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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

#461

Post by int_19h »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #232
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…

Positions 1 and 2 are not consistent (all our neural networks are classic)? 1. "emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory " 2. "Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level" 3. consciousness is mystical, otherworldly device A lot of people who oppose 1 and agree with 2 are unfairly lumped with position 3.

Thing is, there's no evidence that "something is going on at a quantum level". Thus there's no particular reason to postulate this (unnecessarily complicated) hypothesis, unless one believes that deterministic mechanicism is philosophically unacceptable when it comes to consciousness.

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

#462

Post by gls2ro »

anon84873628 wrote: post #439
thethimble wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are not able (at least to my current knowledge) to go entirely from inorganic matter to a simple organic cell.

So, to make this so strange to say: while we can procreate organic agents, we cannot yet build them with our hands.

Thus I think we are a bit far away from creating consciousness. Whatever that is.

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

#463

Post by int_19h »

Barrin92 wrote: post #110
gokuldas011011 wrote: post #5

Yes, the beauty of nature is, there is no magic. Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it.

>Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by laws that you can't make it how you want. It's perfectly possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic brains rather than digital computers. I can understand the laws that govern the properties of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't mean I can build it out of jello. That was…

You can simulate the Golden Gate Bridge on a sufficiently powerful computer, though, such that the simulation will behave exactly like the real thing.

Chinese room is a good example of begging the question, since the postulate that "understanding" is somehow distinct from observable behavior of the system implies the outcome. But from a materialist perspective, Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant to the question.

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

#464

Post by int_19h »

anon291 wrote: post #444
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well defined experiment that would not produce the same result consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing s…

> What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? I was thinking photons which, when passed through a diffraction grating one at a time will cause an interference pattern on average but whose individual course is -- as far as we know -- unpredictable. This flies in the face of the idea that the universe is perfectly predictable. > The very machine you are posting your comment from can only be manufactured b…

It is only unpredictable if you confine yourself to a single branch. If you embrace Many Worlds and simulate things accordingly, creating branches as needed, the result of such simulation is consistent and reproducible.

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

#465

Post by gls2ro »

nox101 wrote: post #409
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.

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 consc…

If you think about the bread example, what you do is to follow a very well known recipe even if you don't understand yeast.

In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread

To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste.

And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.

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

#466

Post by int_19h »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #415

My favorite new tidbit is that if you believe Turing machines can result in consciousness, you believe that certain integers are conscious when executed (lambda calculus).

If you believe in that, you're also likely to believe that consciousness is not a static trait but rather a process. Thus integers themselves are not conscious, but a process that produces a sequence of integers may be.

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

#467

Post by astrobe_ »

nprateem wrote: post #416
anon-3988 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The calculator is not human-like, let's figure out how to humanize this! Intelligence comes in a myriad of ways. Mimicking humans will just produce a human, what's the point? I am not even sure a super intelligent "human" is even a good thing. The smartass will probably spend their intelligence betting the stock market.

The point is actual cognition. Without consciousness there can be no understanding which stunts the ability of AI and makes AGI impossible.

That doesn't prove anything, but from an etymology perspective both "conscious" and "cognition" mean "know together". One can easily spot the common "co-" prefix which carries the "together" part, but the main roots derive from different verbs which have respectively the alternative meanings of "distinguish, dissect, split" and "recognize", respectively.

As often, the definition of "recognize" is definitely circular so it seems that it is the "real root" for "knowledge", while "conscious" seems to have an "analysis" flavor.

IMO, "understanding" is synonym to intelligence, and the ability to analyze is one keep part of it (another is the ability to recombine). So it seems that we can agree that "without consciousness there can be no understanding", although we moved away a bit from the common meaning of "conscious".

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

#468

Post by skissane »

Thiez wrote: post #453
skissane wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-cio…

> Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place?

Society runs on faith–that the cruelty and insanity of the world, while undeniable, has its limits. Historically (and even for the majority of the global population today), that faith was most often religious, but it also comes in secular versions – everyone from communists to LGBT activists to the New Atheist movement has a faith that history is "on their side", even if they do not believe in any divine assurance of that. A society in which everyone (or even the clear majority) have given up faith and hope, is a society doomed to wither and die, and be replaced by societies which still retain those things (if there be any other societies retaining that faith left to replace it).

The problem with solipsism, is not that it supposes the world is sometimes cruel and insane, but that it destroys one's faith that said cruelty and insanity has any limits. And without that faith, the continued functioning of society becomes impossible.

Does that have any relevance to the tragic case of a newborn abandoned to starve? They can't constitute a society, so concerns of what beliefs are necessary for society to function aren't relevant to them.

> 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?

If believing that "Mommy loves me and is coming soon" gives comfort to a dying child, and eases (however slightly) the pain of their horrific death, then I would want them to believe it–and if I were them, I would want to believe it too. It is better for a dying child to believe comforting falsehoods than painful truths–truth has no value for them, and falsehoods can do them no harm.

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

#469

Post by Thiez »

umvi wrote: post #389
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This seems like the secular version of "the devil made me do it". We can't be accountable for any of our actions because we are all just molecular machines playing out their predetermined outcome.

Where did GP use this view to argue for the abolishment of the criminal justice system?

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

#470

Post by Thiez »

silver_silver wrote: post #434
EasyMark wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But since we can't yet define consciousness, how do you know the AGI is just 'faking it' instead of being the real deal? What are human brains but a bunch of neurons pretending to be a person?
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