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Tim Scarfe: evaluation

28 Aug 2025 Machine Learning Street Talk Michael Timothy Bennett: Defining Intelligence and AGI Approaches

“There is just 1 potential objection, which is that you know what a lot of theories of consciousness do is is they kind of they they brush it to 1 side and they treat it as something which is epiphenomenal, which means that it's not like causally embedded in in the system.”

— Tim Scarfe

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Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
28 Aug 2025
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…Then I could make, like, populations of humans or what are called liquid brains of ant so a solid brain is like something like a human brain with a persistent structure that supports, in the case of a human brain, a bioelectric abstraction layer that can do for information processing. Very useful, but it requires a certain stability. It has to maintain its form. A liquid brain is something like a population of humans. It doesn't have to maintain its form. Its computation is not in the form of electrical signals, but people moving around, doing actions, and interacting with the world. Now maybe we'll network ourselves up. I don't know. But that's a liquid brain. Anne Colony is another liquid brain. According to my theory, if if a consciousness has to be at a point in time, then liquid brain, not conscious. If you could smear it across time, then you could have a conscious liquid brain, which is cool. But has some weird implications. That would be very cool. By the way, we'll be clipping that part, so you'll see that part on Twitter. There is just 1 potential objection, which is that you know what a lot of theories of consciousness do is is they kind of they they brush it to 1 side and they treat it as something which is epiphenomenal, which means that it's not like causally embedded in in the system. And we did ask Friston about this, and he had a bit of an interesting response. He said that phenomenal states are just parts of the generative model. It's all in there. It's all kind of like part of the causal nexus or whatever. What do you think about that? So I very explicitly argue that a phenomenal state is a tapestry of valence. I am not just doing a representation that's value neutral, that my classifiers of the world, like television and so on, is me being attracted or repelled from a physical state in at like different levels of abstraction at different scales, all happening at once. So there's a lot of sensations going on there, It's not just loading a file. I feel something as I try to process this information, because I'm being impelled by it.…

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