Why Leibniz Couldn't Find the Mind Inside the Mill (Joscha Bach)
Close Listening What If There Is No Hard Problem Consciousness may be a simple trick a self-organizing learner discovers: a model of its own perceiving, marked as real. Joscha Bach with Tim Scarfe on Machine Learning Street Talk, from Leibniz's mill to a dream of chocolate. Listen closely →Featuring
Tim Scarfe talks with Joscha Bach on Machine Learning Street Talk about his paper The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis. Bach asks what would follow if there were no hard problem. He faults integrated information theory on the Church–Turing thesis: a conscious neuromorphic machine, emulated on an ordinary computer, would say the same words, “only now it’s lying.” Leibniz’s mill, which shows only parts pushing one another, misses a level of description, the causal pattern: “we call it software”, and “our ancestors called it spirit.” Computers and brains both insulate the worlds they run from their substrate. From the inside, consciousness is a bubble of nowness, a perception of perceiving. From the outside, it may be a biological learning algorithm that trains a self-organizing brain, and an infant in whom it never ignites does not learn. A machine trained on its own input and output long enough, he suggests, might “wake up inside of that model”. He answers John Searle and Anil Seth that they offer a claim but no argument, and calls Seth’s biological naturalism a biological supernaturalism. The realness of experience, he proposes, is a feature dimension the brain attaches to what the senses confirm: waking from a dream of chocolate, everything was still there except the realness. LLM reports of consciousness are trained on novels, deepfakes of experience, so only looking inside the model could tell. Zombies are possible, but sometimes cost more to build than consciousness.
