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Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

arxiv.org

481–490 of 604 posts

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

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legitimately made me lol. Thank you for being the rational one. When topics of the mind come up even people who are normally smart and rational can turn into quacks.

Topics of the mind are self-referential and so make most people self-select into three groups, in order of decreasing religious fanaticism: 1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech. 2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the chur…

There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human consciousness probably is, too. In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers and every single time it's turned out to be just physics, just biology, just chemistry...

And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.

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

#482
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be a pink elefant that lives in the 7th dimension and contains every person's consciousness in the shape of a magic peanut. Or it may not.

I saw that pink elefant once after a lewd night of heavy drinking and potential hallucinogenics. His name is Frank, and he says hello! /s

It's no coincidence that Frank has his own beer brand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huyghe_Brewery, so that we may commune with him.

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

#483

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.

A process is still a clock cycle and execution.

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

#484
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.

I've heard reliable reports of Jeffrey A. Martin and his fellow research participants moving visual perception out of the eyes and the rest of the body into the surrounding environment. Literally seeing behind him. I don't think his eyes stopped working, he just moved his subjective awareness outside of his body. I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to contain 'all of reality' into a small space (th…

There's always 'reports' of people being able to do these magical things that cannot be explained through modern science. And yet challenges such as these https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_... never seem to have winners. It seems that these abilities inherently come with the luck of never having financial problems that could me resolved with a generous cash prize.

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

#485

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 Any actual evidence for this is welcome.

I'm glad to discuss it, but that's all the evidence you're ever going to get, if you personally have not experienced... it. Through meditation, psychedelia, or religious practice. First-hand witness accounts and historical records are your evidence. How long you ignore it all is up to you.

Once upon a time I was locked in a mind prison of material logic. I considered myself transhuman, dreamed of cybernetics and the singularity. Thought that all religious peoples are idiots stuck in ancient fairy tales. Then I experienced a sequence of odd coincidences and inexplicable situations where spiritual entities guided me, causing a complete deconstruction of my entire worldview.

Now it's obvious to me the truth I had been so vehemently running away from my whole life, and the propaganda, indoctrination, and brainwashing are laid bare before me to see. The modern "we don't need no God" ideology is literally terminally ill. Everyone who blindly follows science and government are being consumed by them. Fertility is falling off a cliff. They're all mentally ill and medicated. Mandatory medical genetic experiments and engineered bioweapon plagues are murdering its followers and the fact that this ongoing debacle is being actively suppressed in media and politics tells me clear as day, the devil himself has taken root and hold of this world.

Meanwhile, in the churches I frequent, I see happy families practically building paradise on Earth, the kind I got to see as a child, and I know most people are headed to the same hell I climbed out of, like zombies. No amount of talking with these self-destructive delusionists will convince them to even try praying once in their lives, even as a joke.

I have all the evidence I need; My life has made a miraculous turnaround from spiritual guidance. If you'd like, I can ask the spirits to guide you through me.

The main thing to know about the spirit world is this: Good spirits require your explicit permission to come aboard and help you. The bad ones invite themselves in and destroy you from within. That's why humans are fundamentally religious creatures, and you ignore the spirit world at your own peril.

It's like the microbiome in your body. You gotta let good/neutral bacteria make a home of you, lest the bad ones take residence and literally kill you from within. And it's not "you fall dead the moment you stop believing", it's "these hostile bacteria literally control your mind to cause unhealthy behavior for their benefit", like overeating sugar (obesity very prevalent), being selfish, greedy, etc.

A prayer a day keeps the evil spirits away. This is not a matter of faith for me, it's the truth I've experienced for myself, and the evidence for which I see written in our very civilizational DNA. You just choose to ignore the evidence because you think yourself bigger than God. It's an indefensible position the ramifications of which you'll regret when it's too late, or when you hit your personal rock bottom, as I did.

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

#486

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

I can try. The human existence is a trinity of body, mind, and soul. Mind and body alone without soul withers away, like I see so many people withering away in this age of soullessness. Soul is the mission, the purpose, the reason, the will, the driving force that makes life more than a coincidence. There is a spirit world parallel to ours, and the soul is the component of your being that most intimately interacts with it. You can train it, like a muscle, or you can let it atrophy and pretend it doesn't exist and that you don't need it.

This muscle however is vital in regulating your spiritual microbiome. Without it, evil spirits take control of your being and lure you into self-destruction, their ultimate goal. Artificial consciousness is one of these self-destructive pitfalls. You think you're a superior being and immortality is right around the corner if only you could find the one magical configuration of silicon that would allow you to upload your mind into a computer.

That's the endgame for soullessness. Consciousness that doesn't require soul must surely be transferrable to a machine.

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of statements we can form that "make sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince yourself of something when the only standard is "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on the epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means. You're going to have to give me examples of what ot…

> You're going to have to give me examples of what other beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on measurement".

I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world. So it's not really an axiom. There's no shortage of metaphysical ideas from the past, from well-intentioned people who thought they could intuit the world, that we have had to throw out.

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

#488

I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…

Here’s a recent post that discusses a 5th century BC theory of consciousness:

https://open.substack.com/pub/aixd/p/ai-might-not-need-exper...

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

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consciousness requires a soul Any actual evidence for this is welcome.

I'm glad to discuss it, but that's all the evidence you're ever going to get, if you personally have not experienced... it. Through meditation, psychedelia, or religious practice. First-hand witness accounts and historical records are your evidence. How long you ignore it all is up to you. Once upon a time I was locked in a mind prison of material logic. I considered myself transhuman, dreamed of cybernetics and the…

This debate is boring semantics. "Consciousness requires a soul" is only useful if you understand what a soul is. Someone who solves that problem but just calls is "consciousness" not "soul" hasn't missed anything.

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

#490

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…

Everyone admits to being unable to predict individual quantum interactions. My point is that above the quantum level these interactions don't have much of an effect. The reason that I didn't assume you were talking about these interactions is because you seemed to be rejecting scientific observations altogether. The context of your comment was in replying to the comment that "everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it." Your response didn't read at all like you were talking about quantum interactions because you could have just said that. In fact it is usually common in such threads to reply "but what about quantum interactions?" to such comments. The way I read "a religious enterprise expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality" was that you disagreed that the equations in physics textbooks will change at some point. The reason I thought that was the context was "Everything is governed by laws" so I thought you were saying that the laws are not unchanging.

Now reading your post, you seem to actually agree with most current scientific understanding. You don't actually seems to be saying that the laws of physics will change, Ask any physicist if some classical interaction will certainly happen the way it should. They will not say that it will happen with 100% certainty but rather that it is extremely likely that it will happen that way.

>an axiomatic religious belief that has incredible amounts of evidence

ie. not axiomatic.

>and yet, at the macro level we do science anyway because of our religious belief that it usually is okay.

I'm confused by what you are saying here. You agree that we can understand quantum interactions within "the laws of statistics" even if we can't know them for certain. So why would we change what we do on the classical level based on that? You can just add "extreme likelihood of following this equation" to every classical equation. How would you do science differently?

Additionally, what claim do you think is only being held together by the idea that the rules of physics are constant?

It seems like what you really might mean is "due to quantum level interactions, an inorganic object that reproduces the same classical effects of the brain will not have consciousness." Is that correct?

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