9 ms·

I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem becaus

I felt the same, it doesn't try to address the "hard" problem of consciousness, as described in the article you linked. It's such an interesting problem because for one, its hard/impossible to prove consciousness. If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human, including answering the question of whether it is conscious affirmatively, and showing signs of pain and suffering in bad situations, how will you ever know if it's all just a simulation, or if real feelies are behind it. At what point does it cross over from an extremely complex and useful behavior machine, to one that experiences actual qualia. Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. People will be polarized, with some championing android rights because they seem to be conscious, while others will be adamant that they are just complex machines that can be treated any which way. Personally I'd probably err on the side conscious, just in case.

codeulike 10y ago
In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.
fpvracing 10y ago
> The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.
- thinkloop 10y ago
  The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.
  - ajuc 10y ago
    > but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation We could have them now if we equipped all vehicles and pedestrians using roads with simple device to broadcast position, velocity, and planned route.
    - thinkloop 10y ago
      Yes we could cheat :)
    - brian_cloutier 10y ago
      Deer and fallen tree limbs and icy bridges too
      - astazangasta 10y ago
        Light rain
  - adrianN 10y ago
    If you want your cars to literally never make a mistake you might have to wait a little longer, but reaching human or superhuman driving ability shouldn't be that hard. Humans are pretty badly equipped for driving, with our shitty reflexes, two eyes and easily distracted brain.
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      Machines are pretty badly equipped for driving, with their shitty machine vision, total lack of socialization, poor ability to interpret context, etc.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        Well, shitty machine vision can include sonars, see behind obstacles and solid objects etc. And "total lack of socialization" can instead be a full blown cooperative driving network of cars that inform one another for their course.
Houshalter 10y ago
>Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. Intelligence isn't about a giant list of arbitrary if then statements though. Think of artificial neural networks. They learn behaviors from experience and reinforcement. They take actions they predict will lead to reward. How is that fundamentally different than what humans do? I mean our brains algorithms are probably much more complex, but the principles should be the same. Shocking a neural net with negative reward, and it will strongly desire to avoid that again. How is that different than pain? Add on a bunch of hard wired goals and behaviors more complicated than "pain" and "reward", and you have yourself a conscious being. Not fundamentally different than a human.
- RivieraKid 10y ago
  > How is that fundamentally different than what humans do? I mean our brains algorithms are probably much more complex, but the principles should be the same. Shocking a neural net with negative reward, and it will strongly desire to avoid that again. How is that different than pain? Because we feel the pain, why? Does neural net feel anything?
  - sokoloff 10y ago
    Is the fact that we feel pain a bug, a feature, or no different from a neural net that learns to avoid that negative reward via electrical impulses rather than electrochemical impulses as we do?
    - RivieraKid 10y ago
      It's not a bug or a feature, the fact we feel or experience anything at all is the most fundamental aspect of our existence. If you think about it, subjective experience is the only thing that exists. All of physics stems from subjective experience. Physics is basically a systematic describtion of the patterns and regularities that we experience and perceive. Example - we see that objects always fall down when dropped - we use gravity to describe this pattern.
joncrocks 10y ago
In case you weren't aware, what you've described in your second paragraph is very similar to a famous thought experiment known as 'the Chinese room' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
sharemywin 10y ago
I think you need learning for consciousness so I think you would need to write to the if-then rules as well as read from them.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
naasking 10y ago
> If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human Except this robot is inconceivable, because it would exceed the size of the universe. The conscious android becomes conceivable when you say its on the human scale and yet still exhibits the same behaviours. > Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. This theory does explain the purpose of consciousness and qualia, as this poster explains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853240
- NobleLie 10y ago
  Surely there is a mistake when you say such an android would exceed the size of the universe, right? Have you done any calculation or can you cite any source which remotely claims this? Im interested.
  - naasking 10y ago
    The English language consists of over 1,000,000 words. Let's suppose only 200,000 in common use, 1/7 are verbs, 1/2 are nouns. Even if you consider only simple sentences consisting of 3 words with subject-verb-object, the number of permutations of subject-verb-object sentences that an English-speaking human can utter are 28,000 * 100,000 * 28,000 = ~78.5 trillion = ~10^13. This doesn't include adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions or anything more complicated we see in real grammars. Now consider that this sentence you're reading is 33 words long, so the number of permutations of such sentences is hundreds of orders of magnitude larger, on the order of 10^10000. The visible universe is estimated to contain 10^80 particles, so even if you could encode a logic gate that could recognize a word in a single particle, it seems you're still just a tad short if you're looking to hard-code intelligent responses. True understanding consists of building a model to generate new facts as needed, amounting to an impressive compression of facts you've already seen.
simonh 10y ago
I think the problem of androids, sometimes referred to as zombies, is based on a fallacy because I don't think it's possible for non-conscious systems to exhibit the behaviours of conscious systems. I do believe that the experience of consciousness is based in a model of consciousness in the brain. This also leads to our ability to form mental models of other beings, systems and processes which enable us to predict or form theories about their behaviour. It's this existence of a model of our mental world in the brain and our brain's interrogation and interaction with it that leads to concious experience. I don't know the details of how that works and I'm no Philosopher so maybe I'm over simplifying, but it seems to me that something along these lines is the most plausible theory. Given this, the existence of such models in the processing system of a correspondent should be testable. You should be able to test the ability of the correspondent to form and generate models of itself, beings, processes and systems and interrogate and mutate those models. One example of such systems are games. My favourite ways to test a chat bot Turing Test style is to try and teach it a game or to introspect on itself and it's understanding and expectations of others. A correspondent that cannot form and process such models cannot be conscious, but if it can then if such models lead to consciousness, by definition it must be concious.
tim333 10y ago
>Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli ? Maybe because we learn stuff before reacting a lot of the time. Say you want to learn some new sport, you might watch it a while to try to figure out what was going on before trying to play. It's going to be hard to figure out if you are not conscious. You could try saying a p-zombie could also be replaying the goal in its mind to figure how the goalie could have stopped it while not being conscious what it's thinking about but it kind of gets to be a bit of a stretch.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  I'm not sure why that's a stretch? Actually feeling and experiencing things is not necessary for any part of that process.

