• @[email protected]
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    138 months ago

    You have provided a descriptive statement. Descriptive statements should come with scientific evidence. What evidence do you have to support your orchestra analogy? Or is it just your hypothesis?

    Spoiler alert: It is just your hypothesis, as you would’ve won a Nobel had you managed to generate evidence explaining consciousness in further detail.

    Many like to point at the Chinese room experiment to show how LLMs imitate consciousness rather than being conscious. They however forget, that our brains are Chinese rooms too in this regard, in that they learn how to provide the best responses to external stimuli while remaining blackboxes (at least for current tech).

    • @cynar
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      08 months ago

      Sadly my evidence is mostly anecdotal or philosophical in nature. A lot of it stems from how ADHD and Autism alter the brain. The orchestral analogy works well as a good number of people for communicating changes in functionality, from an experience perspective.

      It also works well for explaining how a system can appear to have a singular controller, without such a controller actually existing.

      Ultimately however, it is philosophical in nature. It does anchor well to, and is reasonably consistent with, our current existing understandings of consciousness however.

      Consciousness is very obvious from the inside. There also seems to be no “seat of consciousness” within the brain. Conversely, there are multiple areas of the brain that cause consciousness to collapse, if damaged. We also see radical changes in consciousness with both epilepsy and strokes. This proves that it is highly dependent on the underlying brain structure (since stroke damage will change it) and on longer range communication (which epilepsy disrupts).

      The music of an orchestra follows similar patterns. Eliminate the woodwind, and the music fundamentally changes, deafen the violins, and it will change in a different way. The large scale interplay produces an effect far greater than the sum of its parts.