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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

#541

Post by strogonoff »

int_19h wrote: post #445
strogonoff wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A philosophical framework in which creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic materialism. Of course, it’s not the only framework available. Among the modern takes, Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an interesting one that appears to align…

> However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a “true” artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie). Coincidentally, this is why I'm generally wary of this line of thinking. It does remind me of Descartes, who was arguing that animals couldn't "really" feel pain (and thus e.g. vivisection is perfectly ethical): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%…

I may believe that an animal (or indeed another person) has consciousness and can suffer because they are sufficiently similar to me in how they came about to exist, but also not believe that about a constructed entity that lacks any such similarities, regardless of what it outputs—those two views are not in conflict.

I do share your worry that rejecting the latter can lead to rejecting the former in some cases, however.

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

#542

Post by [deleted] »

belter wrote: post #114
Zambyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in humans, it is something we learn as we grow.

That is particularly interesting specially in the context of the ways we know the human brain works. For example in Automatic writing, patients with neurological damage, can write coherent text without conscious awareness of the content. Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the words. And finally...who never, when particularly tired or worried with…

[deleted]

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

#544

Post by nearbuy »

card_zero wrote: post #449
naasking wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Much though I'd be interested in Daniel Dennett's responses, I don't think you understood mine. I'm saying: Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically. If you want to sweep this aside with a magic gesture, and assert that she does somehow have all the facts (alright, all the objective third person facts), you are also making the science, communica…

But like the brain, language is Turing-complete. Any information Mary's brain can figure out can also be described in language. If the brain could deduce something that couldn't be described with math and language, it would be doing something outside of our current understanding of physics.

You could respond that even though computability theory tell us it's possible to describe in language, the description would be far too long and complicated for Mary to understand. But I think that misses the thrust of the thought experiment. Even if we imagine Mary being so smart that she could understand and absorb the full written description of the color red, it still doesn't seem like that should be the same as experiencing seeing red. Most people's intuition would be that internal experiences are categorically different than facts.

And also, intuitively, the experience of the color red doesn't seem complex. The dumbest person on Earth can easily experience it, as can a newborn baby with no knowledge to draw on (I guess assuming newborns are sentient). Even a honey bee may be able to experience it. It's such a simple thing that it seems weird to think it's theoretically possible to describe with language, but the description is too complex for humans to understand.

It fundamentally feels weird to think that any combinations of words could ever be the same as experiencing the color.

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

#545

Post by chr1 »

mekoka wrote: post #397
chr1 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation. This second approach have turned…

> Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is be…

> What exactly has it yielded?

All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.

There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation.

Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain.

> since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.

Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.

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

#546

Post by [deleted] »

chr1 wrote: post #375
mekoka wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness. Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and doe…

Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation. This second approach have turned…

[deleted]

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

#547

Post by strogonoff »

chr1 wrote: post #545
mekoka wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way. It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is be…

> What exactly has it yielded? All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that c…

> All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.

False. Natural philosophy of Aristotle et al., a precursor to both modern physics and Abrahamic religions[0], does not[1] assume materialism in the slightest.

> I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.

Please define or qualify “useful”. Useful how and for whom?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Soul

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

#548

Post by strogonoff »

Thiez wrote: post #481
strogonoff wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poorl…

> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers

Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer.

> Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.

It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.

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

#549

Post by naasking »

anon84873628 wrote: post #450
naasking wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people are capable of convincing themselves of all kinds of nonsense. The kind of ontological emergence you would require in such a model of qualia is still of a completely different kind than any other kind of emergence, and so still requires extending the ontology of basic physicalism. There seems to be very little motivation to do so at this point. Let's not repeat the mistakes of vitalism.

That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others. Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up. Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechani…

> That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others.

It's not a value judgment to point out that objective third person facts can logically entail other objective third person facts, but cannot logically entail subjective first person facts as with qualia. That's the whole point of the hard problem. All forms of ontological emergence we've actually seen are the first sort of entailment, but to accept and explain qualia with ontological emergence, you need to accept the second kind of emergence, which is a whole new thing we've never seen and we're supposed to accept it only for consciousness because we have such a hard time accepting that our perceptions on this could be flawed. It's simply more plausible that we're mistaken about subjective first person facts IMO.

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

#550

Post by naasking »

card_zero wrote: post #449
naasking wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Much though I'd be interested in Daniel Dennett's responses, I don't think you understood mine. I'm saying: Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically. If you want to sweep this aside with a magic gesture, and assert that she does somehow have all the facts (alright, all the objective third person facts), you are also making the science, communica…

> Mary doesn't have all of the objective third person facts, only the ones that can be conveyed to her academically.

The premise of the argument is that Mary has all of the facts, and you can even imagine that she has a super powerful computer accessible to her to perform any calculations needed. The goal is to point out that it still seems implausible that Mary could infer knowledge of the experience of redness despite having an unbounded set of dry facts about physics and biology, because to most people, qualitative experience seems like knowledge of a different kind.

That said, you're sort of on the path towards Dennett's response.

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