Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 604 posts

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#91

Post by stvltvs »

neom wrote: post #78

My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi ) That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.

That's begging the question of whether inorganic matter can be conscious. If you boil it down, she's just said if it's inorganic, it's not conscious.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#92

Post by thr0w4w4yHNabc »

xvector wrote: post #67
alex_duf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me the bag might change its mind about the whole operation once the upload is finished and it realises what's up next. So yeah not sure I like the idea.

Hence the "gradual replacement" part of my comment :) Scan and copy never made sense to begin with, as you point out. Not sure why it's the default when people think of mind uploading.

People seem to imagine it like plugging a cable or getting an EEG cap and then they can't imagine the next step. Gradual replacement is a very radical idea to most people - a friend of mine recently described is as a horror movie.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#94

Post by strogonoff »

exe34 wrote: post #25
strogonoff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that pink elephants may indeed well exist.

no it doesn't.

This is only true if you reject the pink elephant argument as straw man in the first place.

As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the implication of the theory in context of scientific method.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#95

Post by neom »

aeonik wrote: post #83
neom wrote: post #78

My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi ) That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.

A psychologist I know did their PhD in this area (also old and smart), and he called this kind of thinking "Neural Chauvanism" -> if her explanation actually requires the chemical and neural components. PDF warning: https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1985-cuda.pdf

It's a good point as i'm sure what she was saying is she belives consciousness requires specific neural properties. I am aware of the the ideas around neural chauvanists, but that paper is now almost 40 years old. We know a lot more about the brain since it was written. The idea that the homunculi can perfectly replicate the relevant causal powers of neurons is... questionable at best. It would says distinctive biochemical properties of neurons enable consciousness, which homunculi would lack, and then homunculized, I also don't like the idea that we must attribute consciousness to the homunculized brain unless we accept an implausible cut-off point? Consciousness could be requiring a critical mass of neurons, which could be reached later without each replacement causing incremental fading. The implausibility of a single neuron replacement eliminating consciousness is not a good reason to consider it conscious. imo It's probably still more likley that experiences like an LSD trip require specifically neural underpinnings.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#96

Post by tomhoward »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #84
tomhoward wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but this is nitpicking, as is your GP comment, and neither refute the point that the original commenter was making: modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty. (As I was writing the comment I thought “ugh will someone chime in and point out that not all countries have strong animal protection laws? Do I really need to preempt that in my comment?”)

>Modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty. I can think of no such society where this is generally true. One need only consider that pigs are far smarter than dogs and then the median pig’s life in said societies.

Laws exist that ban practices that are - according to those who set and enforce the laws - excessively cruel to pigs. That’s all this discussion is about.

That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible thing, and I’d happily see more done to protect all animals against cruelty. But it’s a separate argument to what’s relevant here.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#97

Post by tasty_freeze »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #9
gokuldas011011 wrote: post #5

Yes, the beauty of nature is, there is no magic. Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it.

The more i've studied i've come to the opposite conclusion. Nature is >99% magic and though some tiny slices of human friendly interfaces of reality are replicable much more is chaos, weird emergence, fields, probabilities and stuff so bizarre to our mammalian logic that we might as well call it magic, god, the simulation or just bleeding edge physics as the whole field is getting weirder and weirder. The whole notio…

At the lowest levels, with quantum weirdness (to our way of thinking), yes, we can only create metaphors to try and don't really understand it. Same at the extreme other end where relativistic effects can't be ignored.

But we don't live at those levels. That low-level unpredictability usually is statistically predictable at the macro level where we live. "Coloric" doesn't exist, but it is a perfectly usable concept. There is no need to actually measure the position and velocity of every molecule of gas an a balloon to understand its temperature.

So, to us, the world is 99% magic at the extremes, but <1% where we actually live; we can understand this regime fairly well.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#98

Post by tasty_freeze »

yreg wrote: post #52

I can accept (and to be honest even like) the idea, that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex structures in an animal brain, that there is no soul, no other planes of reality, no special quantum phenomena needed, etc. Maybe we could create a synthetic artificial conscious mind. At worst we could simulate a full human brain at whatever level is necessary. I can accept that. What's crazy to me is the followin…

The way I think about it is that no neuron is conscious; it is the network that is conscious. That is why the "mystery" of Searle's Room doesn't seem mysterious at all. Of course the human following the directions in the room doing thinking in Chinese doesn't understand the language any better than ATP (which is what the human is in that thought experiment -- an energy source) knows English in my brain.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#99

Post by xvector »

chasd00 wrote: post #74
xvector wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care if stubborn, old leaders live longer if it means I don't have to worry about my loved ones dying and get to see humanity reach the stars.

Be careful for what you wish for. There’s no guarantee immortality doesn’t result in eternal suffering.

Wait, where did I say that immortality would be mandated!? Of course you'd get to choose when you want to shuffle off the mortal coil.

For me, personally, I don't see that being the case for many hundreds or even many thousands of years at least. I'm nearly 30 and I feel like I've barely lived a blink of an eye.

Re: Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

#100

Post by neom »

stvltvs wrote: post #91
neom wrote: post #78

My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI" could happen with 4o (basically just explained this: https://b.h4x.zip/agi ) That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious" and went back to making her dinner.

That's begging the question of whether inorganic matter can be conscious. If you boil it down, she's just said if it's inorganic, it's not conscious.

It's funny, I've studied a lot of psychedelics (probably because it was an area of research for both my parents), and salvia divinorum is a really really stand out plant in it's trips, it seems to be a very "technically philosophical" plant. Trip reports always go into weird things like "I became a book on a shelf for 4,000 years, and now I know inanimate objects are conscious", there is also the area of panpsychism and animism.

That stuff is all a little too mind bending for me, but pretty fun thinking for a Sunday morning. :)

Post reply on HN