Consciousness and the Social Brain

What Hacker News says

1. wildermuthnNov 2023
   That’s a fair critique, and I appreciate the engagement. Thanks!

   My thinking is based on the Attention-Schema theory of consciousness (AST), by Michael Graziano. His book “Consciousness and the Social Brain” is, I believe, the right roadmap for AGI. AST is basically a variant of the Global Workspace theory of consciousness, distinguished by its deterministic account of the mechanics and utility of consciousness.

   “The Consciousness Prior” by Bengio also informs my thinking.

   I’m not certain that I can point to anyone that has been as explicit as I have that phenomenological consciousness is a prerequisite for intelligence, but all the cookie crumbs are there for anyone interested in following the trail.

   One correction to what you wrote — I’m explicitly saying that AGI will be fundamentally the same as existing biological intelligence, in that intelligence resides only in consciousness, and consciousness remains consciousness regardless of being biological or artificial. My point was that no currently existing DL models are generally intelligent.

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2. wildermuthnOct 2023
   The article’s main assertion: “Better metrics reveal that general intelligence is continuous: “More is more,” as opposed to “more is different.””

   Incorrect. There is a qualitative difference between instinct and intelligence, and all current models are instinctual rather than intelligent — narrow rather than general.

   Instinct utilizes knowledge; intelligence produces knowledge. Instinct is deterministic and brittle; intelligence is creative and fluid.

   The critical discontinuity between instinct and intelligence is located at the divide between non-conscious and conscious. Although there are varying degrees between semi-conscious and fully-conscious, there is no continuum from non-conscious to conscious. Qualia is not continuous — it exists (is experienced) or it does not exist.

   Intelligence, as we experience it, and as we know it, exists only as a side-effect of the conscious experience of qualia. In truth, intelligence is a side-effect of consciousness, or to be more precise, an exaptation of the modeling of other minds driven by the evolutionary pressure of being socially dependent creatures (mostly mammalian). See “Consciousness and the Social Brain” by Michael Graziano.

   Humans aren’t actually all that intelligent at the baseline: we require societies help in becoming educated and learning tools such as writing and arithmetic. It takes hard training to turn our conscious experience into an intelligent experience capable of solving problems. Many, if not most, people never become even somewhat capable of rigorous critical thought, let alone grammar and algebra.

   Intelligence is an accident of conscious experience, in that consciousness grants a capacity for creativity of knowledge that does not exist in non-conscious entities. Knowledge has one source: consciousness.

   This is why your dog or cat, as dumb as they are, still learn how to get what they want from you, whether a walk or tin of tuna.

   Without going down the rabbit-hole of metaphysics, we can definitively state that conscious beings have access to a state of information unavailable to non-conscious entities — that of qualia. Qualia can be thought of as the ultimate data structure — infinitely combinatorial and extensible, in that qualia by their nature beget qualia. It is this inherent creativity that accidentally leads to what we consider general intelligence.

   We may not understand the hard problem of consciousness, but there is nothing in our obviously material existence that precludes us from generating artificial consciousness, and thereby producing the environment in which general intelligence can manifest itself.

   The concrete metric to train artificial consciousness is simple: maximizing a model’s ability to predict its self and its antagonists, and minimizing a models’s predictability by its antagonists. This metric is a relational-social metric that leads to the creation of a consciousness of self and others, laying the foundation for the engine of knowledge that we call intelligence.

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3. Paul_SJul 2021
   This book and Consciousness and the Social Brain by Graziano have changed the way I read any history book or world analysis. I see value in the viewpoint it informs even if it's not true.
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4. wildermuthnMay 2021
   The only problem I see here is that if intelligence has a large evolutionary advantage over non-intelligence (or lesser intelligence), then intelligence should always emerge given a large enough population over a large enough time-scale.

   Given the galaxy, and given billions of years, the Great Filters that seem most likely are the ones that occur on the edges of the timeline: before multi-cellular life begins, or after a hyper-dominant intelligent species arises.

   Having said that, I think you’re absolutely right about mammals and societies. If the Great Filter does occur in between life and intelligence, it seems like it would happen where the first signs of intelligence begin. And for earth, that means mammals and the arms race of mind-modeling that their social lives initiated. No other type of animal on earth has parental-care so fully built into its biology: milk glands and placentas force mammals to be social from the start.

   A great book that doesn’t deal with intelligence and mammals directly, but provides a key connection, is “Consciousness and the Social Brain.” The book makes a strong argument that consciousness sprung from evolutionary pressures that were essentially social — that being able to model (and predict) the mind of another is essential for communication and cooperation. But one can only model the mind of another if you first model your own mind, and thus, consciousness (which I would argue is just another name for general intelligence).

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5. wildermuthnApr 2021
   As convoluted as this comment is, props for pointing out that evolution (and the formation of the solar system) took billions of years to produce intelligence. Can humanity do it in less time?

   Because biological evolution’s is oriented toward propagation of DNA rather than intelligence, we can ask what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to intelligence. Under what scenarios does higher intelligence lead to higher survival, and lower intelligence to lower survival? If the answer was “all the time”, then everything on earth would show signs of intelligence. An intelligent spider would have no significantly greater chance of survival. It merely needs to spin webs, eat, and reproduce in a tight loop, with deterministic responses to various scenarios — it needs instinct more than intelligence.

   By understanding what kind of evolutionary pressures lead to the necessity of intelligence, we can evolve (train) ML directly for intelligence, skipping straight to the answer rather than showing our work.

   The answer is found in the peculiar evolution of mammals, the only organisms that display consistent intelligence across all its species. Mammals are highly social, beginning from live birth to mammalian glands that feed its comparatively feeble spawn. Sociality is built into the bodies of mammals. And the most social animal on earth is Homo Sapiens.

   From here I’ll just recommend “Consciousness and the Social Brain.” I’ve been beating this dead horse on HN for some time.

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6. wildermuthnMar 2019
   “Consciousness and the Social Brain,” by Graziano is a great place to start.
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