Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by skissane » Mon, May 20, 2024, 3:38 AM UTC

Terr_ wrote: post #408

skissane wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

A human child costs a lot more than a dog or cat does, and yet society grants the child vastly greater rights than the dog or cat. The difference is due to cognitive capacity - a smart five year old can give a lecture about how you are allegedly violating their rights (e.g. “making me go to bed on time violates my right to have fun”)-no dog or cat in the world can do that

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

#432

Post by thethimble » Mon, May 20, 2024, 3:39 AM UTC

anon84873628 wrote: post #391

thethimble wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)_/¯

It’s not clear that the material world of the simulation is of the same kind of the material world we seem to observe. Further it seems definitely not clear that we can interact/modify the simulation’s material at all.

The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.

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

#433

Post by silver_silver » Mon, May 20, 2024, 4:12 AM UTC

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 possible that consciousness is merely observation and agency, or less comfortably, just observation. A lot of one’s identity comes from their experiences, particularly as a child, and like you say: memory has been proven to be physically rooted in the brain.

We could all be the same observer moving around in time and space, a new one every morning, or the same continuously, and there would be very little way to tell. Who can say whether the day to day fluctuations in our behaviour are biological or a result of a different will driving us?

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

#434

Post by silver_silver » Mon, May 20, 2024, 4:21 AM UTC

EasyMark wrote: post #390

jugg1es wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I don't understand this "we have to understand consciousness first" stuff gets so much discussion. If it acts human, and is indiscernible from human or human like, it'll fit our definition. I don't understand why "organic machine" matters, it's the "machine" part that matters, and we are machines. I think all that needs to be seriously considered. Is it et…

Something which pretends to be something else, no matter how convincing, is still essentially different. A deepfaked video could be bit for bit identical to what the genuine recording would have been and it still wouldn’t reflect reality if the content never happened.

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

#435

Post by strogonoff » Mon, May 20, 2024, 4:49 AM UTC

exe34 wrote: post #163

strogonoff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if you reject the pink elephant argument as straw man in the first place. As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the implication of the theory in context of scientific method.

Gödel's theorem deals with the axioms of mathematics. the scientific method deals with the physical universe. a small part of mathematics is useful in describing the universe, but most of it isn't.

The theorem is about formal systems in general. You may want to take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method#Science_of_c..., though I recommend to read, for example, GEB to inderstand the implications of the theorem.

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

#436

Post by vidarh » Mon, May 20, 2024, 4:56 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #303

vidarh wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:/…

The reasoning stands entirely on its own. There's nothing you need to "believe". That you don't have a way to disprove it is close enough to proof.

The problem with it is that it's not giving us anything useful.

OK, so maybe this moment is the only one there is? Now what?

Accordingly the only reasonable recourse is for the most part to ignore it, and add an implicit "assuming my memory and senses are roughly trustworthy" to every assumption.

This is the same reason I'm a firm materialist even though we could be in a simulation, or brains in vats: absent evidence of either, the only thing giving us useful information is our senses and our introspection, and so the most useful approach is to assume they are valid until proven otherwise.

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

#437

Post by strogonoff » Mon, May 20, 2024, 5:00 AM UTC

anon291 wrote: post #122

strogonoff wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that pink elephants may indeed well exist.

That's really not what it says. Godel's incompleteness theorem applied to AI would say something like 'There are statements about the model's behavior we cannot prove without relying on statements that cannot to be proven' (this is because obviously the AI algorithms are based on elementary arithmetic).

The theorem applies beyond elementary arithmetic to any formal system. If we try to be rigorous in that way with our models of the universe, the theorem would say that no matter how formally sound our models are they will have to be incomplete, incorrect, or non-provable; that is, we would not be able to rule out the existence of consciousness or figurative pink elephants.

(And if they are not formally sound in that way, our models can be safely considered to be incorrect/incomplete simply because they are not formally sound in that way.)

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

#438

Post by anon84873628 » Mon, May 20, 2024, 5:35 AM UTC

anon-3988 wrote: post #428

anon84873628 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't think you understand how fundamentally hard the question is. See the hard problem of consciousness[1]. When you think about gravity, you can imagine a universe where gravity is reversed. All of the physics seems mechanical, or probabilistics or whatever. But "there's there there" is a completely different phenomena that I think we will never have an answer for. There doesn't seem to be a continuity, eithe…

I understand the hard problem. There clearly is a continuum of "consciousness" from simple insects on up to primates & cetaceans, and the complexity of that consciousness is correlated with the structural complexity of the brain. Creating minds is just what brains do.

Anyway, I was specifically responding to the parent comment statements about the research needed, pointing out that we already have it.

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

#439

Post by anon84873628 » Mon, May 20, 2024, 5:47 AM UTC

thethimble wrote: post #432

anon84873628 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)_/¯

It’s not clear that the material world of the simulation is of the same kind of the material world we seem to observe. Further it seems definitely not clear that we can interact/modify the simulation’s material at all. The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.

Whatever reality is, humans have sex and make new conscious agents all the time. If they can be created by birth, why not by building?

My point was that however the subjective reality I perceive came about, the laws of it still seem to allow for the creation of new non-biological conscious agents.

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

#440

Post by lottin » Mon, May 20, 2024, 5:53 AM UTC

Thiez wrote: post #365

lottin wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main ingredient is a living being.

Why?

Because the evidence strongly indicates so: we haven't found a single instance in the entire universe of a conscious entity that wasn't also a living being.