9 ms·

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitte

by dilap 7y ago

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and let it grow up, or somehow clone an existing brain...tricky no doubt, but again, in principle solvable.) So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? On the one hand, you might argue of course not, it’s just a computer; computers “obviously” don’t have feelings. It’s just bunch of bits. A precise collection of patterns of electrical charges evolving in time according to rigid rules. On the other hand, is our own biological brain any different? We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. Can the biological substrate of the complex arrangements really matter? Maybe consciousness is like a “soul”, it’s a completely untestable, untouchable “ghost” that can inhabit anything. So maybe everything really does feel, in its own way? Maybe my computer already has some form of consciousness...

platz 7y ago
If you create zombies people are going to be upset with you.
- ngvrnd 7y ago
  only if they can tell.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.
- etrautmann 7y ago
  As a neuroscientist, I have the opposite intuition. If we swap out one Neuron with a digital version you’ll be the same person. Do that 84B times and at the end of the day I see absolutely no reason why you would lose consciousness or sense of self.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Neurons are only part of the brain (50% ?). Glia have been shown to be part of the NMDA repair/replace cycle [0]. And that's just some prelim stuff. We've no idea what else the other cells may/not be doing yet. Just replacing neurons is unlikely to replicate a brain's functions. You need the whole caboodle. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=glia+cells+NMDA&atb=v173-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=glia+cells+NMDA&atb=v173-1&ia=web
  - arnoooooo 7y ago
    That only works if neurons do generate consciousness. The only thing we know is that their activity seems to correlate with consciousness. My guess is that you can't build a digital Neuron, at least not one that has consciousness properties. That's because I take neurons to be what consciousness looks like when viewed through our senses.
    - hackinthebochs 7y ago
      But what's special about neurons aside from the causal relationships it has with the rest of the system? If its utility to consciousness is nothing but its causal relationships then a digital replica will support consciousness just the same.
      - arnoooooo 7y ago
        "nothing but causal relationships" is indeed all you'd need, provided they go the materialist way, i.e. that consciousness comes from specific arrangements of neurons. I don't think that makes sense, as nobody can give the slightest hint of a theory that would make that work. The reverse theory, that consciousness is primary, makes more sense to me. In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital replicas will not have consciousness, they will be a mirror of what consciousness looks like when seen through our senses.
adwn 7y ago
To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone who believes that an AGI will automatically be conscious. But then again, I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of consciousness from anyone...
- dbqpdb 7y ago
  If you haven't already, I highly suggest you read Permutation City by Greg Egan, these kinds of questions are explored in great depth.
  - rapnie 7y ago
    Yes, that is indeed a great read!
- mannykannot 7y ago
  Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious. Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game? This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even just that some sort of conscious machine intelligence is possible, it is merely intended to suggest that Searle's line of argument does not show its impossibility.
  - DonaldFisk 7y ago
    There are two distinct meanings of consciousness being used here: my own experience of consciousness in me (it's always first person), and the conclusions people make about consciousness in other people or animals - that they're conscious because they're like them in important ways. The Chinese Room argument is confusing because it conflates intelligence (understanding Chinese) with consciousness (knowing what it's like to understand Chinese). So I simplified the problem, by replacing the ability to understand Chinese with the ability to see in colour: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html While the simplified system is able to distinguish colours, how does it have the first person experience of seeing in colour?
phn 7y ago
We probably are not yet able to tell if we can simulate a brain fully, with something we call a computer nowadays. If we can, then indeed consciousness comes from the collective function of individual cells. But maybe there's more to the workings of the brain?
- criddell 7y ago
  Or maybe there's less to consciousness.
  - phn 7y ago
    Depends on the person :) Joking aside, I agree with you. My point was simply that we're very ignorant about the brain and its workings, one way or another.
jhanschoo 7y ago
> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? I think there are more easily accessible examples that investigate this problem closer. Are animals conscious? How about children? How about very slow people?
- awb 7y ago
  Or better: when does an embryo become conscious?
- dilap 7y ago
  So me it seems intuitively obvious that the answers are yes, yes, and yes. Even ants seem to have some sort of consciousness to me. But of course it's completely unknowable. Maybe every other single creature on earth is just an unfeeling automaton, and only I feel. But I doubt it. ;-)
  - nprateem 7y ago
    That's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect an unfeeling automaton to write -- or even believe -- to try to trick me into thinking it has feelings
mirekrusin 7y ago
It's interesting we don't have much idea about it yet. It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight. What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness? What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc. What happens in cases of distorted/malfunctioning brain schizophrenia etc. I've read somewhere that if you put implant which mimics neuron activity, your brain will build structure around it just like with normal neurons. What would happen if you take 1 square mm of brain and replace it with implant, slowly replacing the whole brain? What happens when you attach brain to larger structure/orders of magnitude more complex one, will conciousness transfer there? Can you disconnect original brain leaving conciousness? As we don't have powerfull computers yet to compete with brain, is it possible to connect two brains instead? Memory is likely playing central role. You are what you remember it seems. Can you boost memory capacity with some implants, will it make more-conciousness? There are many not yet feasible experiments, but some should be. Also completely brutal in many cases.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  No idea about connecting brains, but dividing one actually works and you arguably get 2 independent consciousness with different set of modules available to them (one has language processing that the other one lacks for example). Look up split brain experiments.
