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From the article: "No computer will ever feel anything. Feeling is uncomputable. Feeling and consciousness can only happen (so far as we know) to organic, Earth

by erokar 11y ago

From the article: "No computer will ever feel anything. Feeling is uncomputable. Feeling and consciousness can only happen (so far as we know) to organic, Earth-type animals—and can’t ever be produced, no matter what, by mere software on a computer." I happen to agree, but the title is a tad misleading.

mirimir 11y ago
Anything can be virtualized on general computers.
- inlineint 11y ago
  Only on quantum computers of sufficient size. And we are far from having idea about how to actually build them.
  - drdeca 11y ago
    Huh? It is my understanding that the current understanding is that quantum computers cannot compute anything that ordinary computers can. They can just compute certain things faster. A quantum computer can be simulated on a normal computer, just inefficiently.
    - inlineint 11y ago
      Ordinary computer can't model even a small quantum system exactly in finite time because it has to deal with infinite-dimension matrices to do it. In other hands, quantum computer could model any quantum system of the same size by one-to-one mapping of degrees of freedom. So you could build a quantum computer that just models your computer and do anything you could do on your ordinary computer on the quantum one. If you are interested in the subject try to read this book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-Scientist/dp/1400033861 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-... (you can skip the parts about the Universe as quantum computer because they are controversial and a kind of metaphysics, just read a few first chapters to pick up the idea of quantum computations).
- JoshCole 11y ago
  This is incorrect. Assume nested virtualization. Extrapolate to infinity. On a computer, understood to be one like ours, it follows that there is now a machine that executes in finite steps will have arrived past infinity. Moreover, there are higher countings of infinity and these would of necessity be within such a virtualization. So it can't even reasonably be expected to compute everything even if you just have a very small sub-set of everything.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Well, I did say "anything" and not "everything".
ThomPete 11y ago
Humans don't feel anything either and our neurons aren't aware of our thoughts either. He is subscribing to some sort of Chinese room argument, but as we learned with Searle the answer simply is. We don't know. Not never or always.
- erokar 11y ago
  Searle was the one who came up with the Chinese room argument to disprove strong AI. Searle empathically believes that humans do feel and that computers as we know them today are not capable of consciousness. I am curious as to how you have arrived at the peculiar belief that humans do not feel.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    It's obvious that the parts of humans can't feel. Either "feeling" is an illusion or it's emergent. Or it's mystical. I'll go with illusory, as a part of that a lot of what we think of as "me" is illusory.
    - erokar 11y ago
      An illusion relative to what? Obviously our perceptions, sensations and feeling are shaped by our organism, and in that sense do not represent an objective reality. So what? The problem of consciousness is that we have these feelings and sensations at all -- that is what constitutes consciousness. I take it you are familiar with Dennet's theories. Imo he doesn't really address to problem of consciousness at all, he rejects the phenomenon itself on the grounds that it cannot be verified using behavioristic observations. Searl addresses this in his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
      - ThomPete 11y ago
        The illusion relative to the idea of the feeling. I.e. the feeling of love isn't a separate thing from other feelings. It's just different interpretation of the same process but in different contexts. I.e. there is no love "out there" you don't feel love you feel something that we then choose to interpret as something called love but it's not a thing it's more a loosely defined category.
orblivion 11y ago
I agree that mimicking feeling behavior isn't the same as having feelings. However I've started to fear and wonder whether there's really anything special about organic life in this sense. "as far as we know" - we don't even know the people around have feelings. I think this is a big open question.
- malka 11y ago
  > I agree that mimicking feeling behavior isn't the same as having feelings The problem is that, as an external observer, you can only observe behavior. A machine retracts its arm due to its sensor sensing a pressure. How do you know it feels pain or not ? other's entities 'mind' is terra incognita.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    My answer to this kind of thought experiment is that you can only know the answer by asking the thing doing the experiencing. Is the robot feeling pain? I dunno, ask it. This is, I think, the reason we do not assign "thing feels pain" to cows or fish or other animals we consume. Or at least "that thing does not feel pain the same way my child feels pain", which allows us to treat them not as fellow Earthlings but as lower life forms. No, cows do not have civilizations, and I am a fervent meat-eater. But this is my roundabout way of saying that the first "truly human (i.e. generalized/strong) artificial intelligence" will have first and foremost an immaculate ability to communicate with humans on every level. Without that perfected capability, it will always just be a smart robot to other human beings.
    - orblivion 11y ago
      The problem is that I do think cows feel pain (I thought most people did? I'm not a meat eater though), and I don't care how smart it is (unless intelligence is somehow required to appreciate pain). A cow-level AI may not be able to communicate it.
pdonis 11y ago
The "so far as we know" qualifier destroys the whole argument; all the argument really proves is that we don't (currently) know how to produce feeling with software on a computer. But that's a much weaker claim than the claims being made in what you quoted.
- erokar 11y ago
  Software can be represented in any arbitrary way (e.g. in a book) and computations can be carried out from the software instructions in any arbitrary way (e.g. by arranging rocks in certain patterns). If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. I think this idea is absurd. I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures. As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have. It follows that computers are no more likely to become conscious than e.g. washing machines.
  - pdonis 11y ago
    > If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. The word "alone" here is not correct. Claiming that software on a computer can produce feelings is not the same as claiming that software on a computer can produce feeling without having to interact with anything else. The latter claim is obviously absurd; organic life forms like us don't produce feelings without interacting with anything else, so why should we expect software on a computer to do so? But ruling out the latter claim still leaves open the possibility that software on a computer could produce feelings if it were interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways. > I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures. Rocks in a certain pattern are physical structures. So this doesn't rule out rocks in a certain pattern producing feelings. > As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have. I don't think we're that badly off. We expect embodied brains of sufficient size and complexity to produce feelings, but we don't expect three pounds of jello to produce feelings. So clearly we have some knowledge of the properties that physical structures must have to produce feelings. They must have some level of complexity and heterogeneity; they must be able to store information in some way that is recoverable (three pounds of jello can "store information" in some sense, but there's no way to recover it in any useful sense); and they must be interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways. There's no reason why we couldn't eventually build computers with these properties.

