Likes Douglas Hofstadter.

Transcript context

…Yes. Great question. So I think that the idea of philosophical zombies, you know, David Chalmers has talked about, right, that maybe something could behave just like you or me, but be dead on the inside, you know, not not not have any experiences, not feel anything, is is actually a lot less coherent than it sounds. So I'm a functionalist about consciousness too. And what I mean by that is twofold. 1 is that I don't think consciousness is some kind of epiphenomenon that, you know, just weirdly, you know, we happen to have for reasons that have nothing to do with our behavior, nor do I think that it is that is that it is somehow tied to anything about our fit the way we're physically made. I think it is functional. So why do we have it? Well, in in my team, Paradigms of Intelligence, we've been doing a lot of work over the last year on multi agent reinforcement learning. And the reason is that we're very interested in the precondition for symbiogenesis, which is symbiosis, now cooperation, you know, when 2 things or 700 things or whatever start to cooperate closely, you know, that's the that's the beginning of them really fusing together and becoming 1 thing. And and in order for 2 agents that are intelligent to cooperate, it turns out they have to have theory of mind. They have to model each other. They have to be able to put themselves in the place of the other. And, we have a, you know, whole long theory called MUPY about how that all works. But it you know, and and I guess the the CliffsNote version of it is that it requires that you do induction over a universe that includes not only the game that we're playing, but that also includes what is happening in your head and what is happening in my head. In other words, you have to have a universe that that that includes yourself in it and the other in it, and that allows you to generalize over the class of you and me, you know, so that I know, you know, my internal state is happy when I smile and when I see you smile, know that you're happy as well on the inside. I can make that inference, you know, in the same way that if I see a bunch of peaches, you know, then I I know that they're all the same object and I know what the backside of it will look like and so on. So this ability to do psychological, you know, induction is is really important for for cooperation and and that's why we have it. So, you know, it it and 1 of the consequences of that is that we model ourselves and we model our own models of others models of our models and so on. There's a kind of a strange loop as Douglas Hofstadter would have called it in that. Yes. I I love Douglas Hofstadter. So so there's this kind of self modeling and then second order self modeling and third order self modeling which could be applied to other agents and of course, know, in in the real world, we are computationally bounded. Right? You know, we we can't make sense of all of the complexity. So when we do this modeling of other agents, our modeling is quite cartoonish and it's quite structured. And I'm quite And and it only it only goes up to sixth order as well at most.…

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