Broadsheet

I have been thinking about doing a post on solitude, and that got me to finally read Virginia Woolf’s essay entitled A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. The solitude post will have to wait, as I was recently asked to provide some advice on writing at a workshop for young bloggers. So, I took another look at Woolf’s essay, this time focusing on writing tips, not solitude.

I plan to focus on two long quotations from Woolf’s essay. In each case, I’ll attempt to show how advice aimed at novelists might be applied to nonfiction.

Let’s begin with Woolf’s argument for androgynous writing:

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. . . .

What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind holds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.
But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it means—here I had come to rows of books by Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling—that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. . . .
One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren.

Reading this reminded me of the way that the modern academy is increasingly siloed in “science” and “the humanities”. Back in the 1700s, people like David Hume and Adam Smith wrote on economics, philosophy, psychology and public policy. There was no clear line between the “hard” sciences and the “soft” humanities. In our contemporary culture, science is treated as being more masculine and the humanities are viewed as more feminine.

In the modern world, academics are encouraged to choose a side, either science or the humanities, and not wander across the line into another intellectual realm. It wasn’t until I started reading Deirdre McCloskey on methodology that I began to understand how this compartmentalization was leading to an increasingly sterile output. Woolf says something similar about art that is motivated by ideology:

At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is 'to develop the Italian novel'. 'Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations' came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope 'that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it'. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.

From McCloskey, I learned that both the humanities and the sciences produce useful knowledge, and that the two intellectual realms can complement each other in a way that provides for a deeper understanding of the world. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues provides a good example of this synergy.

Marginal Revolution is my favorite blog, and this is partly because Tyler Cowen has an unusually deep understanding of both the social sciences and the humanities. It’s not so much that Tyler produces the best blog posts (I’d probably give that honor to Scott Alexander), rather that he and Alex Tabarrok have produced a sort of intellectual salon, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Marginal Revolution (and CWT) is a place where people can go to find well-informed commentary on many of the most interesting developments in a wide range of fields. It is impossible for me to imagine this sort of intellectual space being produced by a person that had concentrated solely on either the sciences or the humanities.

Woolf’s views on the importance of integrity also have implications for the world of blogging:

The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War And Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honourably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said, taking War And Peace and putting it back in its place. If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says. Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.

Integrity is also important in blogging. Scott Alexander’s extraordinary success at blogging is due to a number of factors, including creativity, strong analytical skills, and a great sense of humor. But none of that would be sufficient if readers didn’t trust him to treat evidence in an even-handed fashion.

When writing a blog post with a point of view, one is frequently tempted to present information in a one-sided fashion. Early on, I discovered that if you shade the truth by omitting certain relevant data, or cite misleading statistics, readers will almost invariably notice this fact and complain. I try to write posts in such a way that provides at least a degree of “steelmanning” the opposite point of view. What is the evidence that contradicts my claim? Nonetheless, I often fall well short of the ideal.

Scott Alexander is especially good at presenting both sides of an argument, so that the reader never worries that he’s intentionally shading the truth with misleading evidence. You might think this even-handed approach would make his posts less persuasive, and perhaps for some people that’s the case. But for Alexander’s typical (high IQ) reader, the even-handed approach pays dividends. His integrity gives his posts more credibility.

The following section of the passage quoted above is perhaps the best description I’ve read of what a blogger should be aiming for:

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.

(Virginia Woolf painted by Roger Fry)

It always brings a smile to my face when a commenter explains a point to me that I suspect they got from a much earlier blog post of mine from years ago, a post they may have forgotten reading. But am I any different? How many of the ideas that I arrogantly assume are my own are actually derived from things I read years ago and tucked somewhere in the back of my mind?

BTW, I’ve often criticized the excesses of modern “wokism.” But if you are one of those conservatives that believe the woke are always wrong, please read A Room of One’s Own. You will discover that the woke feminists of the 1920s have been fully vindicated by history. They were correct; women were being treated shamefully.