  - mirekrusin 7y ago
    That's interesting; points towards "emergent from low level structure". I wonder if it's possible to quantify concousness and how much of it you loose it. It seems like it's not half/half split, ie. 1+1 != 2; can you split them again and how far you can do it. I also wonder what would happen if you left them to be for a while and then connect them back, would they merge or stay diverged. Maybe you could run it on ordinary neural net, it would be easier to quantify. Maybe some numbers would reveal something interesting, ie. maybe neural nets are exponentially better when connected and that's the whole trick. It won't answer questions about counciousness directly though.
hazeii 7y ago
There is an extension of that idea, which is to suppose that we could make a silicon neuron that can perfectly replace an organic one (state and all). Then you can replace neurons in the brain one by one, and the brain carries on functioning exactly like it always has. Eventually the brain is entirely silicon, but to the owner subjectively nothing has changed, they are as 'conscious' as they ever were.
zyxzevn 7y ago
Your computer simulation does not solve the "stopping problem". This means that the artificial brain does not know what is good or what is bad. It can not know everything about itself. So the brain will be completely unstable and fail after a while. On the other hand, if there is some guiding (like a programmer), the artificial brain can be functional. If the real brain would be guided by some kind of consciousness, this would work the same. The consciousness needs to be in a different dimension, in a way that physics does not change. So it would be like a 2D pool table, where we can describe exactly the movement of every ball. But sometimes a ball gets hit by a player, outside the table. And this gives us events that bring the balls to a certain direction. In similar sense the brain can be played by a consciousness to get it working. In a way that is very hard to detect with physical instruments.
- david-gpu 7y ago
  Do you mean the halting problem in Turing machines? Okay, we have a proof that a machine can't solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine, but we can build algorithms that solve it for some cases. Now, can a human solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine? We obviously can't, either. Make the machine complex enough and we can't wrap our minds around it.
WhompingWindows 7y ago
The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have very serious personality deformation. So no, I don't think it's possible to create a simulated brain that behaves similarly as a human, as the biological medium is in a constant state of dissolution, repair, evolution, and adaptation. This is how we learn, get stressed, get tired, get certain emotions...it's a whole new layer of programming you'd need to perfect beyond just replicating a brain at one moment in time. A brain in silico would be apples:oranges different than a biological brain.
- n4r9 7y ago
  I'm get your point but I also think you've answered it yourself. You can give time and experience to a software mind by programming in that new layer...
  - WhompingWindows 7y ago
    How do you program a software mind to have had infancy, childhood, and a lifetime of social human interaction? I'm saying that's MUCH harder than simply making neural nets to perform specific duties.
    - n4r9 7y ago
      Yeah it'll be harder, but I don't see anything in principle which makes it impossible. If you can simulate the growth and plasticity of the brain to enough precision, then you could probably simulate 20 years of development in a very short time. Maybe I'm making a massively overly pedantic point. It's just that your post began with a claim that certain things "cannot be given" to an artificial mind, which sounded like you were proposing absolute limits to AI.
- osmarks 7y ago
rsiqueira 7y ago
> you start with a baby brain and let it grow up You can grow biological brain structures from stem cell. It's called Brain Organoids and Neural Organoids, that may one day be used in machines and may one day have consciousness properties. Interview about this with Lex Fridman (MIT Artificial Intelligence teacher) and Paola Arlotta (Harvard brain neuroscientist): https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/ https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/ > We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. This is called "emergent property" (see "Emergence" in Wikipedia), that is a sub-area of Complex Systems theory. There's a theory that states it may be possible that consciousness may appear as an emergent property from a high complex, dynamical and evolutionary AI system. > imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation Some paradigms to approach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence / Superintelligence) are: 1. Simulate the brain in low level details; 2. Simulate the functioning of higher level structures of the brain (cortical columns, visual cortex, hippocampus...); 3. Create artificial neurons (that can be used to neural networks, deep learning, etc.); 4. Simulating simple brains and nervous systems (e.g jellyfish, insects, C.elegans connectome project, etc) to understand how intelligence works; 5. Simulating the behavior of the brain ("cognitive architectures"); 6. Creating en evolutionary system that could converge to brain-like funcionality.
willtim 7y ago
> imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) The laws of physics start to become relevant here. It is quite likely that it is not possible to simulate a human brain using a classical computer, at least not at any kind of speed such that it can experience the world as we do.
- deelowe 7y ago
  Agreed. Are Kurzweil's predictions holding true? I've not read any of his work, but I recall many doubting whether it would stand the test of time due to similar concerns around physical limitations.
eeZah7Ux 7y ago
> An interesting Not really. > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Obviously yes. Either that or our brains are filled with magic unicorn dust.
russdill 7y ago
The Goff answer to this is that since you've used intrinsically conscious matter to build this machine, it is conscious.
otikik 7y ago
Feelings are just that: numbers. A combination of tiny electrical currents and chemicals moving around inside your head. I would never make a copy of my brain (or somebody else's) with the intention of disconnecting it later.
iak8god 7y ago
> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? I worry we'll never know the answer to this, even if we manage to pull off such a simulation.
infradig 7y ago
Ok, you can have the simulation of cells and neurotramsmitters, but what is the model of how they work? You are justmaking stuff up. It is not the same at all. It's cargo-cult level hubris.
coleifer 7y ago
That's the boat problem. Over time theseus' ship had every board and nail replaced (to preserve it). Is the ship still the same ship?

