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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

arxiv.org

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

#221

Post by vinceguidry »

harha_ wrote: post #205
vinceguidry wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard reliable reports of Jeffrey A. Martin and his fellow research participants moving visual perception out of the eyes and the rest of the body into the surrounding environment. Literally seeing behind him. I don't think his eyes stopped working, he just moved his subjective awareness outside of his body. I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to contain 'all of reality' into a small space (th…

You've heard "reliable records"? Can you link it/them? I can't find via search engines, I tried.

Reports, not records. People who I know who know him sharing privately. Jeffrey doesn't and can't publish everything that he comes across and has to be very circumspect with the stuff he does.

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

#223

Post by cs702 »

Before we can answer that question, don't we need a method for determining whether an entity is conscious?

As far as I know, such a method doesn't exist yet. We have no way of verifying if other entities are conscious.

I'd settle for a more mundane goal than "consciousness:" reliable machine intelligence.

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

#224

Post by makk »

jpt4 wrote: post #174
tomhoward wrote: post #11

I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…

Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?

?

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

#226

Post by refulgentis »

strangescript wrote: post #218

"Is this thing we defined to make us feel special achievable?" What we define as "consciousness" is just an emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory. The human brain is a marvel of mechanical and electrical engineering, not a mystical, otherworldly device. Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level to explain the incredible performance our brains achieve, but that is still nothing that we…

> What we define as "consciousness" is just an emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory.

Wow. That settles a ton of questions across fields. Fascinating.

Source?

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

#227

Post by d_theorist »

strangescript wrote: post #218

"Is this thing we defined to make us feel special achievable?" What we define as "consciousness" is just an emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory. The human brain is a marvel of mechanical and electrical engineering, not a mystical, otherworldly device. Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level to explain the incredible performance our brains achieve, but that is still nothing that we…

How do you know?

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

#228

Post by chr1 »

strogonoff wrote: post #102
smokel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights A dog (most likely) has consciousness, but no human rights.

If a chatbot obtained from an emulation of a human brain behaves in a human-like manner, and is attributed consciousness and self-awareness, good luck arguing that its consciousness is like that of a dog. …and even if you succeed, abusing a dog in the way we abuse ML-based products would not be acceptable in any developed country.

If we abuse a dog we have no way to restore it to its previous state. With computer programs we have a perfect time machine, so any thing that one may call "horrible" can be done and then undone without any moral consequences.

This btw also is the answer to the question of evil in religion, god can do whatever he wants without being evil, because it is effectively all in his imagination, and for the people living in our computers we'll be gods.

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

#229

Post by aleksiy123 »

It seems to me that our definition of consciousness is just our own state of mind. A scale that starts with our own individual sense of consciousness (most conscious) and goes to infinite (least conscious).

Do we believe there is anything more conscious then our own individual self at the current moment in time?

The more similar we perceive and empathize with another entity the more conscious we believe them to be.

But I think in a practical sense it doesn't matter too much. Theres no global hierarchy of consciousness.

A rock isn't very similar to us. But once that rocks starts talking/communicating with us enough that we can empathize with it and think that it understands us. We will call it conscious and probably give it the rights we think it deserves.

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

#230

Post by martin-t »

light_triad wrote: post #213

The problem with consciousness is that it’s both a vague term that’s been difficult to define and it has social roots that are not really universal. The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog’s 1972 documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ where multiple people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have difficulty with the task. Even though it’s not scientific it makes you realize how much…

Do we know why they failed at the task? My immediate thought is that it's a failure of translation. My second is to "debug" their reasoning by asking them to describe the pictures.

There's gotta be somebody who knows more but the information was lost on the cutting room's floor in favor of a moral lesson.

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