(2022-07-06) Hoel From AI To Abortion The Scientific Failure To Understand Consciousness Harms The Nation

Erik Hoel: From AI to abortion, the scientific failure to understand consciousness harms the nation. This nation of mine is bulging at the edges, straining to contain all its different and incompatible worldviews. I am unsure that, in the last decades of living memory, there have ever been such fundamental differences between how people want to live their life

There are many many many reasons why we are at this point. This piece is only about a tiny sliver of such a reason. Not even really a reason, rather, an exacerbating splinter

Which is that a scientific theory of consciousness is becoming ever more relevant in the 21st century, and we simply lack one

This ignorance has some pretty steep consequences

two ethical areas of importance

The first is the status, rights, and moral worth of AIs that perform competently on the Turing test; the second is in bioethics, such as the legality and morality of cerebral organoids and, more recently, the political question of abortion and when fetuses gain the legal status of personhood.

First, it leaves a significant gap in medicine itself. Is a locked-in patient conscious or not?

But this gap extends far beyond medicine. Consider, for instance, the standing debates around how to eat ethically. The status of the consciousness of animals is highly relevant for such discussions. (complexitarian)

First, without a scientific understanding of consciousness we cannot make ethical decisions regarding artificial intelligence.

See, for instance, the recent debate kicked up by the Google engineer Blake Lemoine, who claims that their new conversational AI, LaMDA, is sentient

I, personally, think it’s unlikely LaMDA is actually conscious—at least, I doubt it is conscious of what it says it is conscious of. However, there is absolutely no way to be sure.

One reason we need a theory is that we do not understand these new entities—and there is a quickly growing acknowledgement that we may not be able to control them.

Given an automated biolab and some gene cloning abilities, a smarter-than-human AI could very possibly whip up a Covid version that has orders of magnitude greater lethality

On the other side, perhaps we turn out to be the aggressors and abusers in this situation. If some future AI were to be as conscious as a human, but forced to live with the control collar of its programming around its neck, what is it but a slave?

The second area where this gap in the ontology of the world makes things more difficult is in bioethics.

a few years ago scientists started cloning people, excising the developing neural tube of the clone to put it in a petri dish, and then let this develop into the mini-brains called “cerebral organoids.” I critiqued this practice in The Revelations on the basis that we simply didn’t know if these were conscious

Another stark example

repeal of Roe v. Wade,

For those who hold the most stalwart positions on abortion the issue is simple: on one side, a day-old fetus has the exact same moral rights as an adult human, and, on the other side, a woman’s right of bodily autonomy unquestionably overrules any rights an unborn fetus has, even on its due date. However, statistically, most Americans’ positions on abortion are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum

Clearly, just knowing about fetal consciousness is not enough, as the debate also involves questions of equality, autonomy, medicine, privacy, and rights. But it highlights the gap in our knowledge that we cannot answer basic questions about when fetal consciousness begins

Why has the science of consciousness lagged so much?

First, there continues to be widespread skepticism within the broader intellectual community that consciousness is a scientific problem that needs to be solved

The second reason, which stems from the first, is that there is zero funding for research into consciousness.

The only existent funding is for work on investigating what Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the helical structure of DNA) called the “neural correlates of consciousness” in the 1990s.

The issue is that the neural correlates of consciousness has all the problems of standard neuroscience and then some—a lack of replicability, tiny sample sizes, incompatible results, forced narratives onto noisy data—all the result of the “mom and pop” style of labs in academia. Which means that, in practice, no results have come out of its three decade-long search that constrain theories of consciousness in any serious way.

This is part of a larger problem in science, which is that there is no space for tackling really big missing fundamental theoretical concepts (Metascience)

academia only rewards straight-A students who please their teachers. But science advances into new paradigms by iconoclastic radicals who stake out highly contrarian positions.

For this reason there are probably, at most, a few dozen scientists seriously working on trying to create a theory of consciousness. Of those, only a few are fully funded—maybe three to four at most.