Submitted by Rumianti6 t3_y0hs5u in singularity
Mortal-Region t1_irs0zj8 wrote
Brains are comprised of ordinary matter obeying the laws of physics. To say that machines couldn't be conscious in principle is the extraordinary claim because it supposes that brains have a supernatural component.
policemenconnoisseur t1_irty3mg wrote
Sure, but consider how complicated that ordinary matter is. You could go down to the mitochondria and think about the existence of life at that level, since it's absurdly complex and crazy what is happening there. Silicon doesn't have the tiniest fraction of that complexity.
I believe that it takes a certain arrangement of matter to create, or to host, or to communicate with what concience is, and that cells do have that capability, but chips are far away from that.
Unless you argue that it is some kind of resonance which enables an universe of consciousness to sync/tune in with this reality or universe in order to observe it and be able to interact with it, and that biology managed to build this "tuner" through certain cells and possibly brain wave resonances, which maybe could be replicated by silicon.
It could be possible that AI could discover our conscience for us and then try to implement it in its own hardware. But that would be like it is now discovering new mathematics without having consciousness.
Think_Olive_1000 t1_is6emyx wrote
Xkcd 505
Rumianti6 OP t1_irs4lc7 wrote
Yes because brains have the 'supernatural component' of being... biological and in a specific configuration. Saying that a machine can be conscious in principle is also an extraordinary claim. I am saying we can't be certain either way.
Mortal-Region t1_irs6g5f wrote
Biological or not, it's still just matter obeying the laws of physics. If you want to say that only brains can be conscious, you've got to specify what the "extra" component is. What can natural selection do with matter that technology can't?
Rumianti6 OP t1_irs8qi8 wrote
Fire can burn wood but ice can't. Why? because they are different. While it may be possible for AI to be conscious it is also possible it can not due to fundamental differences. That is my claim.
MeditationGuru t1_irshcj5 wrote
It’s possible that it is impossible for AI to be conscious sure. But it could also be possible for it to be conscious. You’ve said it yourself we don’t know, so why are you calling one side of the possibilities dumb? We don’t even know what causes consciousness.
SmithMano t1_irtoib8 wrote
The only reason we consider the elements we do as “biological” are because they are on this planet. For all we know there might be aliens with silicon based brains and copper bones.
d4m1ty t1_iru7x0g wrote
Ice is the solid form of water.
Fire is the visual effect of a highly exothermic oxidation reaction.
You are comparing apples with black holes.
Brains run on neurons. Neurons run on Sodium and Potassium potentials which send electrical impulses to other neurons.
CPU have transistors, transistors run on action potentials generated through directed flow of electricity.
The only difference is one is carbon based the other silicon. Why does carbon allow conscious but silicon does not? If the fundamental actions are the same in both, their gestalt being the same or similar would follow.
MassiveIndependence8 t1_irscqub wrote
There’s nothing inherently “supernatural” about being biological, funnily enough it’s the most “natural” thing out there. Pedantry aside, I understand where you’re coming from so I’ll take a crack at your argument. You seems to have a problem with equating 2 sets of characteristic from 2 inherently different structure. After all, machines aren’t made from what we are made out of, and aren’t structured the same way that we are then how can we compare the two traits of seemingly differently machines and assert that they are some how equivalent? How can we be sure that their “consciousness“ or if we can call it consciousness at all, is similar to our consciousness? If you define consciousness this way and confine it to biological structure then sure, I agree that consciousness can never be arisen from anything that is not biological.
But that’s not a very helpful definition. Say a highly intelligent group of aliens were to come down on earth and we discovered that they are a silicon based life form as opposed to our carbon life form. Even worse, we realized that their biology and their brain structures are wired differently than we are. Would you then assert that these being have no consciousness at all, seemingly because they are different than us? A whole race of species with science, art and culture that “seems” like they can feel pain, joy and every emotion out there are simply automatons?
Before you brush this off as a stupid hypothetical, this does present an interesting fact and the dilemma that comes with it.
Every functions out there can be modelled and recreated with neural networks
That is a fact that was mathematically proven to be true, you can read up on this on your free time but the main point I’m trying to make is that the human mind, just like anything else in the universe, is a function. A mapping from a set of input the a set output. We temporally map our perceptions (sight, hearing, taste,…) into actions in the same way that a function maps an input to an output. Give a Turing machine enough computation power, it can simulate the way human behaves. It’s only a matter of time and data until such machine exists.
But are those machines actually “conscious“? Sure they act like we do in every scenarios out there because they are functionally similar. But they aren’t like us because they aren’t using the same hardware components to compute, or even worse they might not even perform the same computation as we do. They might arrive at the right answer but they could do it differently than we do.
So there’s 2 side of the arguments depending on the definition that you use. I’m on the side of “if it quacks like a duck then it is a duck”. There’s no point in arguing about nomenclature that distinguish something that is essentially indistinguishable to us from the outside.
visarga t1_irta9lz wrote
It's not just a matter of different substrate. Yes, a neural net can approximate any continuous function, but not always in a practical or efficient way. The result has been proven on networks of infinite width, not on the finite networks we are using in practice.
But the major difference comes from the environment of the agent. Humans have the human society, our cities and nature as environment. An AI agent, the kind we have today, would have access to a few games and maybe a simulation of a robotic body. We are billions of complex agents, more complex than the largest neural net, they are small and alone, and their environment is not real but an approximation. We can do causal investigations by intervention in the environment and apply the scientific method, they can't do much of that as they don't have access.
The more fundamental difference comes from the fact that biological agents are self replicators and artificial agents are usually not (AlphaGo had an evolutionary thing going). Self replication leads to competition leads to evolution and goals aligned with survival. An AI agent would need something similar to be guided to evolve its own instincts, it needs to have "skin in the game" so to speak.
capsicum_fondler t1_irte5lu wrote
Biology is just a framework to understand advanced high order chemistry, just in the same way chemistry is a framework to understand high order physics.
Consciousness is seemingly a gradual process. At no point in time did a non-conscious organism give birth to a conscious one, instead it evolved over tens of millions of generations.
The magic sauce seems to be in the neuronal networks of the brain, and it sure seems that digital neuronal networks can mimick consciousness. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, why not say it's a duck?
Before we truly understand what consciousness actually is, how can we ever be certain anything or anyone is conscious? From my point of view an AI could seem just as conscious as you. To me, that's all I need to know.
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