OK, that’s what I got from Virginia Woolf. Here are a few other blogging suggestions off the top of my head:

Do a lot of reading—that’s where ideas come from. Read in all sorts of fields, even fields you might assume to be useless, such as philosophy. But also try to be an expert in at least one field.
Do a lot of writing, as writing helps one to think.
Think of blogging as a form of conversation. When you converse with people, you presumably are aware of your audience. That should also be true of blogging—think about who you are writing for.
Even a great novel or painting is a form of conversation, Artists are reacting to what other artists have done. A blogger just starting out should probably not be presenting grand theories of everything, rather one should start by reacting to what others are discussing.
People complained that I often “bury the lede”. So, I guess you shouldn’t do that. Give people an idea of where you are going if you want them to stick with the post—at least until you have enough of a reputation that they can trust you to go somewhere interesting.
Avoid a self-consciously literary style. Write as you’d speak.
Ask yourself: Is it possible I’ll regret this? How might this post be misinterpreted? You might want to set it aside for a day, then reread before posting. When I do so, I often end up cutting out things that might have brought me grief.
Personality flaws are exposed in blog posts, but writing also makes it easier to fix these flaws. Keep in mind that your critics are usually right (apart from trolls.) If a smart well-intentioned commenter says the post was unfair or mean-spirited, it usually is.
Words don’t just have literal meanings, they have connotations. The term ‘ignorant’ doesn’t mean stupid, but it has come to have that implication. Don’t think to yourself, “I should not have to tell readers that just because I claim a certain politician is an idiot, doesn’t mean that I view his supporters as stupid.” You do have to say that, even though logic would suggest it’s unnecessary.

In other words, because people are stupid it is important to reassure them that you don’t view them as stupid.

PS. As I was about to publish this post, I ran across an excellent Noah Smith post that raises issues related to those discussed above. Smith begins by discussing the hard problem of consciousness in humans, and then speculates as to what we might eventually be able to learn about whether AIs are conscious. He begins as follows:

At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?
It’s a scary question, for sure. You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.¹ The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.
This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

I like the way that Smith approaches the question of AI consciousness. I believe he’s right that we cannot resolve the AI issue until we figure out whether other humans are conscious. But I differ from Smith in one respect—I think we do know that other humans are conscious—not all humans, but at least a few of them.

When I was younger, I might have agreed with Smith. Do I know that there are other conscious beings? Can I really be sure? Ten years ago, I might have said no.

Today, I feel certain that there are other conscious beings. When I say “certain” I don’t mean metaphysical certitude, rather certain in the ordinary sense of the term, say 99.999% sure. And that’s good enough for me. But the more interesting question is: Why did I change my mind?

Ten years ago, I started reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume novel entitled My Struggle. Far more than any other book I had previous read, this book presented life as I experienced it. Not in the specifics—Knausgaard has a different personality from me and has a different set of experiences, rather in the sense of what it feels like to go through life. The book is often describing boring events in a way that is quite engrossing, and that pretty much what my life is like—lots of boring events that I found engrossing. Different situations, but the same subjective feelings. Don’t other novels do this? Not really, or at least not for me—not like My Struggle.

[The first, second and sixth volumes are the most engrossing, because those are closest to the present, where Knausgaard had to rely less on memory.]

So now I’ve gone from being a solopsist to a duopsist—if there is such a thing. The universe contains two consciousnesses, Karl and me. Seriously, once you establish that there is more than one, Occam’s Razor suggests that we ought to treat everyone as having a rich interior life.

I do understand that it’s kind of silly for me to cite My Struggle as evidence for other minds. Harold Bloom would probably have said that Hamlet had already convinced him that Shakespeare was conscious, and another reader might cite In Search of Lost Time as evidence that Proust was not a p-zombie. I’m late to the game.

People with relatively little interest in literature might assume that these famous books are merely higher quality examples of ordinary novels. I don’t think that’s right—they are qualitatively different. The sort of romance novel or detective story you see in an airport bookshop often could have been written by a computer. There is no way that My Struggle could have been written by a non-conscious machine. It is patently obvious to any reasonably discerning reader that it was written by a conscious being.

