151–160 of 189 posts
Read more about the weak and strong AI theories to understand what I mean.
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…
What if as Julian Jaynes says consciousness is a social creation rather than a biological one? Machine social interaction would be tremendously different and could be incapable of sustaining consciousness.
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…
There is one nonreligious factor that significantly differentiates humans from machines: that humans evolved, while machines were built by humans. There's an argument to be made that humans cannot understand consciousness well enough to build it, because consciousness is our only tool for doing that. Of course, this only applies to intentional creation of consciousness. It says nothing about the distinct possibility…
The design of machines evolves all the time.
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.
My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with.
This tendency towards oversimplifying the unknown seems to be fundamental to the way we think and it runs through the history of human speculation. Consistently, our beautifully unified theories about gods and ether and magic are replaced by the messy, complicated realities of physics, math and biology.
One of these beautiful unified theories which we are having a particularly hard time letting go of is the idea of "consciousness", alleged to be a single remarkable quality of some sort which is both essential and unique to the mind. That vague description is as close as you will come to a consensus on the definition of consciousness, and it still won't please everybody. Despite there being no agreement on what the word actually means, nearly everyone is nonetheless quite sure that whatever it is does exist and needs explaining.
In the time when the brain was utterly baffling, before we knew about neurons or brain anatomy, the model of the mind based around consciousness was at least reasonable. But now we know essentially how neurons work, how they can grow into complex useful systems, and the staggering quantity of them that make up a single mind. We have managed to isolate many aspects of human thought to particular areas of the brain. We've observed people functioning without certain fundamental faculties when parts of their brain are damaged, faculties which we would have intuitively considered indivisible from the mind as a whole, but which we are now forced to consider handy peripherals which we could do without, if need be.
As the gap between our intuitive understanding of the mind and our scientific understanding grows ever smaller, as we explain one faculty after another, cleaving them from the plausible kernel of the mind, and as the operative definition of "consciousness" continues to vary wildly from one navel gazing philosophy major to another, sharing nothing in common but the spelling, its career as a thought provoking topic of conversation nears its end, to be followed by its retirement to a quaint artifact of our ignorant past.
Some things a machine will never be able to: - spontaneously ask itself where it is coming from - spontaneously ask itself what it will become after its own destruction - having spontaneous thoughts - having free will Why do I say spontaneous? Because our thoughts aren't coming from our mind, but from our soul (that is, from the principle of life, which is invisible by nature). Come on, these are all obvious things;…
But we do all those things and we are machines. Biological machines, yes, but still machines.
Who did convince you of that? Science?
Science is only science, science very often is wrong, and has to correct itself, sometimes decades, or even centuries later.
I know that I'm not a biological machine. I know that there's a voice inside myself that asks many many more questions than any science will ever be able to answer.
Now, where do these questions come from? Certainly not from my brain. My brain is not able to ask questions beyond its own capabilities.
So, let me repeat the initial question: are you a biological machine, and nothing more?
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.
My peeps, it is not necessary to give negative karma for someone expressing an honest and inoffensive opinion you don't agree with.
He/She's allowed to have such an opinion, but this discussion is trying for a particular feel and that isn't contributing helpfully to it.
I look at consciousness fairly oddly: I believe consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system; it is simply the nature of the universe that complex systems exhibit consciousness. I'm defining "complex system" as any system whose outputs/results affect the inputs/possible states. If I think something, the possibility space for my next thought is dependent upon my previous thought, and so on. I think artifi…
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…
If true machine consciousness is possible, it's a lot further off than we would like to think.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A computer-based consciousness would also be a result of evolution (albeit in a different way than things we know usually) being the byproduct of something that an evolved species created to help itself adapt. Sometimes, when I'm getting overlogical, I see machine intelligence as being pretty much our destiny (i.e. that singularity thing) and that organic life may be very much obsolete once it gets into its own. As o…
Evolution is not directed by a consciousness, so you cannot loosely use the term "evolution" to describe the DEVELOPMENT of computer-based consciousness. ADDED: but yes, extended phenotype and all that jazz.