Having been one of “those people”, I can assure you that you are very correct.
“Friendliness” is not the purpose of AI, but rather “Influence”, as in money and control.
Friendliness is merely the pretty box in which to package it for sales and further financing.
Again, right on target.
Life is life and dead is dead and never the twain shall meet.
Consciousness is consciousness. Matter (inorganic) is matter. They move in opposite directions. Matter moves toward entropy while life has the capacity to move in the opposite direction.
Life can make things out of dead matter but it cannot make life out of dead matter. Life is simply life or it isn’t.
There’s no reasons why synthetic brains cannot produce consciousness, other than we don’t know how to figure it out yet.
Consciousness itself is so simple, most people miss it.
Agree. It will happen when A-I investigations and brain imaging techniques (fMRI) tell the same story.
I think it will happen when science catches up to philosophy.
Will it? how could we possibly know? We would have to be able to say what and where consciousness is. We cannot do that yet, and I get the feeling that we cannot do that simply because consciousness is nowhere to be found within the context of the physical.
If they can show us what and where it is in the physical then all my theories are wrong. However it would also mean that physical objects ‘contain’ everything we are, and that would make them into a very interesting thing. Objects that understand, feel and can be mental qualia, emotions, concepts, perceptions and visualisations ~ even hallucinations would be real physical things, we could open up the cranium, cut into the brain and look at them lighting up the brain in a mini 3D image [same as with the world we really see]. 
If they cannot show where and what all those mental things are, that would logically mean that building an artificial brain, or even creating an artificial biological brain, would not ‘produce’ consciousness!
Well, it would logically mean that we can't tell whether we have produced consciousness or not.
Ierrellus,
Presumtions are somewhat necessary to get the things going but you are presuming far too ahead, and even without going through the initial steps. And, perhaps you do not realize how much effort and means have been put in creating something like human mind or AI in last some decades.
If metaphysical entitis are not proved to be exist yet, it does not mean that that they could not be done even in the future.
Realize that, given the the world is no more than a global village now, even a vague or very slight evidence would change our whole perception about metaphysics. The whole of scientific populace would start chasing it without losing a second.
And, may i humbly ask that what physical or scientific evidence we have till date that we have emotions?
Can it be proved or shown empirically?
So, should we conclude from this that we do not have emotions either?
And, do not say that we all know it so it must be true. I am asking for solid physical evidence.
with love,
sanjay
That is true.
But remember that we do not have only physical means for investigation and there are some other options too.
This is where we are going wrong.
What we are doing trying to prove the existence of a smell by seeing through the eyes and concluding that; As the smell is not visible to the eyes thus it does not exist.
The right approach would be to investige the smell through nose, not eyes.
In the same way, we have to use our mind to experience metaphysical entities, not any physical instruments.
Or, In that case, their argument also may be that consciousness cannot produced because it is an imaginary or fake concept, instead of reality.
with love,
sanjay
Uccisore
True, but given that we do have consciousness, then the implications of my previous two posts remain true also. We simply don’t see it if we observe only from the physical perspective.
zinnat13
True, but we experience it, it is our first reality and the one by which all others are observed. To say there is no consciousness would mean thought is entirely informational and hence that there is nothing experiencing it.
I know arguments like this can go round in circles for ever, but at some point we have to admit the reality of a thing merely because it is repeatable ~ and we all experience consciousness, hence it is being repeated. We have to accept science on a similar basis, so I don’t really get the problem with admitting that there is consciousness. As most scientist and philosophers would concur then i’d rather keep to the argument that they have to show it is in the physical, or else consciousness is something other than physical.
Imho we don’t smell, hear, touch or see anything with the physical senses, they merely inform the comparative aspect of mind. The mind does have mental information and that all informations can communicate &/or correlate with one another. This is why we associate our thoughts with sensory info, ~ its a bit like a hand-in-glove thing, the informations would naturally be the same experience such that the mental info knows the physical info i.e. that they are in the same place reading one another – so to say.
_
Zinn,
If your brain has a limbic sytem, you probably have emotions. See Paul McLean on the limbic system in almost any “brain” book. EG, Carl Sagan’s “The Dragons of Eden”.
“Emotions are nerve activated”–Antonio Damasio, “The Feeling of What Happens”.
The problem that remains is can subjective, qualitative experiences be expressed objectively (Quantatively)?
This statement has no logical validity whatsoever.
Only if the previous statements were logically valid, which this one is not. Therefore you cannot assert any degree of truth.
Since none of you seem to even know what consciousness is, this has been an absurd argument.
I feel slightly frustrated because everybody seems to understand the OP, while I don’t.
I chose not to discuss the possible meanings of consciousness. However while question 1 can be dealt with respect to self-consciousness alone, the others appear related to something different, where the notion of conscience seemingly implies memories too, as well as other characters that may arguably be attributed to mind. Although that is quite important in this debate, I do not want to talk about semantics.
Wikipedia reports that a though experiment «considers some hypothesis, theory, or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences». Here I do not see a sufficiently comprehensive hypothesis for conducting such an experiment, basically here are three questions and the hypothesis lacks of elements for inferring any consequence.