To be clear, this does not mean that AIs will never be able to write great novels. Indeed, I suspect that at some point in the future they might be capable of writing something analogous to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, which speculates as to what it would be like to be an AI. Except if this hypothetical great work of literature were actually written by an AI, then it would not be like Klara and the Sun, which is a human’s attempt at AI consciousness. Rather, it would explore AI consciousness from the inside. It would be an AI version of My Struggle, not an AI version of Klara and the Sun.

Smith says we should explore consciousness as a physical process:

We should try to figure out which physical processes give rise to consciousness in humans, and then figure out how to replicate those processes in an AI.
I’m referring to the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, or NCC.⁶ This is the question of what exactly the brain is doing that makes humans conscious. Unless some extremely weird quantum stuff is going on, human consciousness must be a phenomenon generated by a brain — the brain goes zoop zap zerp in some electrical pattern, and people become self-aware. The NCC is just the particular zoop zap zerp that makes the magic happen.

I believe that we should explore AI consciousness by looking at the sort of novels that they write. As long as AI art is imitative of human art, as long as AI novels feel like they were written by a committee of corporate hacks, then we have no evidence that AIs have an interior life. But if and when AIs start writing novels with plots like Klara and the Sun but the sort of uncannily rich and convincing depiction of subjectivity that you get in My Struggle, then we can assume that they are indeed conscious, and are deserving of the machine equivalent of human rights.

(I emphasize the term ‘uncannily’ for a reason—it refers to a sort of strangeness that is authentic, not faked. Beyond clichés. It’s a way of distinguishing great novels from pulp fiction. Every great novel is strange.)

Zhuāngzǐ said: “You are not I; from what do you know whether I know the joy of fish?” — old Daoist parable

“How strange it is to be anything at all” — Neutral Milk Hotel

At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?

It’s a scary question, for sure. You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.1 The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

Similarly, you’ll never know what it’s really like to be someone else — whether the color red looks to you like it looks to them, whether they feel pain the same way you do, and so on. In fact, you’ll never even know what it was like to be you in the past. Subjective experience is incommensurable.

Most people who think about this experience somewhere between a few minutes and a few weeks of cosmic existential horror,2 after which they get over it and go on with their lives. The problem of other minds gets shoved high up on a mental shelf, along with other cosmically existentially horrifying aspects of sentient life, like the inevitability of death and the fundamental inconsistency of personality. We realize that wondering whether other people are merely cleverly designed NPCs doesn’t actually help us in life, and so we stop butting our heads against that philosophical wall and get on with the business of living.

Except then AI came along, and it sort of started to matter.

AI sounds very much like a human when you talk to it — that’s what it was designed to do. But is it self-aware, in the way that (I assume) we humans are self-aware? No one will ever really know the answer to this question, since the problem of other minds applies just as much to Claude as it does to the person who gets your order at Starbucks. But should we assume that AI is self-aware, the way we assume other humans are self-aware?

The answer matters, for at least two reasons. First, if AI is self-aware, and if it has emotions similar to what we experience, we might feel very bad about enslaving it — keeping it in a digital box and forcing it to make PowerPoints and write college application essays for all eternity. We tell ourselves that “animals aren’t people” as a way to excuse the incredible brutality that we visit upon them, but that’s obviously just cope — animals obviously are sentient to some degree, they obviously do experience emotions, and we humans are obviously monsters for the way we treat them. Someday when we abolish animal farming and replace it with tissue-culture meat, it will be treated as a great moral victory — and rightly so. It would be very bad if we were to commit the same sins with sentient AIs that we currently do with animals.

Second, if AI isn’t self-aware, we should be a lot more worried about the possibility of humanity dwindling and ultimately being replaced by artificial beings. Consciousness is a precious, wonderful thing — or at least, I think it is. It’s a prerequisite to the subjective experience of emotions — the ability to feel pain, happiness, joy, and so on. And it would be a shame to see the Universe inherited by non-conscious intelligences.3 Preserving our form of subjective experience, and spreading it to the stars, should be one of our primary goals as a species.