by dilap 7y ago

platz 7y ago

If you create zombies people are going to be upset with you.

ngvrnd 7y ago
only if they can tell.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.

etrautmann 7y ago
As a neuroscientist, I have the opposite intuition. If we swap out one Neuron with a digital version you’ll be the same person. Do that 84B times and at the end of the day I see absolutely no reason why you would lose consciousness or sense of self.
- Balgair 7y ago
  Neurons are only part of the brain (50% ?). Glia have been shown to be part of the NMDA repair/replace cycle [0]. And that's just some prelim stuff. We've no idea what else the other cells may/not be doing yet. Just replacing neurons is unlikely to replicate a brain's functions. You need the whole caboodle. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=glia+cells+NMDA&atb=v173-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=glia+cells+NMDA&atb=v173-1&ia=web
- arnoooooo 7y ago
  That only works if neurons do generate consciousness. The only thing we know is that their activity seems to correlate with consciousness. My guess is that you can't build a digital Neuron, at least not one that has consciousness properties. That's because I take neurons to be what consciousness looks like when viewed through our senses.
  - hackinthebochs 7y ago
    But what's special about neurons aside from the causal relationships it has with the rest of the system? If its utility to consciousness is nothing but its causal relationships then a digital replica will support consciousness just the same.
    - arnoooooo 7y ago
      "nothing but causal relationships" is indeed all you'd need, provided they go the materialist way, i.e. that consciousness comes from specific arrangements of neurons. I don't think that makes sense, as nobody can give the slightest hint of a theory that would make that work. The reverse theory, that consciousness is primary, makes more sense to me. In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital replicas will not have consciousness, they will be a mirror of what consciousness looks like when seen through our senses.

