Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Consciousness as a conflationary alliance term, published by Andrew Critch on July 10, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Tl;dr: In this post, I argue that the concept of 'consciousness' is more conflated than people realize, in that there's a lot of divergence in what people mean by "consciousness", and people are unaware of the degree of divergence. This confusion allows the formation of broad alliances around the value of consciousness, even when people don't agree on what it actually means. I call alliances built around conflated terms "conflationary alliances".

Executive Summary

Part 1: Mostly during my PhD, I somewhat-methodically interviewed a couple dozen people to figure out what they meant by consciousness, and found that (a) there seems to be a surprising amount of diversity in what people mean by the "consciousness", and (b) they are often surprised to find out that other people mean different things when they say "consciousness". This has implications for AI safety advocacy because AI will sometimes be feared and/or protected on the grounds that it is "conscious", and it's good to be able to navigate these debates wisely.

(Other heavily conflated terms in AI discourse might include "fairness", "justice", "alignment", and "safety", although I don't want to debate any of those cases here. This post is going to focus on consciousness, and general ideas about the structure of alliances built around confused concepts in general.)

Part 2: When X is a conflated term like "consciousness", large alliances can form around claims like "X is important" or "X should be protected". Here, the size of the alliance is a function of how many concepts get conflated with X. Thus, the alliance grows because of the confusion of meanings, not in spite of it. I call this a conflationary alliance. Persistent conflationary alliances resist disambiguation of their core conflations, because doing so would break up the alliance into factions who value the more precisely defined terms. The resistance to deconflation can be conscious, or merely a social habit or inertia.

Part 1: What people mean by "consciousness".

"Consciousness" is an interesting word, because many people have already started to notice that it's a confused term, yet there is still widespread agreement that conscious beings have moral value. You'll even find some people taking on strange positions like "I'm not conscious" or "I don't know if I'm conscious" or "lookup tables are conscious", as if rebelling against the implicit alliance forming around the "consciousness" concept. What's going on here?

To investigate, over about 10 years between 2008 and 2018 I informally interviewed dozens of people who I noticed were interested in talking about consciousness, for 1-3 hours each. I did not publish these results, and never intended to, because I was mainly just investigating for my own interest. In retrospect, it would have been better, for me and for anyone reading this post, if I'd made a proper anthropological study of it. I'm sorry that didn't happen. In any case, here is what I have to share:

"Methodology"

Extremely informal; feel free to skip or just come back to this part if you want to see my conclusions first.

Whom did I interview? Mostly academics I met in grad school, in cognitive science, AI, ML, and mathematics. In an ad hoc manner at academic or other intellectually-themed gatherings, whenever people talked about consciousness, I gravitated toward the conversation and tried to get someone to spend a long conversation with me to unpack what they meant.

How did I interview them? What I asked each person was to take some time to look inside their own minds - sometimes starting out by paying attention to just their bodies, if introspection was hard for them - and try to describe to me in more detail the thing the...