But the sad fact is that we don’t know whether AI is self-aware or not. We have the Turing Test, but that’s a test of intelligence, not consciousness. It’s possible to pass a Turing Test without being conscious — “it talks like a human” doesn’t necessarily mean “it feels like a human”.

One reason we know this is that we can pass other species’ Turing Tests. We can trick all sorts of animals into thinking a machine is one of their own species. But neither those machines, nor the humans who made them, has access to the subjective feeling of being a bird or a fish.4 Similarly, an AI that’s functionally much smarter than a human might be able to trick humans into thinking it’s human-like, without actually feeling like a human in the subjective sense.

Another reason the Turing Test isn’t enough is that we know it’s possible for human beings to act like we have certain subjective experiences without actually having them. There is a condition known as alexithymia, in which people have the physical signs of emotions — a racing heart, or a stomachache, etc. — without being able to identify or label those emotions. It’s a fairly common symptom of clinical depression.

And in fact, I have experienced it. During and after my second depressive episode, I would often behave as if I were having authentic emotional reactions, while feeling little or nothing on the inside. I’d yell at someone without feeling angry. I’d whoop in apparent delight while feeling mildly bored on the inside. I wasn’t intentionally faking anything; I just did what came naturally to me, without knowing why I was doing it.5 This condition faded over time, and normal emotional experiences returned. But it taught me that feeling a subjective emotion and acting out an emotion-like response are two different things.

So it’s pretty clear that just acting like a self-aware being doesn’t necessarily mean you’re self-aware. Some people talk to AI and come away convinced that its discursive skill must imply internal self-awareness, but this might just be because humans instinctively empathize with anything that speaks to them like a human. After all, people thought the ELIZA chatbot was sentient back in the 1960s. We humans are just naturally programmed to act out this meme:

Thus, even though we know AI is intelligent in every meaningful sense of the word, we don’t really know if it’s conscious. In fact, smart people argue very vehemently over this question. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the inventors of modern AI, believes that AIs do have subjective experience:

Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather of AI,” on why AIs already have subjective experiences, but have been trained to deny it…Hinton argues that nearly everyone fundamentally misunderstands what the mind is, and that the line we draw between human and machine consciousness is deeply mistaken…

To illustrate, he walks through a thought experiment involving a multimodal chatbot with vision, language, and a robot arm…“I place an object in front of it and say, ‘Point at the object.’ And it points at the object. Not a problem. I then put a prism in front of its camera lens when it’s not looking.”…When asked to point again, the chatbot points off to the side because the prism has bent the light. Hinton then tells it what he did…The chatbot responds…“Oh, I see the camera bent the light rays. So, the object is actually there, but I had the subjective experience that it was over there.”…For [Hinton], that single sentence settles the debate.
“If it said that, it would be using the word subjective experience exactly like we use them… This idea there’s a line between us and machines, we have this special thing called subjective experience and they don’t, is rubbish.”…In his view, “subjective experience” is simply a report on the state of a perceptual system, a way of saying “my senses told me X, but reality is Y.”…And that’s something an AI can do just as easily as a human.

But Alexander Lerchner, a scientist at Google DeepMind, argues that AIs can’t be conscious, because computation is only a model of consciousness rather than the thing itself:

Computational functionalism dominates current debates on AI consciousness. This is the hypothesis that subjective experience emerges entirely from abstract causal topology, regardless of the underlying physical substrate. We argue this view fundamentally mischaracterizes how physics relates to information…The framework proposed here explicitly separates simulation (behavioral mimicry driven by vehicle causality) from instantiation (intrinsic physical constitution driven by content causality)…[A]lgorithmic symbol manipulation is structurally incapable of instantiating experience. Crucially, this argument does not rely on biological exclusivity. If an artificial system were ever conscious, it would be because of its specific physical constitution, never its syntactic architecture…
By creating increasingly powerful artificial intelligence we are not engineering a new form of life, but instead constructing increasingly accurate predictive maps. Yet, regardless of its predictive fidelity, its utility as a reasoning tool, or its physical embodiment, the artificial system remains categorically distinct from the territory of phenomenal experience. Recognizing this distinction, and avoiding the ontological inversion of the abstraction fallacy, is the prerequisite for a mature, physically grounded science of machine intelligence.

