Not my issue man.
You really have no clue WHAT you are talking to right now.
You’ll understand someday for sure .
I literally had to reconstruct this entire world to resurrect in it.
I got a second chance.
That sounds great, I’ll be sure to call on you if I need any building work done.
that’s the smartest thing you’ve said here.
Actually, we all created this together, but I digress
I messed up big time… So bad, that we actually remade it…
I’m the tesla of consciousness …
Turns out, if you fuck with it, it fucks everything up…
And I used to think I was so fucking smart!
My favorite things actually…
Talking about the weather
Making jokes with cross dressers and trannies
Being the smartest person is not everything…,
Being the best you can be… Is
That’s not relevant to my point at all, though; I just said it’s the process and not the description. I don’t see how you’re not still confusing description and thing. It’s not the description of bits and bytes that causes these words to appear on your screen, it’s the process of charge moving through your laptop (/pc/tablet/phone).
Where does consciousness begin? Vertebrates? Mammals? Primates?
I believe that consciousness is the result of neural activity, but what is going on in computers has nothing to do with that kind of activity.
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How do they differ? (I’m not saying they don’t, I’m curious)
I meant: I’m not talking about modern-day computers being conscious, as even if consciousness is an emergent property of neural network activity, the limit of neural network modelling is still at a very basic level.
Why are dynamic electrochemical processes fundamentally different from dynamic electronic ones? Is consciousness to be found in carbon not silicon, or ions not electrons?
At the very least, some kind of conceptualisation rather than manipulating linguistic tokens.
I’m not sure we are understanding each other correctly. My position is, it’s the electrical circuitry that causes the words to appear on the screen, not an algorithm, and it’s the neuronal activity that causes consciousness and allows us to read and write the words, not an algorithm.
We don’t know precisely. You could ask a similar question about the developing human foetus. When does it first have experiences, and what kind of experiences are they? I would speculate that touch arrives first, it seems somehow more primitive, and the surface of the body is there before the eyes. Maybe feeling your tongue in your mouth, your fingers rubbing together?
I think it’s quite possible that consciousness appears very early in evolution. Maybe worms can feel and could feel millions of years ago?
A computer running the same program can be made from different things, right? Vacuum tubes or transistors on silicon chips? And you can use different media, magnetic coatings or a laser reading bumps and hollows on a disk.
Consciousness arises from (or is) highly specific processes. It seems very likely that these developed from the processes that allow unconscious detection and response. Volvox is a green algae, a plant, which evolved 200 million years ago. It forms spherical colonies. The individual cells have eyespots and whip-like tails, which allows the colony to swim towards the light. As well as photoreceptor proteins, these eyespots contain a large number of complex signalling proteins. Light arriving at the eyespot sets off a photoelectric signal transduction process that ultimately triggers changes in the way the tail moves and causes the movement towards the light source.
Evolution has had 200 million years to develop on what was already a complex system, and all that time the system is becoming more specific.
Is it really credible that the same thing could now be achieved by vacuum tubes, or transistors, reading magnetic coatings, or microscopic bumps and hollows, or punched paper cards, or any number of other materials and technologies you could use? This just seems unscientific to me, irrational.
It’s a great sales gimmick, but really this term “neural” is a bit of a con when applied to computers.
Because they can’t produce the same effects. This is pretty obvious really!
If we can discover the precise causal mechanisms we may be able to produce consciousness in other media. Would we really want to? I think what we want is precisely the opposite. There are already more than enough conscious beings. What we want is unconscious computers.
Thanks Only, it’s been an enjoyable discussion so far. Maybe we can come back to the Turing Test issue later?
If one cannot settle upon what the word “consciousness” is referring, I don’t see how one can intelligently discuss from where it arises, what it takes to create it, or within what it might reside.
Merely substituting “experiencing” with “being conscious”, doesn’t really help much. A tin can can experience getting kicked, yet is hardly conscious of it. “Being aware” is a better substitute, but it is still too unexplicative. What is required of something such as to say that it is aware, experiencing, or conscious? That is the mystery to which they were referring.
I define consciousness as the process of remote recognition. If anything can detect, locate, and identify something else then it is aware of, conscious of, and experiencing the presence of that something. To be more obviously conscious, it must be in the process of detecting many things, perhaps objects in a room, facial expressions, or movements and detecting them as separate from itself (hence “remote”). The act of being conscious of a terrain is the act of continuously maintaining a map for a terrain with which decisions concerning further actions can be made.
