Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 604 posts

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

#451

Post by prolyxis »

anon84873628 wrote: post #438
anon-3988 wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think neural correlates of consciousness have been identified, so clearly there remains research to be done. I'm not in touch with the neuroscience literature, but acknowledging the hard problem of consciousness means one should accept there is a lot of work remaining. That being said, I believe the hard problem is surmountable. In my mind the situation is similar to computer science before Turing's description of the Turing machine: there were imprecise notions abound about what computation meant that needed to be clarified through a concrete model. My view is simply that finer control over conscious experience would aid understanding enormously. But you're right, I should probably skim the real research more.

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

#452

Post by Thiez »

User23 wrote: post #392
Scarblac wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cons…

So then bacteria have souls? And computers will never have one since they're not biological. But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.

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

#453

Post by Thiez »

skissane wrote: post #372
amenhotep wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

Solipsism is emotionally and ethically horrific. All the people I love the most aren't actually real, only I am – if one seriously believes that, it is going to do a great deal of harm to one's mental health. Solipsism can ethically justify all kinds of horrors. "Other people only exist in my own mind, so if I murder/torture/etc them, those acts are just figments of my own imagination: there is little ethical differe…

Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place? Take for example the babies that had to be left behind by hospital staff in one of the Gaza hospitals when it was occupied by the IOF and when the doctors could come back a few weeks later they found the rotting corpses of these babies who had been left to starve, alone and afraid, by the Israeli soldiers.

If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?

I think so easily dismissing the cruelty and insanity of the world is in itself inhumane.

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

#454

Post by binkethy »

skissane wrote: post #431
Terr_ wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

I do not think cognitive capacity is the motivation here: human children are our offspring.

It's simple favoritism of ones offspring, which would seem to be a primary motivator here.

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

#455

Post by int_19h »

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…

I think OP is saying that p-zombies are a pointless thought experiment, because the intended outcome is hardcoded in the premise. If you accept the premise, you ipso facto already believe that consciousness is not necessarily physical, and the experiment doesn't change that. If you reject the premise, then the experiment is nonsensical.

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

#456

Post by binkethy »

Thiez wrote: post #452
User23 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

So then bacteria have souls? And computers will never have one since they're not biological. But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.

I will argue that a self reproduced organism that has organized its own self reproduction over the course of N generations and which metabolizes what inputs it can, defining a niche in the complex web of life != an attempt by one organism to call its tools independent consciousnesses

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

#457

Post by binkethy »

hhshhhhjjjd wrote: post #358
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 Now define a soul! /s

That which animates a living organism. We know the external appearance only. What internal mechanisms may be are yet unknown or undefined.

Some say that an organism is an antenna for a kind of interference pattern in a universal field of consciousness.

We also hear tales of individual souls spanning multiple lifetimes.

I consider this a blackbox.

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

#458

Post by int_19h »

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…

We need smarter automation for Star Trek communism utopia to be feasible.

Having biases or making subtle mistakes is not really desirable, it's just that we haven't figured out how to have something that can reason without those things.

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

#459

Post by binkethy »

I find it odd that computer "science" is in a rush to prove a religious ideology while acting impatient with actual scientific study of consciousness and our extremely limited understanding of it.

There is a palpable rush to bypass actual neuroscience and continue iteration of tech based upon discredited models of neuronal activity, or based upon what the current tech can deliver.

"I am looking for my lost object under the streetlight, not because i lost it under the streetlight, but because its the only place with light, at the moment" comes to mind

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

#460

Post by astrobe_ »

PeterisP wrote: post #310
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 usefu…

Interesting take. This reminds me of Blade Runner, which, I read, takes place in 2019.
Post reply on HN