"When I saw this animation I was immediately inspired to write an impressionistic tweet about it"
Maybe we should set the threshold for consciousness a little bit higher
If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
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Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#12I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy.
You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#13I am unable to afford the attention at the moment to assess this argument, that's to its credit. They demonstrate that they are aware of the implications of the varying descriptions of consciousness. Most articles I read on this topic turn it to be crude justifications of a naive ideology. This article is a cut above.
I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#14Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#15Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
Our bodies could just be rocks on a beach, but whatever it is about us that is capable of observing the output of our own internal thinking (preventing us from just being p-zombies) is not contained within the beach.
The "whatever" part, in strict terms, would be information. Jury is still out whether that is a fundamental component of the universe or not: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundame...
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#16And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.
Consciousness could be an emergant property too, of matter arranged in a certain way. Why am I me though? Drives me nuts!
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#17And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.
I mean, we are as much a part of the universe as everything else. We're just dead star matter arranged in specific ways. A part of the universe is objectively conscious.
I have yet another take on that.
Each consciousness is a universe on its own. Matter is just how those universes interact with each other. This is how quantum mechanics work in my idea, each observer affects the matter and quantum effects take most probable outcomes because of that.
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#18And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.
I haven't read the article myself yet as it's big and I haven't got time now, but I will as it looks like it might be very good. However, if you read just the very first paragraph you'll see that's exactly what the author thinks:
> Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#19I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy. You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where…
I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?
Re: If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level
#20Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/ Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious. Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.
Indeed a classic (upvoted!), but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists. Nor do we know whether it's possible to simulate "just" neurons and get meaningful results on some higher level. People have been trying at that for decades, so far without success. (nice overvie…
> but it presupposes that there is a theory of everything that can be used to perfectly simulate the universe, and I'd like to remind everybody that we still don't know whether such a thing exists
Is it even possible that a complete simulation of the rules of this universe (let alone the content of it) could exist in this universe?
I am no expert but I did manage to read most of GEB [0] so I feel fully qualified to say that it feels like something Gödel would have opinions about?
[0] the honest nerd's "did sleep in a Holiday Inn last night"