by erokar 11y ago

mirimir 11y ago

Anything can be virtualized on general computers.

inlineint 11y ago
Only on quantum computers of sufficient size. And we are far from having idea about how to actually build them.
- drdeca 11y ago
  Huh? It is my understanding that the current understanding is that quantum computers cannot compute anything that ordinary computers can. They can just compute certain things faster. A quantum computer can be simulated on a normal computer, just inefficiently.
  - inlineint 11y ago
    Ordinary computer can't model even a small quantum system exactly in finite time because it has to deal with infinite-dimension matrices to do it. In other hands, quantum computer could model any quantum system of the same size by one-to-one mapping of degrees of freedom. So you could build a quantum computer that just models your computer and do anything you could do on your ordinary computer on the quantum one. If you are interested in the subject try to read this book http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-Scientist/dp/1400033861 http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-... (you can skip the parts about the Universe as quantum computer because they are controversial and a kind of metaphysics, just read a few first chapters to pick up the idea of quantum computations).
JoshCole 11y ago
This is incorrect. Assume nested virtualization. Extrapolate to infinity. On a computer, understood to be one like ours, it follows that there is now a machine that executes in finite steps will have arrived past infinity. Moreover, there are higher countings of infinity and these would of necessity be within such a virtualization. So it can't even reasonably be expected to compute everything even if you just have a very small sub-set of everything.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Well, I did say "anything" and not "everything".

