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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

#501

Post by mistermann »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #216
mistermann wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are declaring it to be a fact that science is flawless. Defining something to be true by definition can certainly cause it to be appear to be true (read some forum discussions among even smart people on the internet if you do not believe this), but it doesn't guarantee that it will be.

I have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm not sure how you're getting "science is flawless" from what I said, or what that's supposed to mean.

You said that science does not behave like a religion at all (zero faith based thinking, as just one example).

You also said: "If reality changes science will adapt". If this is not essentially a claim that science ~"understands reality", then what is it claiming?

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

#502

Post by anon291 »

CooCooCaCha wrote: post #343
tomrod wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is adaptable to reality -- therefore, it reflects reality as it is presented. Esoteric arguments portraying an ineffable, unobservable stream of will that never interacts with reality is not observable by definition; since it doesn't interact with reality, it can be safely ignored. Roko's basilisk be damned!

I think some people think science rejects mystical explanations because science is rigid and stubborn and has it's head buried in the sand. But no, it's because there's no proof. If we had evidence that something mystical was happening then it would be a huge breakthrough and it would eventually become science.

And that would not be me, because at no point did I say we needed a 'mystical' explanation. I'm just pointing out the universe is not always predictable, but -- just as it did many years ago -- this often causes a lot of distress, especially on pop science forums.

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

#503

Post by User23 »

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.

> So then bacteria have souls?

Yes.

Plants, fungi, and everything else that's alive also have souls. In fact the term medical "vegetative state" is using Aristotelian vocabulary. Obviously it's not saying the patient has acquired chloroplasts.

> And computers will never have one since they're not biological.

That depends. Can a computing device come alive? Inanimate matter evidently somehow came alive at least once so I don't see how we can rule it out.

> But also there doesn't seem to be a relationship between souls and consciousness, so they are irrelevant.

So far as I know everything that we've verified to have consciousness is alive and thus has a soul. I'm very interested in any counter-examples if you have any to offer though.

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

#504

Post by ben_w »

vidarh wrote: post #436
ben_w wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trustwo…

> 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.

Not so, for it is like the liar's paradox, except with high probabilities rather than Boolean logic.

If you assume it is true, it follows that you can't trust your own state of mind, and that all statements including "I am just a thought" become suspect, as there is nothing leading up to them to give them justification.

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

#505

Post by anon291 »

IshKebab wrote: post #448
anon291 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a Christian belief, Augustine and Aquinas (among others) openly believed animals, plants, even stones, had souls. A lot of mistakes regarding Christian theology is people mistaking something they heard '30 years ago' with a millennia old religion

I didn't mean it was an official position of the Church, just one that a lot of Christians have (or at least had fairly recently). Let's not no-true-Scotsman this.

You brought up Christians, not me. Was it meant as a serious claim, or just casual bigotry?

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

#506

Post by Barrin92 »

int_19h wrote: post #463
Barrin92 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 wh…

>Chinese room, considered as a whole, does understand what it does. The fact that the man inside of it does not is simply irrelevant

Searle does address this point even in the original paper. That argument doesn't hold water because you can imagine taking the whole room and putting it in your head and then you still don't understand Chinese. Or put differently if you're a Mandarin speaker and we two sit in a room and I use you to secretly translate, you understand the meaning of what is being said, I don't and it doesn't mean anything to say we "as a system do".

The point is that even though we can "as a system" behave as if we speak Mandarin, there's a difference between you and me. You understand what you're talking about, and I just hear gibberish. Searle is a die-hard materialist by the way, nothing of that violates materialism. What he isn't is a functionalist. What he is teasing out in the thought experiment is that a system that produces the same output as nother system does not need to be equivalent on the inside.

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

#507

Post by silver_silver »

Thiez wrote: post #470
silver_silver wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That’s fair, we can’t even prove humans aren’t like you say - although the brain is vastly more complex than a neural network analogy lets on. I suppose once these models become sophisticated enough we’ll have to treat them as conscious until it can be proven one way or another.

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

#508

Post by vidarh »

ben_w wrote: post #504
vidarh wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trustwo…

> 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. Not so, for it is like the liar's paradox, except with high probabilities rather than Boolean logic. If you assume it is true, it follows that you can't trust your own state of mind, and that all statements including "I am just a thought" become suspect, as there is not…

No, it's nothing like that. In the liars paradox, the statement is inherently uncomputable.

In this case the statement is either true or false, and the truth or false of the statement doesn't change anything. Your belief in whether the statement is true or false changes your belief in whether the statement is true or false - there's no basis for assuming that in the general case it would alter the actual truth of the statement (it could, in as much as e.g. you could have a simulation that keeps running as long as you believe you're in an isolated moment, and freezes you and discards the rest the moment you believe time is real).

Now, it is true that you can't trust your own state of mind to truthfully represents a physical reality. That this means you also can't trust your own logic is irrelevant, because irrespective of whether you believe this to be true or false, the absence of any external source of validation of your senses or state of mind or existence in time means the statement must inherently be true irrespective of your trust in your mind.

This claim gives a straightforward condition to falsify it: Find any single source of external validation that does not depend on your senses or observation of it. If you can, then the claim above is false.

Given you absolutely can't, the logical conclusion is that the claim is true.

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

#509

Post by andrewflnr »

zero-sharp wrote: post #487
andrewflnr wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I think I just experienced how much self-deception there is about the world.

This is not actually a proof. It is, however, exactly the kind of soft reasoning that motivates reasonable axioms. I'm not saying it's a bad axiom, I'm saying you should know what you're doing. That way when you run into a domain where it doesn't apply very well, you know where and how to back up and restart.

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

#510

Post by grantcas »

thethimble wrote: post #359
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain. Stated a bit differently: All events must h…

> 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…

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