Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image

What your post sort of hints is what's known as the hard problem of consciousness. I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on it and qualia if you're interested.

Suffice it to say, given our current understanding of physics, we are no better than finite state automata (see the Bekenstein Bound). The only escape from this inevitability is if we collectively decide that the hard problem of consciousness is irreducible, and then something like panpsychism becomes preferable.

This is unlikely though, and we've been through this once before in the debate over how living matter differs from non-living matter. Must there be some "secret sauce" added to non-living matter to bring it to life? This was the proposal of vitalism, but eventually biology came to prominence and all of those who insisted living matter had to be different just died off and we were left once again with a reducible, mechanistic understanding of living matter. So it will be with consciousness (see [1] for an example of how this might work).

[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

You are basing your skepticism top-down based on the results the science of artificial intelligence has shown to date.

It's a fair source of skepticism. There are 15,000+ species of just mammals, all of which have neural nets and exactly one of which have higher abstract reasoning communicated in a language with very strong innate grammatical rules - and that is humans.

However, we have 7 billion working specimens, a huge digital corpus of their cultural output, and their complete digitized source code which can be explored or modified biologically.

For me bottom-up wins. We can just try things until it works - which may be sudden/overnight.

At the moment I see a jet engine, feathers flying everywhere, and no flight. But looking at that jet engine, I just can't imagine it will take long.

In your phrasing, it seems that you would assume this following sentence does not contain a contradiction.

> Alice in the year 23,435,342,435.03453725 correctly deduced all laws governing her Universe and through a clever mathematical trick was able to correctly deduce the state of the universe in the year 24,535,342,450.03453725 (15 years later, i.e. '50 instead of '35), which a mathematical trick allowed her to predict with absolute precision without having to model the entire Universe. Having deduced the correct set of laws, she knew for certain that that state at '50 would include x, let's say atom #349388747374123454984598323423 in that Universe must be a hydrogen atom. She knew this with certainty, because she had deduced the laws governing her Universe and that they could not be any other set of laws. The laws were also deterministic. She was also correct in her calculations. Therefore, since she made no mistake in her calculations, had deduced the correct set of laws which was actually running the Universe, she was correct that atom number #349388747374123454984598323423 would be a hydrogen atom. One thing to note however, is that the whole universe happened to have an "if year ==24,535,342,449 then all atoms turn into nitrogen atoms wherever they may be" which someone had added to the source code as part of an experiment. Therefore, although she had correctly deduced that atom #349388747374123454984598323423 in the year '50 would be a hydrogen atom, in fact when that year rolled around it was not one. That doesn't stop her deduction from being correct and proper, or mean that she had not deduced the laws with certitude or been correct. In effect, it is possible fro me to say with complete and justified certitude that "next year x" as long as I have completely rigorously deducted it, and I will be correct in my rigorous deduction and in thinking that I have 100% chance of being right, even if next year not x."

you see my struggle?

For me, if you "deduce" that something "must" be exactly some way, you can't possibly have been right in your deduction if it turns out that you are wrong.

Nobody can deduce that Pi cannot equal 4, if, in fact, there is any chance that it is indeed 4 (under that axiomatic system). That's not a deduction: it's a logical fallacy.

so you are you using an extremely different definition of "deduction" as I am. I can deduce that within standard axiomatic mathematics, Pi is not equal to 4. After making that correct deduction, there is no conceivable Universe in which I am wrong. (Seriously - it's not possible that in another universe someone exploring ZFC+ would find that Pi is four there.)

Held to such rigor, there is nothing that I can deduce with certainty about the laws that govern our Universe - so that it is impossible that some other laws or a larger set of laws might in fact govern it.

However, that is exactly the state that I wanted to assume as axiomatic for my argument. (I wanted you to assume as axiomatic that the complete set of laws or source code could be 'deduced' and as guaranteed to be correct as we have a guarantee that under ZFC+ pi isn't equal to 4.)

if we knew that "these 100 megabytes exactly model our Universe, and by the way deterministically - if you run it on enough hardware to simulate a hundred billion galaxies with a hundred billion stars, one of them has a human around year 12 billion" and we are guaranteed that it is exactly the laws of our universe with the same certitude that we are guaranteed Pi isn't equal to 4 under ZFC+ -- well --- that is not the level of certitude that Physics is able to confer :)