It is possible that there’s no conclusive test to get to know whether there is consciousness or not, but I guess that, in the case of the living, reacting to certain stimuli or displaying certain behavioural patterns should be taken as sufficiently reliable signs.
In this experiment no mention is made about the criteria by which consciousness could be detected. I fail to understand the relevance of this specific grid design - instead of a matrix with 3 or more dimensions, for instance – with a loose reference to configurations of lit neurons, opposed to a generic neural network; while no hint is provided on the means available to detect consciousness. Maybe it is assumed that consciousness can be detected solely by manipulation of symbols, or by problem solving. But these are traditional fields of AI that have never had the detection of consciousness in the agenda. Since Leibniz there’s been no need to imply/assume consciousness for anything that could be represented through a procedure. Instead some memory capacity seems required by questions 2 and 3. These design aspects should be addressed before getting into a hypothetical experiment – and in a subsequent post you seem to be conscious (no pun intended) of that.
Anyway, let’s assume that there is some way to detect whether there is consciousness or not. Then the question is if an artificial brain can be self-conscious, but at the same time it is doubted that any brain per se, artificial or not, can be self-conscious. So the experiment seems to aim at answering this question, artificiality is expedient to have an instance of a brain detached from a body.
As for point 1: why impossible to determine? What about switching on all of them? Assuming that some conscience is detected, then one can decrease until a minimum is found. Conversely, if even when the neurons are all lit and there is no consciousness, your hypothesis would be corroborated. Please note that normal tests for checking the design of CPUs perform all the possible configurations of transistors: it would not take a major theoretical leap, nor ground-breaking engineering.
Point 2 could be meaningful to determine whether a brain alone is the cause of consciousness, but only inasmuch by consciousness is meant something beyond self-consciousness. But as for your question about consciousness seemingly hopping over time, regardless thought experiments, what about coma? As it happens that some people waking from coma often seem to display the same “consciousness”, by which I mean that they eventually recall who they are - your hypothesis seems verified. However in this case the brain would appear to have a determining role.
Point 3 too could be relevant in order to assess the relationship between “consciousness” (not self-consciousness) and the brain, but frankly it sounds pretty “magical”. Here too, regardless though experiments, maybe examining twins would provide food for thought. We might presume that their brains are as similar as two distinct brains can be, yet they do not seem to have the same consciousness.
It’s not clear to me what leads you to these conclusions. In my view there is no experiment here, the hypothesis is not sufficiently comprehensive and looking at your questions it seems to me that your notion of consciousness is not rigorous.
However, that does not mean that you are wrong, I have no way to confirm or disproof your conclusions. Instead, I would infer that you think that brain has no relationship with mind, nor with consciousness. Can you develop more?
Then, I would like to know more about some other positions - and I mean just to enhance my understanding - I am not objecting, even when I disagree.
How can I get a list including at least some names of these intellectuals and scientists?
The right order of what?
I would like to know which references back these views.
Is there any research – or argument - corroborating the theory (or whatever that is) about the position of consciousness, as well as the connection of consciousness to mind through will?
Do you mean that consciousness precedes mind or the reverse sequence? “All that” is what? experience, thoughts, representations… all of them? Something else?
And about that too, are there authors, studies, research… anything upon which these views are developed?
If it’s possible to resume them concisely, what are these stories and where do they conflict?
No, not entirely. I think it’s likely that they can be expressed but in many ways, each of which might meet with an agreement to what something is approximately if not to what it was exactly. I’ve always thought it was a mistake to assume the brain has an exact map that will be reproduced across the board. It’s far more likely I think that ultimately agreement about a qualia will come from an experience that will meet enough criteria to form a consensus. I think we will find that there is not an exact biological match of the colour red to exactly red across all minds, more a match of what we can agree red is not across all minds.
Good post! To the point! We all experience consciousness and the problem with describing it is the same as the problem with how we feel about red–how to objectify a mostly subjective experience. Consensus of agreement is our current response to this. We have red crayons. When told they are red, children generally accept the definition. So we must begin by saying consciousness is. As to what it is, the consensus seems to be that it is a brain phenomenon caused by the billions of possible neuronal communications in signal and feedback loops. Doidge in “The Brain That Changes Itself” introduces neuroplasticity to replace the old descriptions of brain topology.
There is no homunculus in the brain. Nothing in there watching videos. Ryle blew that concept out of the water. His “Concept of Mind” is a must read for anyone who believes in Cartesian dualism. Dennett follows Ryle in attacking the “Cartesian theater” in “Consciousness Explained”.
The Cartesian Theater isn’t incorrect as much as merely a metaphor explaining an important issue of consciousness, the inner simulation of a remote scene. The mind certainly does do exactly that, without which it would have no consciousness. But of course, it is metaphor. There are no actual projectors and the eye watching the inner simulation isn’t explained by the theory (and isn’t easy to relay to the public because it is actually too simple compared to the confounded complexity of their confused questions).
Dennett, then, appears to waste a lot of time and print in combating the illusions this metaphor presents.