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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

#261

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

jpt4 wrote: post #258
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, let me rewrite it: > Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen? > Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you have links to written work from them? Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound like you've been perusing…

At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more rigorously defend his position, but doing so respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome, demanding multiple links. The proposed revision…

Communication is about being understood. Not about crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for you_, and it might be completely lost on many people, some perhaps even more intelligent than you.

The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure, but the subtext of your comment is "I opened a thesaurus and tried to seem smart", which is why this conversation derailed here. You can't ignore the subtext to craft a mathematically perfect sentence..

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

#262

Post by Scarblac »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #182
thriftwy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changes when they are known? I believr it affects yout consciousness, not the one being simulated. The latter does not have "I'm being actually simulated" input

"Actually simulated" is such an oxymoron. So which is it? Is the consciousness actual, simulated, or actually simulated? And does the resulting state of mind change the universe, or merely reveal its hidden structure? It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem is, logic is not all of creation. Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confuse…

> Consciousness requires a soul

What's a soul? How can you possibly know that's what's required?

Maybe it requires a blerpqu.

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

#263

Post by Scarblac »

amenhotep wrote: post #136
lumb63 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…

You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

It doesn't need to be solipsism - for instance, maybe half of us are conscious.

But if we can't even know that, if we don't even have a test to see whether some human or animal is conscious or not, how can we start trying to figure out what makes them conscious? It seems it's impossible to get to something falsifiable without such a test.

Like, you say a rock isn't conscious. But what about a sponge? An amoeba? How can you answer that if you can only guess answer whether your neighbour is?

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

#264

Post by cscurmudgeon »

jpt4 wrote: post #174
tomhoward wrote: post #11

I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. (To be clear, I’m not here to argue about the topic or try to persuade anyone of any position – that’s a waste of everyone’s time). I recommend seeking out discussions involving: - Federico Faggin: inventor of silico…

Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?

There are tons of written books and journals on this topic.

My favorite:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shadows-of-the-mind-...

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

#265

Post by naasking »

card_zero wrote: post #250
naasking wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to Google and read those thought experiments to see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give good reasons. We have mechanistic explanations for all of those organs, and even if we lack some explanation, we know one is possible in principle. They argue this isn't the case for consciousness.

OK. Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly the same way as normal people, including internally, but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to find that conscious experience is something non-physical - or else the p-zombies don't really do what they're claimed to do, which is to react identically to everyone else. There's a dubious implicatio…

> 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 limit of factual knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be able to infer the experience of red before actually observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then you're admitting the existence of first person subjective facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person facts, not even in theory.

Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these challenges.

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

#266

Post by Scarblac »

tsimionescu wrote: post #75
lumb63 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to…

I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is, > Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you…

Bit it's useless,its circular. The definition must have something to do with the experience of qualia, that's the hard to explain part.

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

#267

Post by joeyo »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #101
Zambyte wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in humans, it is something we learn as we grow.

I don't see how we can learn to experience qualia. If the author means self awareness instead of consciousness that would make more sense.

I think language acquisition provides a pretty compelling example of learning affecting the experience of qualia. When someone is learning to speak a foreign language, there is often an period where certain sounds are difficult for the learner to produce, because those sounds are not present or are not distinguished in the learner's native tongue. For example, the R and L sounds of English are tricky for a native Japanese speaker.

A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel sounds, I would argue, is because the learner literally cannot hear the differences at first. It's only after learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that production of the new sounds becomes possible.

One can think of other similar examples in the context of expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.

If you buy this argument, that learning can affect perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine how qualia itself might also be learned ex nihilo.

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

#268

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

Jevon23 wrote: post #243
jpt4 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?

Video is not the standard medium of communication in academic philosophy. I imagine the GP mentioned youtube because most people are more likely to watch a video than read a paper. Bernardo Kastrup has a bunch of essays/books up for free at his website https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html?m=1

Or GP himself watches these videos. And I would push back on the claim that most posters here are more likely to watch a Youtube video than read an article.

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

#269

Post by verisimi »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #253
jpt4 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reply is an attempt to address the original comment with precision. To diagram its intended meaning: > alternative theories of consciousness "Any body of academic thought" [I accede the scientific legitimacy of the domain of discourse, rather than dismissing it.] > know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic. "whose paradigmatic communication medium" [This is the beginning of my challenge to the Or…

OK, let me rewrite it: > Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen? > Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you have links to written work from them? Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound like you've been perusing…

But you're using the word 'perusing'....!! Who's swallowed the dictionary now, huh?

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

#270

Post by Der_Einzige »

telmo wrote: post #192
everdrive wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do actually fit the definition. Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose definition which is collo…

> Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels who spent his life thinking about such topics: "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted." It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced. It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.

That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is synonymous with objectivity at all!

Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.

LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting their own existence. That's not thought!

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