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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

#291

Post by vidarh »

zer00eyz wrote: post #179
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #3

We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity inven…

> We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. This isnt an interesting path outside the paradox of proof. We are fine disregarding that there are truths that are unprovable in math... I think we need to make that leap in this realm as well. Concisousness is also probably a bad term, concepts like sentience and sapience need to be the ones we are talking about. We might get to one, long before th…

It is relevant here because it goes to the very core of what we're talking about, though.

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

#292

Post by vidarh »

ben_w wrote: post #12
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #3

We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man. The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one way or another, even if humanity inven…

I know that at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term would never have been invented. But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity :P

No, we don't. We don't even know if existence has an extent in time, because our only way of "interfacing" with time is our experience of memory we can't prove is real.

For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion.

But of course this isn't a useful assumption in most respects.

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

#293

Post by Lerc »

mekoka wrote: post #254
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…

As someone who's been engaged in this topic (the nature of reality and consciousness) over the past 3 years, it's very surprising to see this comment on HN. As I've suggested in a past comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465928 ), this can potentially be one of the most transformative rabbit hole anyone can ever hope to enter. It's been fascinating to observe the dichotomy between researchers who work on…

I hadn't encountered conscious agent theory before. I took a quick look and it seemed to be solipsism wearing a disguise. Can you elaborate how it distinguishes itself from solipsism in its arguments that it might be real?

I found the evolutionary argument rather odd. The disconnect between perception and reality is pretty much the standard belief these days. Unless I'm reading it wrong it was making the claim that 'reality' is a non causal artifact of conscious entities but one that was caused by evolution, which seems contradictory.

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

#294

Post by andrewflnr »

zero-sharp wrote: post #274
telmo wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science, there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a weird introspection riddle. I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what consciousness is. And I think that "definit…

Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a scientific definition. It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a great definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the concept. Too indirect.)

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

#295

Post by tomrod »

jpt4 wrote: post #277
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you. The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure,…

> Communication is about being understood. > The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text, without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I…

Hear hear!

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

#296

Post by coldblues »

I think it's possible that machines could become conscious in the future. Do I think it matters? No. A lot of people mistakenly try to empathize and think ethically. I think it's the Effective Altruism brainrot. If you are a physicalist, consider this: consciousness is a phenomena that can be replicated and modified any which way. Right now, you are having a subjective conscious experience. This experience of yours is seamless regardless of what happens. Whether you are in a coma, asleep or dead, your subjective conscious experience will indefinitely be there regardless of your memories. You will continually wake up. You will continue to experience until it is impossible for any consciousness to ever form. That means an indefinite amount of suffering. This is not a greater than life threat. It's all physical. Pain and suffering are evolutionary products. You want to minimize them because of your biology. You have evolved to be able to relate with someone's pain and this has presented the advantage of being able to work together and care for one another.

I am intrigued by non-human consciousness. A higher form of life. Seeing more colors, feeling more emotion, perhaps being a part of a hivemind. Do you ever think why the hivemind is vilified? Realistically there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so foreign that we can't ever possibly imagine it. It's a scary thought. We lose our human experience, something unique to us.

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

#297

Post by Llamamoe »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #133
grishka wrote: post #10

For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as well be something that partially exists on another layer of reality we have no idea about yet.

Human consciousness has logically to be a product of the physical structure of human beings.

To be fair, there is absolutely nothing within known physics that would explain why we're more than a complex biological computer and how subjective experience and qualia arise from it.

So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It could be anything from "it's actually just the physical processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the loss of connection"

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

#298

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

anon291 wrote: post #123
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.

In the sense that science is ultimately a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality (which is not a universal belief by any means, and is utterly religious in nature), then yes, this is true. On the other hand, if we take an irreligious look at things and try to keep focus on just what we observe, one is forced to make the opposite conclusion, as the very basic building bloc…

What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing such an experiment. Lastly, if someone did produce an experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is, an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the same, but the result of the experiment being different, then the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible would be wrong. It isn't axiomatic.

>try to keep focus on just what we observe

That's all science is though – making observations. Writing hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of nature?

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

#299

Post by PeterisP »

amenhotep wrote: post #136
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…

You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

It is very relevant to keep analyzing and keep trying to get any other answer to this question, because while "appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us" applies to other humans, as soon as we want to talk about the consciousness (or lack of it) of other actors, this argument can not be applied and we would very much like to get to any other criteria of consciousness which could be applicable to arbitrary non-human agents.

Even if we axiomatically assume that everyone else is not a p-zombie, trying to find any evidence towards your/mine consciousness other than that axiom is helpful as a candidate for such criteria which can be tested and validated.

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

#300

Post by hanrelan »

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 videos in particular you'd recommend?
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