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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

#341

Post by mewpmewp2 »

a_random_canuck wrote: post #197
smokel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness might be overrated. It could simply be a short-term memory of the state you were in.

This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random reality. There isn’t even an agreed upon definition for what consciousness is from a scientific perspective.

And the reason that it is overrated, is because it has to feel special for the bearers because it makes them prioritise their survival.

Consciousness is largely a way to have a reward function for set of behaviours that keep you alive through reason.

It appears at a level where reasoning is intelligent enough that you need a more complex reward function.

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

#342

Post by ggpsv »

hanrelan wrote: post #300
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?

I found his first appearance [0] in Rupert Spira's show to be a good introduction to his arguments.

For a more thorough examination, his book "The Idea of the World".

[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MQuMzocvmTQ&pp=ygUNa2FzdHJ1cCB...

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

#343

Post by CooCooCaCha »

tomrod wrote: post #334
mistermann wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are declaring it to be a fact that science is flawless. Defining something to be true by definition can certainly cause it to be appear to be true (read some forum discussions among even smart people on the internet if you do not believe this), but it doesn't guarantee that it will be.

Science is adaptable to reality -- therefore, it reflects reality as it is presented. Esoteric arguments portraying an ineffable, unobservable stream of will that never interacts with reality is not observable by definition; since it doesn't interact with reality, it can be safely ignored. Roko's basilisk be damned!

I think some people think science rejects mystical explanations because science is rigid and stubborn and has it's head buried in the sand.

But no, it's because there's no proof. If we had evidence that something mystical was happening then it would be a huge breakthrough and it would eventually become science.

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

#344

Post by corry »

hanrelan wrote: post #300
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?

Not OP but check out Closer to Truth on YouTube. PBS show hosted by a former neuroscience PhD, they have tons of recent interviews with leading thinkers on consciousness (among other fascinating topics).

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

#345

Post by light_triad »

martin-t wrote: post #230
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.

Agreed it's not possible from the footage to draw any definite conclusions - the whole exchange and portrayal is deeply flawed. I wonder if anyone has seen some scientific papers with a reproducible methodology that look into the deep differences in cultural framing along those lines?

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

#346

Post by 9dev »

foobarian wrote: post #202
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 is why so far the Kantian philosophy makes the most sense to me. I can tell that something is there because I am thinking it, but can't tell about any others. The really scary thing is the question of why this particular body at this particular time. It's like when born, organisms generate a "consciousness vortex/attractor" that binds to a parti…

> It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body

I always found it even more interesting how your body can switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try holding your breath for example—do it too long, and your body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a working state before attempting a new deployment.

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

#347

Post by dpig_ »

vereis wrote: post #323
Der_Einzige wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solipsism is incoherent because it's not radical skepticism. All of the critique of the external world also apply to belief in the primacy on internal experience. Any good solipsist should just accept the "evil demon" of descartes, embrace radical doubt, and say "I don't even know if I truly exist or not". "I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm a replicant or not, Deckard!"

well doesn't the argument suggest the only thing you can be certain of is I, or at least some 'experiencing agent' exist, otherwise there would be no subject to do the experiencing

Yeah the first-person subjectivity has to arise before second and third persons can arise. But with some further investigation, one can find that the things they take to be their subject are in fact object to them, too.

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

#348

Post by light_triad »

In many ways 'consciousness' is a human projection onto machines. The whole debate might be, in some sense, irrelevant. Here's 2 scenarios:

- Your robot companion gets so good at mimicking a human, knows all your preferences and is able to have natural conversations, that over time you forget you are interacting with a robot and start to develop feelings for them.

- A robot swarm interacts with the environment to further its goals and continues to grow long after humans have disappeared from the scene.

In both cases is there consciousness? Does it matter?

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

#349

Post by mekoka »

Lerc wrote: post #293
mekoka wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 '…

Solipsism is skepticism of the existence of anything outside the self. I've seen Hoffman address accusations of solipsism a few times and I have to admit that it's always been unclear to me which part of his theory people tend to perceive as such. Perhaps I've just consumed enough of it to zoom past this perception.

I'll try to keep things short, as this can get pretty long winded fast.

From what I understand of his proposition, it's a take on idealism that is very close to eastern thought as inspired by nondual traditions like Advaita and Buddhism, but with a heavier emphasis on science. Everything in reality is a projection in consciousness of consciousness. It's made up of interacting conscious agents (you, me, a rock, an atom, a particle, etc) which are themselves "projections" ultimately stemming from a fundamental, unknowable, infinitely distant and unattainable root conscious agent. The implication is that space-time, our perceived reality, is not fundamental. Hoffman thinks that we might possibly have access to at least one, higher, more general dimension of reality of which ours is a specialized version (as hint of this, he speaks of current work in physics where structures outside space-time are being discovered, like the amplituhedron).

Space and time not being fundamental creates problems with some materialist assumptions in evolutionary biology, where consciousness is seen as part of an evolutionary process. Hoffman suggests to rethink evolution from scratch instead. He uses evolutionary game theory to demonstrate that we can have consciousness as fundamental, keep some of the core evolution principles and still end up with consistent conclusions.

I'll stop here, as I've said, it can get deep rather fast.

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

#350

Post by andrewflnr »

zero-sharp wrote: post #325
andrewflnr wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what ot…

> You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space.

Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement".

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