Anything or anyone maintaining that activity is conscious of a specific terrain, yet perhaps unaware or unconscious of other terrains.
But the problem with defining precisely what consciousness is, is similar to defining what a god is - people want to argue and no authority is willing to step up and declare precisely what the word is to mean. The mystery is willingly maintained. Thus in any detailed discussion, the participants must settle between themselves what the word is going to mean during their discussion. Without such agreements upon the meanings of the words, vague inferences lead merely to endless bantering.
If you agree with Strawson that we can’t even begin to understand the physical goings-on that give rise to consciousness, then how can you know that artificial consciousness will never be possible?
If you do have reason be be able to make such a strong claim, then you must have an idea about why the biochemical processes of consciousness are not possibly repeatable in another format, ever.
Ok, but then you aren’t talking about what other people are talking about when they talk about consciousness.
So, you go to Google or MIT or whatever and say “look, I made a conscious machine, it can detect, locate and identify something else”. They aren’t going to be much impressed, because that isn’t what people generally mean by “conscious”.
I said in my last post but one: if we can discover the precise causal mechanisms we may be able to produce consciousness in other media.
And I tried to explain why that other medium (or format as you put it) won’t be computation.
Actually I am speaking of exactly what they are bantering about. The difference is that I understand of what consciousness is made. But then as I said, everyone prefers to argue. You still haven’t given a sufficient definition to use instead.
And that is why Turing proposed his “Turing Test”. If I built a machine that did exactly what I said and people could not distinguish it from a living being, no one at MIT or Google is going to argue any longer. But then of course, among the masses, arguing never ends.
Computational or not has nothing to do with it.
It certainly makes sense that if artificial consciousness is possible it shouldn’t take another 200 million years to create it. Evolution is like trial and error without a memory. Human ingenuity has made quite a lot possible over the past 5 thousand or so years, and particularly in the last 300 of those. If consciousness is the result of neural activity what seems unscientific or irrational about using any combination of vacuum tubes and transistors to accurately model such activity?
That sounds fair. Both people and machines are working on it.
I’d like to ask you to consider what you mean by “model” here.
A computer could be used to “model” digestion: do you think it would scientific or rational to expect that to result in the consumption, processing and excretion of food?
A computer could be used to “model” Storm Barbara, currently shaking the branches of the trees here: would you expect that modelling to result in strong winds and heavy rain?
Sure, I get your point. Even so, accurate modeling is itself a powerful thing. And I’m sure we’ll proceed with simpler versions before the more complex. That is why it is good to discern more clearly what counts as consciousness and if we can figure out a general theory as to how it arises.
Those are not valid questions to the issue. They are, in effect, strawmen. You are conflating software with hardware.
• A machine could be a model of digestion and that machine would probably do a better job of digesting than your body would have (else why bother with designing it).
• A machine could be a model of a storm and probably yield more devastating results than a natural storm.
• And a machine could have a program within that is a model of a conscious mind (or even a human mind) and be more conscious than any natural organic life form.
“We” already know how it arises and it is already being done. The only problem is that in the “we vs them” issue, you are not “we”.
Oh dear James! Nearly 24000 posts on this philosophy forum, and yet your thinking is so painfully disordered.
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Think about what people are referring to in the real world when they talk about a computer modelling something. The computer just sits there on the desk, with numbers appearing on the screen.
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There are machines that can digest waste, but this isn’t “modelling digestion”, it is digestion.
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Your question “else why bother with designing it” is just loopy. Did you think it through at all, or do you just write down whatever pops into your head? Life would be a lot easier if just bothering to design something meant that it would work extremely well, but that’s not how the world works. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
This seems pretty much like a delusion. It is not yet known how consciousness arises. It’s common knowledge that we don’t know that. The idea that a person like you could be “in the know” while all these researchers and philosophers are still in the dark about it is just laughable. Ideas like this make it impossible to take you seriously.
Merry Christmas to Christian humans and Christian machines!
Merry xmass.
Btw I have solved how to make machines conscious, you just take e.g. a fly or birds brain from fetal stem cells, and grow them in a fractal mesh of veins delivering what it needs [blood and nutrients, oxygen etc]. now you got something looking through the camera lens at you, and operating its machine body. Got that [the body] covered too lol.