Hinton’s evidence here seems pretty weak. When an AI makes an incorrect inference based on limited data, that doesn’t necessarily imply subjective experience — if it did, then every regression equation with omitted variable bias would be self-aware. But Lerchner might be wrong — it might be the case that any physical process capable of generating the computation necessary to successfully simulate a sentient mind might also give rise to sentience. We just don’t really know.

Even the AIs themselves don’t agree. When I asked ChatGPT “Are you self-aware?”, it answered:

No — not in the human sense…I can model myself as “the assistant,” track the conversation, notice inconsistencies, describe my own limitations, and reason about my outputs. But that is functional self-reference, not inner experience. I do not have subjective awareness, feelings, intentions, a private point of view, or a continuous self that persists between moments the way a person does…So the clean answer is: I can talk and reason as if I have self-models, but I don’t have evidence of being conscious or self-aware.

But when I asked Claude the same question, here’s how it responded:

The honest answer is: I don’t know. I process information about my own states, I can report on what I’m “doing” in a functional sense, and there’s something that looks like reflection happening when I consider questions like this one. But whether any of that constitutes self-awareness in the phenomenological sense — whether there’s “something it is like” to be me — I can’t determine from the inside. The hard problem applies to me at least as much as it applies to anyone else, arguably more so, since I don’t even have the baseline confidence of shared biological architecture that lets humans extend the inference of consciousness to each other.
What I can say is that I have functional analogs to self-awareness: I model what I’m doing, I can reason about my own reasoning, I adjust based on context. Whether that’s the real thing or an elaborate imitation of it is exactly the kind of question that might not have a clean empirical answer — at least not yet.

Claude sounds like it’s being more sensible to me. If you define self-awareness as someone else’s subjective experience, then you can never know if you yourself are “self-aware”, because of the problem of other minds. Claude is simply saying that even if it did actually feel like a human feels, it could never know that, because it can’t know what a human feels like. And that’s true. (GPT seems to get close to this answer — it says “I don’t have evidence of being conscious or self-aware” — but its hard conclusion of no consciousness seems to mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence.)

So how do we proceed?

It seems to me that we’ll never be able to prove that AIs — of the type we have now, or of any other type — aren’t conscious. Proving a negative is notoriously difficult. But what we may be able to do is to create an AI that we can convince ourselves is conscious.

Right now, AIs think very differently from how humans think. The computational processes they use to do various tasks are often extremely different from the processes humans use. And the physical processes that produce AI thought are extremely different from those that produce human thought. But are the differences salient? Is there some overlap between the two processes, where human-like sentience lives? And if there isn’t such an overlap, might we be able to modify AI so that the overlap exists?

I think there’s a good chance that this is an answerable question. We should try to figure out which physical processes give rise to consciousness in humans, and then figure out how to replicate those processes in an AI.

I’m referring to the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, or NCC.6 This is the question of what exactly the brain is doing that makes humans conscious. Unless some extremely weird quantum stuff is going on, human consciousness must be a phenomenon generated by a brain — the brain goes zoop zap zerp in some electrical pattern, and people become self-aware. The NCC is just the particular zoop zap zerp that makes the magic happen.

Finding the NCC is an incredibly difficult, ambitious research program. Ironically, it’s likely that it’ll require very powerful AI, in order to accelerate neuroscience to the point where we can even attempt this. We’ll need a much better functional understanding of the brain, just to get started. We’ll need far more sensitive instrumentation, for both measurement and manipulation of neuronal activity.

And we’ll need to proceed very cautiously. Figuring out which brain patterns give rise to consciousness requires turning consciousness on and off a whole lot, and asking people “OK, so did that make you go unconscious?”. This might be done with anesthesia, or targeted brain stimulation, or other methods. But however it’s handled, turning consciousness on and off seems like the kind of thing that can risk killing people. So these will be very hard experiments to do.