ThomPete 11y ago

Humans don't feel anything either and our neurons aren't aware of our thoughts either. He is subscribing to some sort of Chinese room argument, but as we learned with Searle the answer simply is. We don't know. Not never or always.

erokar 11y ago
Searle was the one who came up with the Chinese room argument to disprove strong AI. Searle empathically believes that humans do feel and that computers as we know them today are not capable of consciousness. I am curious as to how you have arrived at the peculiar belief that humans do not feel.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  It's obvious that the parts of humans can't feel. Either "feeling" is an illusion or it's emergent. Or it's mystical. I'll go with illusory, as a part of that a lot of what we think of as "me" is illusory.
  - erokar 11y ago
    An illusion relative to what? Obviously our perceptions, sensations and feeling are shaped by our organism, and in that sense do not represent an objective reality. So what? The problem of consciousness is that we have these feelings and sensations at all -- that is what constitutes consciousness. I take it you are familiar with Dennet's theories. Imo he doesn't really address to problem of consciousness at all, he rejects the phenomenon itself on the grounds that it cannot be verified using behavioristic observations. Searl addresses this in his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
    - ThomPete 11y ago
      The illusion relative to the idea of the feeling. I.e. the feeling of love isn't a separate thing from other feelings. It's just different interpretation of the same process but in different contexts. I.e. there is no love "out there" you don't feel love you feel something that we then choose to interpret as something called love but it's not a thing it's more a loosely defined category.

orblivion 11y ago

I agree that mimicking feeling behavior isn't the same as having feelings. However I've started to fear and wonder whether there's really anything special about organic life in this sense. "as far as we know" - we don't even know the people around have feelings. I think this is a big open question.

malka 11y ago
> I agree that mimicking feeling behavior isn't the same as having feelings The problem is that, as an external observer, you can only observe behavior. A machine retracts its arm due to its sensor sensing a pressure. How do you know it feels pain or not ? other's entities 'mind' is terra incognita.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  My answer to this kind of thought experiment is that you can only know the answer by asking the thing doing the experiencing. Is the robot feeling pain? I dunno, ask it. This is, I think, the reason we do not assign "thing feels pain" to cows or fish or other animals we consume. Or at least "that thing does not feel pain the same way my child feels pain", which allows us to treat them not as fellow Earthlings but as lower life forms. No, cows do not have civilizations, and I am a fervent meat-eater. But this is my roundabout way of saying that the first "truly human (i.e. generalized/strong) artificial intelligence" will have first and foremost an immaculate ability to communicate with humans on every level. Without that perfected capability, it will always just be a smart robot to other human beings.
  - orblivion 11y ago
    The problem is that I do think cows feel pain (I thought most people did? I'm not a meat eater though), and I don't care how smart it is (unless intelligence is somehow required to appreciate pain). A cow-level AI may not be able to communicate it.

pdonis 11y ago

The "so far as we know" qualifier destroys the whole argument; all the argument really proves is that we don't (currently) know how to produce feeling with software on a computer. But that's a much weaker claim than the claims being made in what you quoted.

erokar 11y ago
Software can be represented in any arbitrary way (e.g. in a book) and computations can be carried out from the software instructions in any arbitrary way (e.g. by arranging rocks in certain patterns). If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. I think this idea is absurd. I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures. As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have. It follows that computers are no more likely to become conscious than e.g. washing machines.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > If one believes that consciousness can emerge from software on a computer alone, it also follows that consciousness can emerge from placing rocks in a certain pattern following instructions in a book. The word "alone" here is not correct. Claiming that software on a computer can produce feelings is not the same as claiming that software on a computer can produce feeling without having to interact with anything else. The latter claim is obviously absurd; organic life forms like us don't produce feelings without interacting with anything else, so why should we expect software on a computer to do so? But ruling out the latter claim still leaves open the possibility that software on a computer could produce feelings if it were interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways. > I do not think consciousness necessarily can only be produced by organic life, but I do think it has to emerge from physical structures. Rocks in a certain pattern are physical structures. So this doesn't rule out rocks in a certain pattern producing feelings. > As of today we have no idea what properties such physical structures must have. I don't think we're that badly off. We expect embodied brains of sufficient size and complexity to produce feelings, but we don't expect three pounds of jello to produce feelings. So clearly we have some knowledge of the properties that physical structures must have to produce feelings. They must have some level of complexity and heterogeneity; they must be able to store information in some way that is recoverable (three pounds of jello can "store information" in some sense, but there's no way to recover it in any useful sense); and they must be interacting with the rest of the world in appropriate ways. There's no reason why we couldn't eventually build computers with these properties.