61–70 of 102 posts
Consciousness implies awareness and perception of the world (and not necessarily self-awareness and ability of introspection).
And life is a result of selection what works and fits by trial and error.
Cells are mechanisms and aggregates of other mechanisms. The more correct word would be a process. Biological processes, which is a biochemical processes.
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I send "AI" to the spam folder in general. No one who is actually doing AI calls it AI. It's only called AI in glossy consultant brochures with stock images of a man in a business suit surfing through a tunnel of glowing blue numbers.
OpenAI?
I’m quite certain Demis Hassabis uses the term regularly, Nature should unpublish him.
I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…
I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…
“I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”
“ Well, it must minimize the uncertainty of the states that it’s in. I have to actively resist the second law of thermodynamics, so I don’t dissipate into all kinds of states. “ People often make this rhetorical mistake when speaking about the second law. Entropy is increasing full steam ahead, and what looks like a small bit of order is revealed to be hiding ‘the man behind the curtain’ i.e. a massive increase in en…
I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchroni…
The idea to define life as the creation of local negative entropy, in a sense pushing disorder out of a local space is not new, in fact that's the premise of Schrödingers 1944 book, What is Life? , which led him to speculate that human genetic information must be stored in something like a crystal, which he thought of as a prototypical structure for storing information, in a way anticipating the discovery of DNA.[1]…
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Yes, in this universe, life as we know it is a salmon of order swimming up the waterfall of entropy, every flick of it tail powered by its shit fouling the river, because life in this universe is spec'd to the constraints of this universe. But perhaps we can't find the aliens because they have tunnelled out, off to another gentler universe where they grow forever in n dimensions of time and space pondering the beauty…
This is lovely but why would they leave their home? There are very unlikely to find another place equally comfortable to the one in which they evolved.
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> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.
Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.
Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.
Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.