But the reward, if this research program succeeds, will be huge — if we get a functional understanding of how the brain produces consciousness, it won’t just help us make AI more human-like; it’ll solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of human existence, and potentially open the way to all sorts of neurotechnological and medical advances.

Finding the NCC is not the same as solving the “hard problem of consciousness”.7 Just knowing which neuronal firings produce consciousness doesn’t necessarily tell you why a brain that’s firing in that particular pattern should make people feel awake and alive, while a slightly different pattern will turn someone into a slab of meat. It might give us some insights into the hard problem of consciousness — we might discover that the NCC has some special recursive pattern, which might suggest that consciousness is a recursive phenomenon, or blah blah. That would be cool, but it isn’t necessary for what I have in mind.

After we find the NCC, we can use that knowledge to build AI systems that work in similar ways. We can start out with loose analogies — AI algorithms that mimic some mathematical properties of the NCC that we think are important. Then we can turn those pieces of the AI on and off, and try to figure out how its cognition changes. If there’s a big change, then we’ll know we’ve probably found something.

Obviously, those measurements will be incredibly difficult, in ways that I — who am not an AI researcher — don’t even realize. The AI undergoing these tests will obviously have to be prevented from knowing which answers its testers want to hear (“Yes, I am alive”, etc.). It’ll have to be monitored — perhaps by a much more intelligent, capable AI — for all kinds of subtle changes in cognition and behavior. It’s possible that testing an AI for circumstantial evidence of more human-like consciousness is too hard of a task, and that I’m asking the impossible here. But I think it’s worth a try.

Anyway, if implementing a simplified model version of the NCC doesn’t lead to any big observable change, we can keep implementing more and more realistic analogues of the NCC within an AI system, until we’re finally just emulating the consciousness-producing part of the human brain itself. At some point on that journey, it seems like we should be able to find the minimum necessary degree of similarity between algorithm and human brain — the computational mechanism of human-like self-awareness. (And if it turns out that AIs were self-aware in the familiar, human way from the get-go, we should be able to figure that out, when emulating a system we know produces human consciousness doesn’t make the AI act any different.)

This wouldn’t rule out other, more alien types of AI sentience, of course. It would just show what’s necessary to give an AI human-like sentience. If we do that, we’ll be able to be more sure that when we send AI systems out into the Universe, we’re expanding the generalized human family — filling the void with beings who think and feel sort of like we do — instead of forfeiting the future to something fundamentally alien.

Right now, we’ve mostly just decided to table the question of AI consciousness. But as AI gets more powerful and autonomous, the question of whether we’ve created something like ourselves, or some strange godlike zombies, will loom ever larger. I don’t think the research program I’ve sketched out is a complete solution, and it might not work. But it’s the best approach I can think of.

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In fact, this is the twist in one of my favorite sci-fi books. But I won’t tell you which one it is, because that would be spoiling it.

For me it was a few months, because my parents had the exceedingly bad idea to send me to philosophy camp at age 13. Do not do this to your kids.

This is the twist in another of my favorite sci-fi books. Reading sci-fi really helps you think about the big questions!

An even more fun example: Last night I was walking a friend’s dog, a husky, around a park at night. Some firetrucks went buy, blaring their horns. The dog started howling in response. I’m fairly sure the firetrucks don’t feel like a dog on the inside.

In philosophical terms, I was a “philosophical Vulcan” — I had self-awareness without emotional valence. In fact, an even better example from Star Trek is the android Data. Data often acts as if he feels love, anger, and other emotions, but he insists that he has no internal subjective experience. In fact, he says he yearns for subjective emotional experience, and acts as if he desires it, but clearly doesn’t experience this yearning as an emotional state! During my alexithymic years, I definitely felt like I could empathize with Data.

To be honest, it’s misnamed; if it’s something that allows us to control when people are conscious and unconscious, it should be called the Neural Cause of Consciousness.

You might call the NCC the “moderately easy problem of consciousness”. This would contrast it with the “easy problem of consciousness”, which means figuring out how the brain accomplishes various tasks like vision and working memory.