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Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#131

Post by coffeeaddicted »

nev wrote: post #25

Try this thought experiment. Imagine there was a replicator that could take an exact copy of your current atom states and replicate them somewhere else while keeping you perfectly intact. Doesn't have to be physical - could be replicated by a computer program. Now here's the thing - you would still feel like you, looking out of your eyes. The other versions of you would be distinctly separate to you - not you. That b…

Imagine your replicate is put in a world without oxygen. It would very fast feel rather different from you despite being identical. You assume consciousness is an inside state which can be copied. But it could as well be a process in constant need of an external influence which might refuse to connect to your replica. Like the difference between standing and flowing water - watched only in one instant they might seem identical. And while the solution would certainly be to copy the world as well, as long as we can't define consciousness we can't really say for sure how much we would have to replicate.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#132

Post by CamperBob »

bufordtwain wrote: post #67

Personally, I do not think a machine will ever be conscious. Machines will always be as dumb as a box of rocks and will need to be told what to do. A machine follows rules - maybe complicated rules, but rules nonetheless. I cannot conceive of a situation where a machine that has been programmed to listen and talk hears a person in the room pass gas and spontaneously laughs as humans do (unless it has been programmed…

Machines will always be as dumb as a box of rocks and will need to be told what to do.

Oh, right, as opposed to most people.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#133

Post by chris11 »

drcode wrote: post #7

I am dead certain that it would NOT be possible to achieve consciousness in a computer program. On the other hand, I know if I ever had to debate this question with Daniel Dennett or Eliezer Yudkowsky or any other capable person who believes there's nothing special about "consciousness" I would lose the debate. Attributing a special meaning to consciousness, on the surface, is just as illogical as believing in religi…

I agree with you in that consciousness does really see ill defined. But I don't think that would stop a computer program from achieving consciousness.

Even with consciousness being so ill defined I'd say that there are a few points that we can agree on. For one, even if peoples definitions and expectations of consciousness differ, we can all find examples of life that we agree are conscious.

The boundary may be really fuzzy. We might disagree whether animals are conscious or brain-dead/comatose are conscious. But we could probably find a case that we agreed on.

And once we assume that I would ask you whether a computer program would ever be able to pass the Turing test and convince us that it was conscious. If a computer program would be able to pass I'd argue that it was conscious, since consciousness seems to me to be totally subjectively defined.

If you say that a program would not be able to pass, I might agree with you intuitively, but I would question it intellectually. Because I've always believed that there are cases that are definitely perceived as conscious by other people. I would be shocked if someone truly believed that the person next to me is somehow not conscious. So the next question I would ask is whether consciousness resides and arises from something that can be explained scientifically. Or to put it simply: Can we describe,now or in the future, the workings of the brain? If so, I really don't think we would need a scientific explanation for any epiphenomenon such as consciousness, all we would need to is recreate those initial conditions and we should be able to mimic consciousness.

If you say that we won't be able to mimic the workings of the human brain I'd simply say that you are making the statement that there is physical phenomena that can never ever be explained by science.

If you say that even if we recreate a human brain, we will never mimic consciousness, then I'd reply that you are saying that my personal definition of consciousness not affected and defined by other peoples definition of consciousness.

I think that might be why you see an inconsistency between attributing a special meaning to consciousness and and religion. We instinctively act like the human race can find common ground on the definition of consciousness. We don't instinctively act like we can find common ground on religious beliefs.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#134

Post by chris11 »

elduderino wrote: post #54

If you define humans as machines - automated creatures based on input and output, then yes. However there is this thing called qualia (aka subjective experience) that I believe is very real. Machines are not capable of this. All of the AI today is based on complex algorithms with an input output model. There is nothing subjective going on inside.

I believe that qualia arises out of specific, physical, quantifiable conditions. And so I think that would imply that machines can experience qualia as long as the initial conditions are there.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#135

Post by rjurney »

joubert wrote: post #79
viraptor wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we know how to get the effects of evolution... on steroids: unsupervised, feedback/effect based learning (generic algorithms, NNs, etc.) We can already generate big enough NNs that we can understand them in general (some areas get "specialised" in some way and more active in some conditions), and we know that the result is what we expect - but there's no way someone will take a look at the weights / resulting mod…

Evolution does not have a goal in mind.

No, but it is driven by external pressures, which we could apply to artificial consciousness by hacking it :) Ok, artificial selection - but no reason we couldn't game it to be genetic.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#136

Post by rjurney »

nwatson wrote: post #53
Mentat_Enki wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able t…

humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance.

My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#137

Post by nico »

dkasper wrote: post #93
nwatson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance.

There's no way to prove we're unique in the universe. At most you could say the known universe, but even then you're going to have a hard time convincing people of that.

At most you could say the known universe

Known to who? I don't like this very self-referencing way of thinking. Very similar to the discovery of America... people were already in America way before Columbus came and "discovered" it. (although apparently he didn't even realize he hadn't arrived to India)

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#138

Post by coffeeaddicted »

byoung2 wrote: post #9

which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it? I don't know if hardware is holding back progress in AI, especially with distributed computing; it is more likely a question of software and programming. I think in order for a computer to exhibit a reasonable facsimile of human intelligence, it will have to do more than just run programs written by humans. It would have to have the ability to write and rewr…

Hardware is holding back progress in AI. Well, I can only speak for game AI, but given that game AI even has to work with simpler worlds and can fake many things I suppose it's not much different in other AI areas. And game AI programming is a lot about programming against the limited available resources. You mention for example the ability to rewrite own code, but what you think about might be more about unsupervised learning in general. I occasionally did experiments in that area - and so far always stopped them after a while due to lack of processing power. I don't say that there isn't also a need to improve the software side, but missing processing power was at least so far the thing that was always blocking me more.

Just to give you one example. Think of bots in shooters. Humans have no problem browsing the whole screen in realtime and evaluating the data. But try even just doing the simplest image processing in realtime with a typical resolution and you will already find out how hard that is. So bots can't do that. Instead they cheat and shoot a few single visibility lines and even those are already targeted because bots can know where opponents are and so they only do for example linechecks to certain areas like head, body, arm, legs and try to find out if that line is blocked. And even that might already be too slow with many opponents so you have reduce it further and shoot only a certain number of lines each frame. And there is no processing yet - this is only about getting the simple information of - is there something or not. This is how slow computers still are. You could certainly do a little more with giving a single bot the whole processing power of your computer, but with the increasing complexity of game worlds the needed processing power grows rather fast (current addition of simple solid-body physics in games makes AI programming already way harder). For AI tasks computers are still very slow.

Re: Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

#140

Post by kalid »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #129
kevinpet wrote: post #8

If we assume that humans are conscious, then yes, it is possible for a machine to be conscious. The only arguments categorically differentiating humans from electronic machines are religious in nature. I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing…

About those economic forces - I'm betting on games to get there first. With Creatures and Sims there have been already two examples that the public is absolutely keen on getting software that features lifelike behaviour. And the wide distribution of games also means that games can get access to a lot of distributed processing power beating even supercomputers. Also game AI programmers are probably the one with the mo…

That brings up interesting ethical issues -- could you play a FPS game knowing the bad guys were 'conscious'?
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