don't know and I don't care. But if you were to ask me, "how sure are you that whole brain emulations would be at least as interesting to correspond with as biological humans on Less Wrong", I'd say, "almost certain". If you were to ask me the follow-up question, "and therefore, should we grant them the same rights we grant biological humans", I'd also say "yes", though with a lower certainty, maybe somewhere around 0.9. There's a non-trivial chance that the emergence of non-biological humans would cause us to radically re-examine our notions of morality.

My initial response to the question in the title, without reading the article or any other comments:

About as sure as I am that other humans are conscious, which is to say ~98% (I tend to flinch away from thinking I'm the only conscious person in existence, but all I have to go on is that so far as I know, we're all using extremely similar hardware and most people say they're conscious, so they probably are.).

The trouble is that this is an outside view; I haven't the faintest idea what the inside view would be like. If a small portion of my brain was replaced with an artificial component, I would have no idea how to predict what that would feel like from the inside, but expect that it'd look like I was still conscious from the outside. I'm personally concerned with the inside part, and that's a huge unknown.

But if we had emulations running around, I'd almost definitely think of them as people just as much as everyone else in the world, and I'd treat their reports on consciousness the same.

To my mind all such questions are related to arguments about solipcism, i.e. the notion that even other humans don't, or may not, have minds/consciousness/qualia. The basic argument is that I can only see behavior (not mind) in anyone other than myself. Most everyone rejects solipsism, but I don't know if there have actually many very good arguments against it, except that it is morally unappealing (if anyone know of any please point them out). I think the same questions hold regarding emulations, only even more so (at least with other humans we know they are physically similar, suggesting some possibility that they are mentally similar as well - not so with emulations*). Especially, I don't see how there can ever be empirical evidence that anything is conscious or experiences qualia (or that anything is not conscious!): behavior isn't strictly relevant, and other minds are non-perceptible. I think this is the most common objection to Turing-tests as a standard, as well.

*Maybe this is the logic of the biological position you mention - essentially, the more something seems like the one thing I know is conscious (me), the more likehood I assign to it also being conscious. Thus other humans > other complex animals > simple animals > other organisms > abiotics.

More sure than I am the original human were concious. (reasoning; going through the process might remove misconceptions about it not working, thus increasing self awareness past some threshold. This uterly dominates any probability of the uploading process going wrong.)

I can too easily imagine difficult to test possibilities like "brains need to be warm, high-entropy, and non-reversible to collect reality fluid. Cold, energy efficient brains possess little reality fluid" for me to be confident that ems are conscious (or as conscious) as humans.

At least one potential approach to defining consciousness is clear: build up faithful simulated nerve cell structures, from a single cell up, and observe what happens in a simulation vs biology. Eventually something similar to consciousness will likely emerge (and ask you to please stop the torture).

An emulation of fire, even a perfect emulation down to the quantum mechanical level, still isn't hot. There's little reason to expect an emulation of a brain in a Turing machine to be conscious.

I'm not sure what consciousness is, but I do believe it has some interaction with the body and the physical world. I expect any artificial consciousness, biological or electronic, will have intimate relationships with the physical world far beyond anything that can plausibly be modeled as a Turing machine.