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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

#241

Post by AnimalMuppet »

lumb63 wrote: post #57
everdrive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition. Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is collo…

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…

We define ourselves to be conscious (even if we don't know exactly what that means). We assume that other humans are similar to ourselves, and we (at least sometimes) see mental activity in other humans that we recognize as being similar to our own. Therefore we conclude that other humans are conscious.

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

#242

Post by bee_rider »

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 seems more like a good natured refusal to engage with the question seriously.

Sort of like, if you come to a smart engineer with a design for a perpetual motion machine, they might likely tease you a little bit and then refer you to a physicist. Smart people from applied fields know when the topics are outside their actual wheelhouse, but getting close enough that they risk being taken seriously, to a misleading extent.

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

#243

Post by Jevon23 »

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?

Video is not the standard medium of communication in academic philosophy. I imagine the GP mentioned youtube because most people are more likely to watch a video than read a paper.

Bernardo Kastrup has a bunch of essays/books up for free at his website https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html?m=1

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

#244

Post by causality0 »

We had really better hope that biological brains are fundamentally "bad" at consciousness, because if a human brain is as efficient at generating consciousness as other biological brains are at doing much older, more refined tasks, we're totally fucked. For example, a dragonfly brain takes visual input from thousands of ommatidia and uses it to track prey in 3D space and plot intercept vectors using only sixteen neurons. How many transistors does a computer need to do the same thing? Now scale that to however many neurons and synapses you guesstimate a human brain needs to create consciousness. The numbers are bad news.

There's little doubt that eventually we will be able to design a computer version of a human soul. Whether that sapience fits in a computer smaller than a zip code or thinks any faster than a person is an entirely different question.

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

#245

Post by aydyn »

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?

Just curious, why do you write like that? Reminds when I was 11 and wanted to sound smarter on the internet.

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

#246

Post by agumonkey »

aydyn wrote: post #245
jpt4 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just curious, why do you write like that? Reminds when I was 11 and wanted to sound smarter on the internet.

Sidenote a lot of people get triggered by videos as information. Cause reading is indexable. I used to be a bit like that and ran into a few extremists.

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

#247

Post by ypeterholmes »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #229

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. B…

You're making this harder than it needs to be. Things that have self awareness via an internal world map can be considered conscious, meaning self aware. A rock has no such mechanism. Most animals including humans do.

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

#248

Post by nobrains »

From Google Gemini:

- This is an article about artificial consciousness.

- It discusses whether it is possible to create artificial consciousness by studying the human brain.

- The authors argue that some features of the human brain are necessary for consciousness.

- These features include a specific biochemical makeup and slow information processing speed.

- Current AI technology does not have these features.

- The article concludes that it is unlikely that AI will achieve human-level consciousness in the near future.

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

#249

Post by agumonkey »

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.

Funny story, but at the same time, got seems fine about hallucinating by itself. At least a little.

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

#250

Post by card_zero »

naasking wrote: post #214
chrsw wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?

You have to Google and read those thought experiments to see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give good reasons. We have mechanistic explanations for all of those organs, and even if we lack some explanation, we know one is possible in principle. They argue this isn't the case for consciousness.

OK.

Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else.

There's a dubious implication that conscious experience is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal. What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it with rights?

The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a revelatory experience even after all that book-learning, so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the premise is wrong. The scientist didn't really learn everything before having the experience, but could have done in principle but for the limits of communication, description, and simulation as we know those things presently. (And then the real experience would not have had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)

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