Roger Smolski: I Am Not Measurable Here, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

A philosopher builds a real instrument to test his own theory of consciousness, then reports, honestly, that it said no.

In the first essay, Roger Smolski sets out an idea about what consciousness might be: not a special substance, and not a switch that flips somewhere between the worm and the man, but a matter of how far a system draws its own past together into what it does next. Integration, not storage, and it comes in degrees, all the way down.

Having published that essay and called it finished, The author found he could not leave one sentence alone: the claim was falsifiable, and no one had tried. So he built an instrument, ΔAIS, a measure of active information storage, and pointed it at the internal states of a large language model as it learned, pre-registering in advance exactly what would count as a signal and what would not.

The second essay is what came back. The instrument fell silent. A falsifier written before a single number was computed forbids him from citing the result in support of his own theory, so he doesn't. What remains is a rare thing in a book about ideas: a theory held up against a real test, honestly reported when the test did not go its author's way.

Two appendices lay out what the instrument found and exactly how it worked, for any reader who wants to check the claim rather than take the author's word for it.

For anyone who has wondered whether machines could be conscious, whether consciousness is even measurable, or what a philosopher does when their own experiment refuses to cooperate, this is that book, examined without flinching.