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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

#401

Post by anon84873628 »

ikrenji wrote: post #211
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?

well the brain is special because it gives rise to consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't

The brain evolved to be intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to model the outside world in order to make predictions and then choose an optimal course of action. More intelligent beings are generally more "fit" in the evolutionary sense. Hence how humans have conquered all the ecosystems on the planet.

Turns out, consciousness/experience/qualia is an unexpected side effect of this process. We can "feel" the intelligence happening.

Where we humans get lost is believing that it has any meaning, or that we are somehow in control. We're not; the feeling of free will is just a other trick of qualia.

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

#402

Post by anon84873628 »

prolyxis wrote: post #212
anon-3988 wrote: post #199

If we are talking about intelligence or "agency", then I don't see why something other than carbon can do it. But if we are talking about "there's there there", then I am not sure if we will ever find an explanation for this. Let's say that X is what gives rise to "there's there there". What does this tell me? Nothing. This is perhaps the most interesting, most important, and most baffling mystery of the universe. It…

I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for consciousness.

Neuroscience has already done lots of investigations as to what's there and why. We know which structures in the brain do what (including "consciousness") at an increasingly fine level. We can observe all sorts of brain disorders and dysfunctions and their effect on consciousness. You can do drugs yourself to alter the ingredients of consciousness.

I think people just don't like how boring the answer is.

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

#403

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

yreg wrote: post #52

I can accept (and to be honest even like) the idea, that consciousness somehow emerges from the complex structures in an animal brain, that there is no soul, no other planes of reality, no special quantum phenomena needed, etc. Maybe we could create a synthetic artificial conscious mind. At worst we could simulate a full human brain at whatever level is necessary. I can accept that. What's crazy to me is the followin…

IIRC It’s Steve Grand’s contention in Creation: Life And How To Make It that we will only get artificial consciousness with artificial biological drives.

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

#404

Post by ecjhdnc2025 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #236
moi2388 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I can replicate a book in a foreign without understanding the language?

You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not even that if it uses a different character set, unless you're doing photocopies). Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign lan…

[flagged]

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

#405

Post by xvector »

jodrellblank wrote: post #188
thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to imagine it like plugging a cable or getting an EEG cap and then they can't imagine the next step. Gradual replacement is a very radical idea to most people - a friend of mine recently described is as a horror movie.

In this book, I think: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393899945799 - 108 Tips for Time Travellers by inventor and Professor Peter Cochrane, 1999, one of the essays is him asking his wife if she would still love him if he had false teeth, a false leg, etc. bit by bit until she stops the conversation saying "I'm not having you dying by installments!". When you replace a heart with a pump, you don't get a human heart. When…

To be honest, I don't really care if I get a human brain or not as long as I stay conscious.

I – and I'd wager most people – would be fine with some level of alteration to their being if it meant they wouldn't literally die, and that they would get to spend some more time with their loved ones. Change is a part of life, and this would just be another one.

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

#406

Post by xvector »

fwip wrote: post #331
xvector wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, where did I say that immortality would be mandated!? Of course you'd get to choose when you want to shuffle off the mortal coil. For me, personally, I don't see that being the case for many hundreds or even many thousands of years at least. I'm nearly 30 and I feel like I've barely lived a blink of an eye.

I feel like that would require society to get pretty chill about suicide. In a world where everyone is immortal-by-default, I can actually see the opposite happening - the fear of death increasing from its absence, and becoming an even greater taboo.

I think such a society would be chill about suicide. An exploration of this idea is found throughout the "Culture" novels by Banks. It's okay to decide when you want to clock out. It's certainly better than being forcibly clocked out against your wishes.

I agree it would be weird at first, but after the first thousand years or so, it would probably become common enough that people wouldn't mind, and the taboo would disappear. Weird, maybe, but at least people will get to live their lives to the fullest and at their own pace.

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

#407

Post by cameronh90 »

__loam wrote: post #308
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 stu…

Pacman was cutting edge in 1980.

In the 45 years since, we've managed to go from "waka waka" to something that could trick many people in a short conversation. Yes, it's probably not conscious, and so you're technically correct in that we've failed to achieve consciousness.

But you have to factor that current SOTA ANNs running our best supercomputers aren't even close in computational capability to the human brain. Reasonably, the human brain is still several orders of magnitude more powerful at executing a NN than our computers are at simulating one and we're likely still decades away from the average researcher having access to a machine as capable as a human brain.

Given that, and that nobody knows positively where consciousness exists within the brain, I'm not sure how you can be so confident as to suggest that GP is being ignorant. Many ideas behind LLMs were invented in the 60s and have just been waiting for powerful enough computers to experiment with them. Another few orders of magnitude and we may see more emergent behaviour that is impossible to distinguish from consciousness.

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

#408

Post by Terr_ »

skissane wrote: post #376
rl3 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person. I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individual…

> I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individuality and autonomy part. Many pets have a lot of individuality and autonomy. Cats and dogs have their own individual personalities and likes/dislikes, and they have their own desires which sometimes contradict those of their human owners (e.g. your dog's desire to chew your brand new expensive shoes, vers…

I think the real crux of the matter would be the difference between rights versus stuff that costs people money.

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

#409

Post by nox101 »

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 replicate things I don't understand all the time. I replicate bread. I haven't a clue why it turns into bread. I just follow the instructions and it becomes bread.

We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.

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

#410

Post by __loam »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #383
__loam wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cheap" OpenAI loves to talk revenue but I'd like to hear more about their unit economics.

Writers of all types. Not a complete replacement but if you can get away with half as many + AI, that’s substantial savings.

I'm skeptical that AI can actually replace writers like ai people seem to think it can. In marketing, I don't think the actual writing is really that much of the cost compared to paying Google and meta and serve the ad, unless you're doing something crazy like fully personalized ads, which I'm not convinced are actually better considering for creepy they are. For writing a novel, I've not heard of any books that are mostly written by AI that people actually want to read and most authors I've seen speak about it seem to hate the technology. And again, the unit economics and market make me think it makes more sense to invest in making a better novel than trying to pump out ai garbage in a winner take all situation. I don't really get it for technical documentation either, where the thing you're really trying to get across is human understanding. The point is not to just pump out garbage, it's too actually understand something than translate that understanding into words. I'm not convinced LLMs can do that right now.

The one area I've seen it work great for in meeting transcripts and summaries, but that's not a convincing use case if you're losing money every time a user uses the service.

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