Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
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Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
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Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#2The only thing I could argue is a speed component. Something would need to work at a reasonable operating speed for humans to judge it as conscious. If an answer took ten years to get back I doubt anyone would call it conscious.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#3no
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#4>To see why, I’d like to point to one empirical thing about the brain that currently separates it from any existing computer program. Namely, we know how to copy a computer program. We know how to rerun it with different initial conditions but everything else the same. We know how to transfer it from one substrate to another. With the brain, we don’t know how to do any of those things.
What about DRM? We can copy programs because we make them or we know specifications of the original computer it was meant to be run on or we can guess (because there aren't that many architectures, etc.)
What if a DRM scheme didn't need to run on modern architectures, was written in new programming languages from machine language and up, on entirely new paradigms? Do you think it would be easy to copy? What if it was unethical and illegal to do anything that could stop the program, or break the hardware? Would it even be surprising that we couldn't emulate it?
Even today's DRM schemes have not all been broken, and not all programs can be run on other substrates. The ones that have been reverse engineered is because they're written for architectures that are already known, and there's just specifics that need to be figured out. (Or so is the impression I get from reverse engineering discussions).
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#5One thing Julian Jaynes discusses in his book Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (highly recommend, but a hard read) is that consciousness is comprised of a number of different qualities, one being excerptification - the ability to take a number of indiscriminate ideas/memories/images and string together a narrative.
For example, I can take the idea of a narwhal horn and the idea of a horse and mix them together to create a unicorn. My conscious mind took the excerpt of a narwhal horn and strung it together with the excerpt of a horse body. And I didn't just stick the horn on some random part of the horse's body, there was a contextual understanding behind it - a narwhal horn belongs on the forehead, the head of a horse is the thing with eyes and a nose.
Can a computer do that? No way, not presently at least. There's waaayy too much going on in the process of excerptification for a computer to replicate just this one facet of our consciousness.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#6One thing Julian Jaynes discusses in his book Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (highly recommend, but a hard read) is that consciousness is comprised of a number of different qualities, one being excerptification - the ability to take a number of indiscriminate ideas/memories/images and string together a narrative. For example, I can take the idea of a narwhal horn and the idea of a hors…
Computers are close to that. The neural net image backward inference is similar. They take bits of imagery and try to retrofit it in 'meaningful' ways, blending both source and target image. Also genetic programming can model swapping and blending traits.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#7The only thing I could argue is a speed component. Something would need to work at a reasonable operating speed for humans to judge it as conscious. If an answer took ten years to get back I doubt anyone would call it conscious.
It's possible that some form of life exists that operates on a significantly different time scale than we do, let's say it takes 10,000 years just to communicate a greeting, or a microsecond to do the same. We likely wouldn't recognize it as conscious (or even life), and it possibly wouldn't recognize us either.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#8My definition of conscious is being aware of what you are doing and influencing it.
Can a computer running a file server realize it is only storing pirated movies and stop it it without being explicitly programmed to do so? A conscious computer could.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#9The question isn't "can" but "should". Should we, assuming we could, create conscious (conscious meaning being self-aware and having the ability to learn) machines? There have been hundreds of books, movies, games - about this issue and all, come to the same conclusion... NO.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#10My definition of conscious is being aware of what you are doing and influencing it. Can a computer running a file server realize it is only storing pirated movies and stop it it without being explicitly programmed to do so? A conscious computer could.
Are you sure that's a good definition? You yourself can't reliably stop remembering something even if you want to; why expect a computer to be able to do it?