codeulike 10y ago

In a few decades I think the use of very sophisticated ais in computer games could become an ethical issue.

fpvracing 10y ago

> The issue of androids is going to be an annoying one in a thousand years. Do you really think it will take a thousand years for that situation to arise? I'm betting on less than fifty.

thinkloop 10y ago
The last 10% always looks really tough for me. For example we kind'of have self-driving cars right now - but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation - seems like 50+ years to me for just that.
- ajuc 10y ago
  > but when will we have self-driving cars without a driver's cockpit where I can play poker in the back with complete faith that it will handle all situations intelligently, navigate any terrain and manage any situation We could have them now if we equipped all vehicles and pedestrians using roads with simple device to broadcast position, velocity, and planned route.
  - thinkloop 10y ago
    Yes we could cheat :)
  - brian_cloutier 10y ago
    Deer and fallen tree limbs and icy bridges too
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      Light rain
- adrianN 10y ago
  If you want your cars to literally never make a mistake you might have to wait a little longer, but reaching human or superhuman driving ability shouldn't be that hard. Humans are pretty badly equipped for driving, with our shitty reflexes, two eyes and easily distracted brain.
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    Machines are pretty badly equipped for driving, with their shitty machine vision, total lack of socialization, poor ability to interpret context, etc.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Well, shitty machine vision can include sonars, see behind obstacles and solid objects etc. And "total lack of socialization" can instead be a full blown cooperative driving network of cars that inform one another for their course.

Houshalter 10y ago

>Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. Intelligence isn't about a giant list of arbitrary if then statements though. Think of artificial neural networks. They learn behaviors from experience and reinforcement. They take actions they predict will lead to reward. How is that fundamentally different than what humans do? I mean our brains algorithms are probably much more complex, but the principles should be the same. Shocking a neural net with negative reward, and it will strongly desire to avoid that again. How is that different than pain? Add on a bunch of hard wired goals and behaviors more complicated than "pain" and "reward", and you have yourself a conscious being. Not fundamentally different than a human.

