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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

#551

Post by naasking »

int_19h wrote: post #455
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…

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.

> I think OP is saying that p-zombies are a pointless thought experiment, because the intended outcome is hardcoded in the premise

Yes and no. The point is to actually test your intuitions around the premise and the conclusion that must follow, to clarify your own thinking around the intuitive plausibility of the conclusions and premises, hence why these are called intuition pumps. They don't prove anything definitively unless you have intuitions around consciousness that agree/disagree with the premises, but you don't necessarily fully understand your own intuitions until you think about this problem.

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

#552

Post by xvector »

jodrellblank wrote: post #477
thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume that the replacements are perfect replicas from the outside, only the inside is different. Why would it not work? The examples you listed are current technologies that don't remotely approach the primary nor secondary functions of the originals.

> " Why would it not work? " As a thought experiment I'll go with "atom by atom replacement would still be you". But I won't easily go with "therefore we modern humans could actually do it in reality, and replace the parts with fakes, and then with simulated fakes, and then extract the simulation to run elsewhere for the uploading part, and even God couldn't tell the difference" just by asserting all those extra bits…

The physical engineering problems may be overcome with time. Billions of neurons - well, arguably you could replace more than one at a time, up to the largest "functional group" or threshold that doesn't comprise you.

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

#553

Post by xvector »

jodrellblank wrote: post #474
xvector wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I don't really care if I get a human brain or not as long as I stay conscious. I – and I'd wager most people – would be fine with some level of alteration to their being if it meant they wouldn't literally die , and that they would get to spend some more time with their loved ones. Change is a part of life, and this would just be another one.

It's arguable that you would literally die and be replaced by a machine-puppet pretending to be you; see the short story about that I linked in another comment in this thread exploring this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40407969 There is no technology I can see which would convince me that a mechanical replacement hand was my hand and my hand was not literally dead. Only Prof. Michael Levin's work of re…

That's pretty cool! At the same time, I think I would take the risk if I was on my way out anyways.

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

#554

Post by moi2388 »

davnicwil wrote: post #256
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not even that if it uses a different character set, unless you're doing photocopies). Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign lan…

As a tangent on this, it'd be such an interesting experiment to see how far one could go in deciphering/understanding a new language and attempting to write a new book in that language based on the content of a single, probably fairly long, book. It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I doubt it's ever been tried. Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from limited, fragmented sources is…

Of course you can. When the brits first met the Chinese, the Chinese didn’t speak a word of English and the British not a word of Chinese.

The Chinese room thought experiment is flawed; this is exactly how we learn languages!

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

#555

Post by nulld3v »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #527
nulld3v wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that's the thing right? First hand accounts alone are not worth much in my mind, especially since there are so many other first hand accounts of different religions. Who am I to believe? Generally, I follow the "don't trust, verify" approach for first hand accounts. I don't believe something is true, even if 1000 people tell me the same thing. I think this is a reasonable approach, especially in today's age of m…

> not worth much Interesting change of tone. Now it's already worth something , just not much . But previously you wrote: > there is just no evidence (or at least I haven't seen any) ... personal experience is also valid evidence, and I have seen none of that either. You went from total denial to already assigning worth. This isn't "today's age of misinformation" stuff, by the way. These are literally thousands of ye…

Yeah, sorry for the inconsistency there. I didn't consider that personal anecdotes and hearsay are technically evidence as evidence is literally anything that supports a conclusion.

It is however, a good indicator for how little I value those two forms of evidence however.

My point with "today's age of misinformation" is not really that there is more misinformation these days. That may be true, but it could also just be that we have access to a higher volume of information. It's more that we are more aware of misinformation, and can develop habits + tools to deal with misinformation.

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

#556

Post by chr1 »

strogonoff wrote: post #547
chr1 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

"Useful" were the things that have allowed us to create new technologies: from internet to medicine to rockets. Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything, it did not even make any measurable impact.

Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.

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

#557

Post by grantcas »

skissane wrote: post #369
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…

> Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. 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). I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs b…

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

#558

Post by grantcas »

rl3 wrote: post #373
skissane wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted human rights. 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). I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs b…

> I think in practice, it will depend on how AIs behave. If an AI forms relationships with humans which humans experience as emotionally significant, and in which it displays individuality and autonomy, humans will begin thinking of it as a real "person", and want to endow it with the rights of a person. I can't help but feel that describes our relationship with animals we consider pets, albeit less so the individual…

[dead]

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

#559

Post by int_19h »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #532
int_19h wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but again, it doesn't mean that "integers can be conscious". It means that a sequence of changing integers can be.

Any sequence is also an integer. Don’t forget how large the number line is ;)

I get your point, but you still need a time arrow to say that something is conscious. Sure, you can e.g. encode all the states of the system over time and represent it as one big-ass integer, but at that point the most that you could say is that what the integer describes was conscious.

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

#560

Post by int_19h »

Barrin92 wrote: post #526
int_19h wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still nonsense. If you take the whole room as a system and integrate it into your brain as a subsystem, then yes, you will understand Chinese. The reason why we have to speak of the room and the person inside as a system is because the real magic is in the instructions. The fact that they are performed by a self-aware human is completely irrelevant to the setup and is only there to confuse the matter. In your…

>The fact that they are performed by a self-aware human is completely irrelevant to the setup Granted, but we can easily create a more clear example that addresses both of your objections, right? Say in the room is a colorblind person with a machine that detects properties of color. If someone now asks you questions about colored objects you can answer them, but I assume you grant that neither the colorblind person,…

> If someone now asks you questions about colored objects you can answer them, but I assume you grant that neither the colorblind person, nor the machine, nor the two as a system have conscious experiences of color vision as you have.

It really depends on the setup. If the system is primed with knowledge of what color various things are (so e.g. it can say that grass is green because it is in the knowledge base), then, no, it does not experience color vision. It's just regurgitating facts.

On the other hand, if you actually have some kind of sensor that is capable of perceiving color, and you provide the output of that sensor to the colorblind person inside the room, who interprets the signals (say, represented as numbers) according to the rules, and those rules result in the system as a whole being able to say things like "apple is red" when presented with a red apple, then yes, I would in fact argue that the system does consciously experience color vision.

> And I don't think your assertion about Searle's belief is correct.

Searle claimed that computers "merely" use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no "understanding" of semantics, and that Chinese room demonstrates that this is not sufficient for consciousness. This was not just about correctly modelling outward functions, though - quite obviously, the room has a lot going on inside, and of course you can model neural nets without physically simulating neurons, either. Quite frankly Searle's attempt to make some kind of qualitative distinction between biology and computation is nonsensical, because it's the same physics all the way down, and it is all representable as computation.

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