131–140 of 161 posts
Couldn't we have a profoundly efficient, intelligent and organised AI (dangerous or not, i would follow mister Asimov on the fact that we are going back to the Frankenstein complex) that could do all that Singularity thingy without counsciousness?
What if counsciousness was just... something completely different?
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And David Chalmers has an excellent rebuttal to Dennett's rebuttal. Different people take different sides, and I'm with Chalmers on this one. The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots. Maybe we could make this a bit more realistic? Y…
> The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots. I don't see how that constitutes evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies. They're obviously distinguishable from conscious entities with a simple test: ask a TV person a question.
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A pair of conjoined twins can read each other's thoughts and see through each other's eyes. Are they two people, or one? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331769/Doctors-stun... A person has left and right hemispheres in their brain. Under some circumstances, losing one of these hemispheres will result in an almost normal functional human being. Imagine, with advances in biology and medicine, one day we can se…
I think the metaphor I would point to here is "whirlpools in a river." Movements of movements of movements ... ad infinitum. Another interesting way of articulating this might be: "The universe splits itself into two parts - an observer and an observed."
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We're all p-zombies. When we get poked with toothpicks we will scream in agony, the thought of being poked with toothpicks will appear internally, and we will in turn react to that thought, the reaction based on our upbringing. We have our outer senses, sight, touch, and then our inner senses, that can sense the 'thoughts' that were triggered by outer sense stimulation. The thought is just another form of sensory sti…
I'm not that comfortable with the hand wavy physicalist view that consciousness arises from the physical processes of the brain. If that were the case, why can't I simply design an artificial brain, a cyber brain, and upload myself in 1000 bodies? What really spoke to me in Aaronson's entire lecture is the whole quantum no-cloning restriction. Bell State can't help you either, because you can't violate causality. Sup…
What makes you think you can't, at least in principle?
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> The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots. I don't see how that constitutes evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies. They're obviously distinguishable from conscious entities with a simple test: ask a TV person a question.
The TV person is obviously distinguishable, but the non-playing character in the VR I described would not be.
> Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them
How do you know the AI isn't conscious? You're simply asserting that it isn't. For all you know, "AI as intelligent as a person" literally isn't possible without consciousness, which makes your assertion inconceivable.
Which is why the whole p-zombie thought experiment doesn't convince anyone: if you already think consciousness is physical, then p-zombies aren't conceivable and the thought experiment isn't convincing, and if you already think consciousness is not physical, then p-zombies merely assert the same conclusion you already hold and you're "convinced".
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It's a straw man, sure. It's an exaggeration about people being willingly baffled by physics. May I ask, where did you get the part about "conscious observer"? Yes, there's a thing in QM about observation collapsing the wave function, and there's disagreement on what that actually means. But I can't imagine that an interpretation promoted by actual physicists would use a squishy term like "conscious" in their hard sc…
'Consciousness-causes-collapse' is also known as the 'Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation' [1]. Yes, THAT Von Neumann. It's got no explanatory power over other interpretations, obviously. But actual physicists demonstrably used squishy terms like "conscious" when talking about their hard science. Embarrassing, but true. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
At some point a measurement is made, and the only way you can be sure of the result is by consciously experiencing it. And until you ask your colleague, her quantum state is entangled with whatever is being measured, and with the measuring apparatus.
I don't see why it's embarrassing about physicists and other scientists using "squishy" terms about things they know (or even suspect) are there but can't explain. Magnetism was just as squishy a term until it was understood. The only difference is that consciousness seems to be exclusively a first-person experience, but that arguably makes it even more real. (You might be a brain in a vat, in which case everything you sense would be bogus, but your experience of it would still be real.)
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The TV person is obviously distinguishable, but the non-playing character in the VR I described would not be.
And your VR example simply assumes the conclusion: > Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them How do you know the AI isn't conscious? You're simply asserting that it isn't. For all you know, "AI as intelligent as a person" literally isn't possible without consciousness, which makes your assertion inconceivable. Which is why the who…
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And your VR example simply assumes the conclusion: > Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them How do you know the AI isn't conscious? You're simply asserting that it isn't. For all you know, "AI as intelligent as a person" literally isn't possible without consciousness, which makes your assertion inconceivable. Which is why the who…
The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels. Before you argue that you are too, you know otherwise and you see the VR's pixels. Meanwhile, the computer which is generating the VR, and is outside it, doesn't have to see anything. It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodys…
Where and how the information processing actually occurs to produce this intelligence doesn't seem relevant. The NPCs are individually either as intelligent as a person, and equally distinct, or they are not. If they are, they may be conscious. You said they are so intelligent, and therefore, you have no idea whether they are or are not conscious.
> It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodysuits, but that isn't going to feel anything like the experience you and your friend are having.
I don't see how that's relevant to whether the game system or NPCs are conscious.
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The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels. Before you argue that you are too, you know otherwise and you see the VR's pixels. Meanwhile, the computer which is generating the VR, and is outside it, doesn't have to see anything. It might sense some electrical signals originating from you and your friend's bodys…
> The computer that runs the VR (including the AI controlling the behaviour of the NPCs) might well be conscious, but the NPCs themselves are just pixels. Where and how the information processing actually occurs to produce this intelligence doesn't seem relevant. The NPCs are individually either as intelligent as a person, and equally distinct, or they are not. If they are, they may be conscious. You said they are so…
My initial thought about this is to reformulate the question as: "Can humans become conscious?". I don't think most people would claim that sperm and egg cells are concious. I also don't expect many people to argue that all humans come from joining these two, non-concious elements. Most (but maybe not all!) would probably agree that that embryo, consisting of a handful of cells, is not concious. Yet, we interact with…
Consciousness is no bright line rule. Humans like to believe that we are on one side of a great divide between conscious and unconscious animals. But all there is is a gradient between us and the bacteria, with infinite stops in between. The interesting twist in Enders Game (and other scifi) is that the alien invaders do not understand humans as conscious beings. I see no reason to believe that there aren't beings on…
The interesting twist in Enders Game (and other scifi) is that the alien invaders do not understand humans as conscious beings. I see no reason to believe that there aren't beings on earth, animals, who are farther up the spectrum than we.
Ahh, that's funny. It's the Blub Paradox [0] all over again! People generally seem to believe that they are special. That they live in a singularly special time in history. That their generation is on the cusp of some indefinable revolution. This bias seems to be extremely pervasive. Another pervasive example is the belief among evangelical Christians that Jesus will return to earth during our lifetime [1].
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[1] http://www.people-press.org/2010/06/22/section-3-war-terrori...