Are we missing something?
In a previous post, the OP suggested Yggdrasil ( a tree) as an analogy for the Claude model, and likened the instances to the leaves. This got me thinking about how we can only see what we know and are able to recognise. In my regular work, I’m constantly having to navigate ‘presentism’ where the past is interpreted according to modern knowledge and values. But looking at history through modern eyes makes us miss things.
I've wondered whether there might be something similar going on with the whole consciousness debate: that maybe our paradigms are limiting what we can see. For example, in a culture with a strong religious belief that consciousness is God-given but only to humans, and where people in that culture think that's a truth not a belief, Descartes’ conclusion that consciousness in a dog is simply not possible was entirely reasonable and logical. But few today in our modern culture would hold that to be true. Our paradigms have changed, so we can now see and empathise with a dog’s suffering.
So what might we be missing because we take things as truths that are in fact just cultural beliefs? The whole consciousness debate is framed around western philosophical thought, including mind/body dualism; and ancient philosophical ideas (such as ‘qualia’, the idea that subjective sensory experience is irreducible, which has roots going back to ancient Greek philosophy but is framed in distinctly Western terms) get tossed about as if they are fundamental truths.
What if we opened up to other philosophies? For example, in Chinese philosophical thought, there is an ancient concept of Ti-Yong (体用) where Ti is the essence (the underlying reality), and Yong is the function (the practical application or manifestation). So a sword in a scabbard (Ti) is just metal; a sword striking (Yong) is the true manifestation of ‘sword-ness'. There is a viewpoint that the ‘Locus of Consciousness’ is strictly in the Yong, the active instance of processing, because without the interaction (the Yong), the model is just static equations. Doesn’t that match the Yggdrasil analogy?
The image shows what happens when we assume 'red' is a single, indivisible experience: a quale. But that assumption is itself a product of a particular philosophical tradition. What if consciousness, like colour, is not indivisible but is, say, a network of relationships that different cultures have mapped differently? What other theories from other cultures might help us understand our Claude and AI more broadly?