RivieraKid 10y ago
> How is that fundamentally different than what humans do? I mean our brains algorithms are probably much more complex, but the principles should be the same. Shocking a neural net with negative reward, and it will strongly desire to avoid that again. How is that different than pain? Because we feel the pain, why? Does neural net feel anything?
- sokoloff 10y ago
  Is the fact that we feel pain a bug, a feature, or no different from a neural net that learns to avoid that negative reward via electrical impulses rather than electrochemical impulses as we do?
  - RivieraKid 10y ago
    It's not a bug or a feature, the fact we feel or experience anything at all is the most fundamental aspect of our existence. If you think about it, subjective experience is the only thing that exists. All of physics stems from subjective experience. Physics is basically a systematic describtion of the patterns and regularities that we experience and perceive. Example - we see that objects always fall down when dropped - we use gravity to describe this pattern.

joncrocks 10y ago

In case you weren't aware, what you've described in your second paragraph is very similar to a famous thought experiment known as 'the Chinese room' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

sharemywin 10y ago

I think you need learning for consciousness so I think you would need to write to the if-then rules as well as read from them.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

naasking 10y ago

> If you built an android that had every if-statement imaginable coded into it so that it behaved exactly like a human Except this robot is inconceivable, because it would exceed the size of the universe. The conscious android becomes conceivable when you say its on the human scale and yet still exhibits the same behaviours. > Another issue is the purposelessness of consciousness. Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli, if the resulting behaviors are identical. Isn't there quite a bit of wasted energy and skull space that could be better used for more survival oriented if-statements. All of our behavior seems possible without the associated feelings. This theory does explain the purpose of consciousness and qualia, as this poster explains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11853240

NobleLie 10y ago
Surely there is a mistake when you say such an android would exceed the size of the universe, right? Have you done any calculation or can you cite any source which remotely claims this? Im interested.
- naasking 10y ago
  The English language consists of over 1,000,000 words. Let's suppose only 200,000 in common use, 1/7 are verbs, 1/2 are nouns. Even if you consider only simple sentences consisting of 3 words with subject-verb-object, the number of permutations of subject-verb-object sentences that an English-speaking human can utter are 28,000 * 100,000 * 28,000 = ~78.5 trillion = ~10^13. This doesn't include adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions or anything more complicated we see in real grammars. Now consider that this sentence you're reading is 33 words long, so the number of permutations of such sentences is hundreds of orders of magnitude larger, on the order of 10^10000. The visible universe is estimated to contain 10^80 particles, so even if you could encode a logic gate that could recognize a word in a single particle, it seems you're still just a tad short if you're looking to hard-code intelligent responses. True understanding consists of building a model to generate new facts as needed, amounting to an impressive compression of facts you've already seen.

simonh 10y ago

I think the problem of androids, sometimes referred to as zombies, is based on a fallacy because I don't think it's possible for non-conscious systems to exhibit the behaviours of conscious systems. I do believe that the experience of consciousness is based in a model of consciousness in the brain. This also leads to our ability to form mental models of other beings, systems and processes which enable us to predict or form theories about their behaviour. It's this existence of a model of our mental world in the brain and our brain's interrogation and interaction with it that leads to concious experience. I don't know the details of how that works and I'm no Philosopher so maybe I'm over simplifying, but it seems to me that something along these lines is the most plausible theory. Given this, the existence of such models in the processing system of a correspondent should be testable. You should be able to test the ability of the correspondent to form and generate models of itself, beings, processes and systems and interrogate and mutate those models. One example of such systems are games. My favourite ways to test a chat bot Turing Test style is to try and teach it a game or to introspect on itself and it's understanding and expectations of others. A correspondent that cannot form and process such models cannot be conscious, but if it can then if such models lead to consciousness, by definition it must be concious.

tim333 10y ago

>Why does there have to be experience tied to our reactions to stimuli ? Maybe because we learn stuff before reacting a lot of the time. Say you want to learn some new sport, you might watch it a while to try to figure out what was going on before trying to play. It's going to be hard to figure out if you are not conscious. You could try saying a p-zombie could also be replaying the goal in its mind to figure how the goalie could have stopped it while not being conscious what it's thinking about but it kind of gets to be a bit of a stretch.

aninhumer 10y ago
I'm not sure why that's a stretch? Actually feeling and experiencing things is not necessary for any part of that process.