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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

#301

Post by __loam »

jugg1es wrote: post #167
monstertank wrote: post #159

I never understood this. Evolution basically says humans are conscious matter...why would that not be replicatable via an intelligent designer (humans)? Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would that be the most efficient solution?

We can't replicate something we don't understand. The mechanism for consciousness is not understood at all right now and could actually be based on quantum effects that we haven't detected yet. It's also possible that it is only achievable in an organic machine. Until we understand how consciousness actually arises, the best we can do is a simulacrum of it.

I agree that people who think we can replicate brains on von Neumann machines with our current understanding of the brain are idiots who don't know what they're talking about, but humans build things they don't understand all the time. There's always a way to go deeper on a subject. The Romans were pretty good architects even without a modern understanding of metallurgy and structural engineering. We can treat mental illness with medications even if we don't fully understand consciousness.

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

#302

Post by PeterisP »

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 somewhat disagree, I feel that the prevailing position is that unlike intelligence (e.g. Legg&Hutter definitions) consciousness can not be easily assumed from mere behavior and relies on certain things happening (or not happening) inside the agent.

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

#303

Post by ben_w »

vidarh wrote: post #292
ben_w wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah, I see you're more of an A. J. Ayer fan than a Descartes fan.

I think that if an LLM has any consciousness, it would be an experience like this — one where the past was a fiction it invented to fit the prompt, and the "now" was the only moment before the mind was reset.

But I'd put that in the same basket as my… ah, nephew comment? Cousin comment? I guess you'd call it that if we have parent comments etc.?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40406398

What you say is not wrong in principle, but it's in the same "cognitively unstable" basket as a Boltzmann brain, where to accept it would mean I couldn't trust my own reason to believe it.

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

#304

Post by __loam »

jacobsimon wrote: post #183
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Programmers seem to forget about how physics is the reason there's np-hard problems.

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

#305

Post by mytailorisrich »

Llamamoe wrote: post #297
mytailorisrich wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 influe…

> why we're more than a complex biological computer

Are we more than biological "computers"?

I think we are complex biological systems that we do not fully understand yet but that does not mean anything supernatural or beyond our understanding of physics is at play.

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

#306

Post by hovering_nox »

vinceguidry wrote: post #221
harha_ wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ROFL

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

#307

Post by telmo »

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…

Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard", and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.

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

#308

Post by __loam »

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…

The brain is not a product of engineering, but of evolution. As a biomedical engineering graduate, I feel obligated to point out that even though I think consciousness is a result of physical process that in theory can be replicated, we have so far failed to achieve that. Saying consciousness is "just" an emergent property of dense neural networks is kind of a signal to me that have a pretty ignorant view on this stuff that's more rooted in machine learning terminology than actual biology.

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

#309

Post by potsandpans »

jpt4 wrote: post #251
aydyn wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My reply is an attempt to address the original comment with precision. To diagram its intended meaning: > alternative theories of consciousness "Any body of academic thought" [I accede the scientific legitimacy of the domain of discourse, rather than dismissing it.] > know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. "whose paradigmatic communication medium" [This is the beginning of my challenge to the Or…

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

#310

Post by PeterisP »

astrobe_ wrote: post #162

What is this obsession with making computers human-like? We can put those machine to better uses than forgetting, having biases, making subtle or gross mistakes (hello, ChatGPT) like we do. The AI that some apparently consider top-notch today is only good at powering NPCs in video games. The more serious the use-case, the more harmful it becomes. Moreover, achieving artificial consciousness is only good at fueling en…

I think there's practical value to knowing what would make a very complex AI system conscious in order to explicitly and intentionally avoid it - we want to create powerful artificial systems to do all the tasks that humans don't want to do, but there's no reason for those systems to have the capability to experience suffering by being 'enslaved' to do all these tasks; arguably consciousness isn't necessary nor useful for any of these tasks[1], and unless it turns out to be an unalienable side-effect of some critical mass of capability, we'd rather not have these systems be conscious.

[1] I can imagine a few roles with relationship-building where expressing consciousness could be useful, but IMHO for all of them faking consciousness would be far preferable than actually having it.

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