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They don't have a conscious experience.

by a13n 8y ago

schiffern 8y ago
I happen to agree with your conclusion, but since we're not part of "they," neither of us can know for sure. That's my point. Merely by examining the hardware, the human brain doesn't look like it should support consciousness either. Our inability to identify consciousness by inspection does not deny consciousness in vivo, why should it do so in silico? Re: burden of proof, let me be clear what I'm saying here. In silico consciousness has not been proven or ruled out, because we have not yet developed a material definition of consciousness, ie one that can be applied merely be examining the hardware. It's not that we've disproven it (as "they don't have conscious experience" suggests), it's that we don't yet even know what we should be disproving! It's not like we have a Consciousness Detector Box ala C&H, which flawlessly classifies all human brains as conscious merely by examining the configuration of the atoms in the box. All we have are functional definitions which look at human behavior. If we don't even know conscious hardware+software when we see it (namely our brains), how can we say for sure whether X is or isn't conscious, for any arbitrary X?
- visarga 8y ago
  > because we have not yet developed a material definition of consciousness, ie one that can be applied merely be examining the hardware It's not a metaphysical puffy thing (unexplainable or inscrutable) or a property of the brain itself - it's the ability of an agent to act in an environment in a way that maximises its rewards. Biological rewards are tied to survival and self reproduction. So consciousness is what happens when there is an agent, an environment and a stream of rewards to be gained, where the agent learns to understand its situation and acts in an intelligent way, learning from its past mistakes and experiences. All these concepts are covered by unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. That's a material definition of consciousness.
marviel 8y ago
Can you define that?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jawarner 8y ago
Of course they do. Our neurons generate conscious experience, and, assuming there's nothing superphysical about our own biology, it's natural to believe that all matter has conscious experience in some shape or form.

They don't have a conscious experience.

by a13n 8y ago

They don't have a conscious experience.

I happen to agree with your conclusion, but since we're not part of "they," neither of us can know for sure. That's my point. Merely by examining the hardware, the human brain doesn't look like it should support consciousness either. Our inability to identify consciousness by inspection does not deny consciousness in vivo, why should it do so in silico? Re: burden of proof, let me be clear what I'm saying here. In silico consciousness has not been proven or ruled out, because we have not yet developed a material definition of consciousness, ie one that can be applied merely be examining the hardware. It's not that we've disproven it (as "they don't have conscious experience" suggests), it's that we don't yet even know what we should be disproving! It's not like we have a Consciousness Detector Box ala C&H, which flawlessly classifies all human brains as conscious merely by examining the configuration of the atoms in the box. All we have are functional definitions which look at human behavior. If we don't even know conscious hardware+software when we see it (namely our brains), how can we say for sure whether X is or isn't conscious, for any arbitrary X?

visarga 8y ago
> because we have not yet developed a material definition of consciousness, ie one that can be applied merely be examining the hardware It's not a metaphysical puffy thing (unexplainable or inscrutable) or a property of the brain itself - it's the ability of an agent to act in an environment in a way that maximises its rewards. Biological rewards are tied to survival and self reproduction. So consciousness is what happens when there is an agent, an environment and a stream of rewards to be gained, where the agent learns to understand its situation and acts in an intelligent way, learning from its past mistakes and experiences. All these concepts are covered by unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. That's a material definition of consciousness.

marviel 8y ago

Can you define that?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jawarner 8y ago

Of course they do. Our neurons generate conscious experience, and, assuming there's nothing superphysical about our own biology, it's natural to believe that all matter has conscious experience in some shape or form.