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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

#391

Post by anon84873628 »

thethimble wrote: post #359
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain. Stated a bit differently: All events must h…

> The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true. How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness. It’s not necessary true that these appeara…

>Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.

Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#392

Post by User23 »

Scarblac wrote: post #262
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually simulated" is such an oxymoron. So which is it? Is the consciousness actual, simulated, or actually simulated? And does the resulting state of mind change the universe, or merely reveal its hidden structure? It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem is, logic is not all of creation. Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confuse…

> Consciousness requires a soul What's a soul? How can you possibly know that's what's required? Maybe it requires a blerpqu.

The soul is the animating principle. The Latin for soul, anima, is where we get our words animal, (in)animate, and so on.

In the most loose sense the soul is whatever it is that a living thing stops having when it becomes a dead thing.

Philosophically speaking saying “consciousness requires a soul” is a consequence of the observation that consciousness requires not being dead.

People, many of whom were assuredly considerably more intelligent than you or me, have spent thousands of years pondering what exactly the nature of souls is. Your metasyntactic zinger adds exactly nothing to that ongoing dialog. But by definition we know souls exist, at least as much as any abstract principle does and perhaps more than some.

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

#393

Post by EasyMark »

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'm kind of worried about virtual assistants, teachers, etc ruining a generation of children who think they are "real people" as much as anything else I've heard about AI. Adults can (usually) discern reality much more easily than children. Some of the assistants are getting these very "emotional" sounding voices and it's freakish to me. I don't need Siri to sound like a doting girlfriend, I just need it to play a song, fetch some information, pull up my schedule, etc.

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

#394

Post by anon84873628 »

jacobsimon wrote: post #169
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?

I agree but even if you take materialism for granted, we’ve yet to uncover the exact biological mechanism. It’s entirely possible that it is unique to carbon-based and/or analog brains.

Uh, it seems pretty clear that the "exact biological mechanism" is neural networks. Like, literally the connectedness and firing of neurons in the brain.

And no there is no proof that quantum effects play a significant role.

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

#395

Post by EasyMark »

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.

that's the kind of musing that leads you off into the weeds. Sure, anything is possible, but science is useful for observing, cataloging, and utilizing knowledge that is provable or at least "approximately" provable to the point it's useful. Spiritual talk of what the mind "is" really doesn't have much of a place when talking about AGI, I don't think. We need repetitive outputs for given inputs into a system. I can make up "what might be" all day long, but it's not really useful, unless I can prove it or use it.

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

#396

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

thethimble wrote: post #359
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain. Stated a bit differently: All events must h…

> The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true. How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness. It’s not necessary true that these appeara…

>it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.

Ok. But that is equally true for any observation. For example, I don't really know that the computer I'm using to write this post actually exists under that proposition, as perhaps by brain is imagining it. So you are really rejecting observations in general here. My point is that given that observations in general are correct, then it is clear that the brain is the cause of consciousness.

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

#397

Post by mekoka »

chr1 wrote: post #375
mekoka wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and doe…

Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation. This second approach have turned…

> Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way.

It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is beyond our available tools and methodology. That our scientific zeitgeist chose to ignore those hints and proceeded to waste resources chasing its tail is our current reckoning.

> This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.

What exactly has it yielded? There are few serious physicalist researchers working on consciousness nowadays. Not one person on this planet could tell you anything scientifically meaningful about consciousness. None of the big names, Tononi, Koch, Hameroff, Penrose, Seth, etc. The best you'd get out of them is that we now have even more tools giving us better indications of correlates of consciousness. That is, while they all set out to find answers about the engine, we've actually made tremendous progress on the dials. So I guess we could say that these approaches have been valuable in discovering in practice all the theoretical dead-ends that idealism predicted.

At least idealism is proposing a paradigm shift, consciousness first. Not an unreasonable proposition either, since it's consistent with every constraints set in cognitive science and in physics, with the bonus of solving in the process various philosophical problems about consciousness.

> So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.

A position taken when you either profoundly misunderstand the philosophy, or when you have no clue how to use insights it gives you. Luckily it's not a universal outlook, since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.

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

#398

Post by anon84873628 »

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.

"We haven't discovered any inorganic flying machines, so it isn't a given that we will be able to create them with metal."

Turns out that if you get the structure right you can mimic the effect. Mimic the brain structure in silicon and you will get a similar effect. Just like how birds and airplanes are similar but different.

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

#399

Post by anon84873628 »

naasking wrote: post #265
card_zero wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implicatio…

> Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are possible, then you accept that consciousness is not necessarily physical. If it's not necessarily physical, then physicalism is false. > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is dry and dusty and limited. What it's attempting to show is the l…

>If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts.

You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.

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

#400

Post by anon84873628 »

nearbuy wrote: post #377
card_zero wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 implicatio…

> or at least that all such effects are shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects. Imagine there's a person, John, and you take a precise scan of every neuron of his brain (or every particle if you prefer). You also record all the sensory input signals from his neurons to his brain. You write all t…

>Physicalism implies that things we wouldn't intuitively think of as conscious can perfectly mimic all such effects.

This is the multiple relizability argument and it only discounts certain types of physicalism that aren't popular anymore.

I consider myself a physicalism and answer that the simulation of John is conscious.

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