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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

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

#181

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

How could you be deciding what's for dinner, if the decision takes so long that all the food has rotted, your body has died, and the continent is now in an ice age? How could you be learning something about your observations of the night sky, if the suns had burned out before you knew they were there at all? Our 'conscious awareness' is the awareness of the environment around us in a timeframe where it stays approximately the same; when something changes too quickly, an explosion, a car crash, we have to wait until the environment steadies before we can think about it. If an insect zips by too quick to see, we never become conscious of it. We can be conscious of sound but not radio waves. Is it possible to have a consciousness where everything zips by too quickly for it to notice, where it has no senses to learn about what's around it, it's not-conscious of anything?

At that point, the XKCD person moving the stones on the beach is doing a bit of a Searle's Chinese Room; "look, these stones I'm setting into positions I chose to represent some knowledge I chose, which I'm moving in patterns I chose, are echoing my choices back to me in ways I chose to interpret!".

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

#182

Post by hypertele-Xii »

thriftwy wrote: post #173
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are computations, the outcomes of which are unknown unknown until actually done.

What changes when they are known? I believr it affects yout consciousness, not the one being simulated. The latter does not have "I'm being actually simulated" input

"Actually simulated" is such an oxymoron. So which is it? Is the consciousness actual, simulated, or actually simulated? And does the resulting state of mind change the universe, or merely reveal its hidden structure?

It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem is, logic is not all of creation.

Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confused stardust sans mission.

A computer is just a calculator. You might as well ask if {addition, subtraction, multiplication, division} is God.

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

#183

Post by jacobsimon »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #177
jacobsimon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but even if you take materialism for granted, we’ve yet to uncover the exact biological mechanism. It’s entirely possible that it is unique to carbon-based and/or analog brains.

That wouldn’t really be consistent with the laws of physics as we know them. So it would require a significant change in our scientific theories (which is possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it)

I don’t follow you. I’m saying we haven’t discovered any inorganic consciousness, so it isn’t a given that we will be able to create it with digital computers. Not sure how that breaks the laws of physics.

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

#184

Post by jodrellblank »

thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote: post #50
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.

So far the only idea that I've read about and might feasibly result in uploading instead of copying is gradual replacement of each cell by a nanobot simulating that cell. So at the end of it, there'd be no bag to change its mind.

Greg Egan's Sci-Fi jewel (dual) idea: https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me...

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

#185

Post by dkz999 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #75
lumb63 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…

I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is, > Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you…

I really like equating faking intelligence to consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being intelligent'.

In addition to having meaningful interactions with others, i would add consciousness also requires meaningful interaction with its-self.

What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which, personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-typed.

And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge you can get in on, real cheap...

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

#186

Post by eaenki »

neom wrote: post #100
stvltvs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

well, i tried salvia and I tried shrooms. I don’t see how it’s more philosophical just because it’s a dissociative. at best, it’s more of an ego death than, say, shrooms, if during the trip you become an object. It’s still a unique plant for sure because of it’s dissociative effects. To thread lightly. AFAIK natives in mexico say that smoking it is very bad. and that u’re supposed to chew fresh leaves. maybe chewing fresh leaves doesn’t even cause the same dissociative effects which are unpleasant.

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

#187

Post by dukeofdoom »

Are cells conscious? I presume yes. I've seen a video of a white blood cell chasing after a bacteria trying to evade, around obstacles, and its pretty dramatic.

Since at one point we were just two cell, all that was required for us to be conscious must have been already encoded in those cells. Unless you want to argue consciousness spontaneously arises out of a grouping of specific cells. In which case the grouping of those cells was also already encoded in those two cells.

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

#188

Post by jodrellblank »

thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote: post #92
xvector wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this book, I think: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393899945799 - 108 Tips for Time Travellers by inventor and Professor Peter Cochrane, 1999, one of the essays is him asking his wife if she would still love him if he had false teeth, a false leg, etc. bit by bit until she stops the conversation saying "I'm not having you dying by installments!".

When you replace a heart with a pump, you don't get a human heart. When you replace a kidney with a dialysis machine, you doon't get a human kidney. Why expect that when you replace neurons with simulations you get a human brain or a human consciousness, or when you've replaced everything, a human?

Biological replacement, your body growing more new neurons, maybe, but it won't be mind uploading. And it won't get you you-at-age-twenty back.

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

#189

Post by RaftPeople »

potatoman22 wrote: post #130

The authors suggest incorporating elements of neuroscience into machine learning models. I don't see why the bitter lesson [1] doesn't apply here. 1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

There will always be a set of problems beyond the current (in whatever year) computational limits of brute force, and we don't know how many of a humans capabilities are in that set.

The delta between a clever algorithm vs brute force in computational advancement could be 7 years or it could be 7,000 years.

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

#190

Post by yehabut »

amelius wrote: post #145
CuriouslyC wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how we can learn to experience qualia. If the author means self awareness instead of consciousness that would make more sense.

I wish the scientific community would get the terminology straight.

“Right” based upon whose consciousness?

People in Georgia use language differently than people in Washington State.

People need to read more Camus and Freire and consider the extent to which relativity applies.

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