adwn 7y ago

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone who believes that an AGI will automatically be conscious. But then again, I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of consciousness from anyone...

dbqpdb 7y ago
If you haven't already, I highly suggest you read Permutation City by Greg Egan, these kinds of questions are explored in great depth.
- rapnie 7y ago
  Yes, that is indeed a great read!
mannykannot 7y ago
Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious. Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game? This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even just that some sort of conscious machine intelligence is possible, it is merely intended to suggest that Searle's line of argument does not show its impossibility.
- DonaldFisk 7y ago
  There are two distinct meanings of consciousness being used here: my own experience of consciousness in me (it's always first person), and the conclusions people make about consciousness in other people or animals - that they're conscious because they're like them in important ways. The Chinese Room argument is confusing because it conflates intelligence (understanding Chinese) with consciousness (knowing what it's like to understand Chinese). So I simplified the problem, by replacing the ability to understand Chinese with the ability to see in colour: http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/blog/ChineseRoom.html While the simplified system is able to distinguish colours, how does it have the first person experience of seeing in colour?

phn 7y ago

We probably are not yet able to tell if we can simulate a brain fully, with something we call a computer nowadays. If we can, then indeed consciousness comes from the collective function of individual cells. But maybe there's more to the workings of the brain?

criddell 7y ago
Or maybe there's less to consciousness.
- phn 7y ago
  Depends on the person :) Joking aside, I agree with you. My point was simply that we're very ignorant about the brain and its workings, one way or another.

jhanschoo 7y ago

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? I think there are more easily accessible examples that investigate this problem closer. Are animals conscious? How about children? How about very slow people?

awb 7y ago
Or better: when does an embryo become conscious?
dilap 7y ago
So me it seems intuitively obvious that the answers are yes, yes, and yes. Even ants seem to have some sort of consciousness to me. But of course it's completely unknowable. Maybe every other single creature on earth is just an unfeeling automaton, and only I feel. But I doubt it. ;-)
- nprateem 7y ago
  That's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect an unfeeling automaton to write -- or even believe -- to try to trick me into thinking it has feelings

mirekrusin 7y ago

It's interesting we don't have much idea about it yet. It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight. What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness? What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc. What happens in cases of distorted/malfunctioning brain schizophrenia etc. I've read somewhere that if you put implant which mimics neuron activity, your brain will build structure around it just like with normal neurons. What would happen if you take 1 square mm of brain and replace it with implant, slowly replacing the whole brain? What happens when you attach brain to larger structure/orders of magnitude more complex one, will conciousness transfer there? Can you disconnect original brain leaving conciousness? As we don't have powerfull computers yet to compete with brain, is it possible to connect two brains instead? Memory is likely playing central role. You are what you remember it seems. Can you boost memory capacity with some implants, will it make more-conciousness? There are many not yet feasible experiments, but some should be. Also completely brutal in many cases.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
No idea about connecting brains, but dividing one actually works and you arguably get 2 independent consciousness with different set of modules available to them (one has language processing that the other one lacks for example). Look up split brain experiments.
- mirekrusin 7y ago
  That's interesting; points towards "emergent from low level structure". I wonder if it's possible to quantify concousness and how much of it you loose it. It seems like it's not half/half split, ie. 1+1 != 2; can you split them again and how far you can do it. I also wonder what would happen if you left them to be for a while and then connect them back, would they merge or stay diverged. Maybe you could run it on ordinary neural net, it would be easier to quantify. Maybe some numbers would reveal something interesting, ie. maybe neural nets are exponentially better when connected and that's the whole trick. It won't answer questions about counciousness directly though.

hazeii 7y ago

There is an extension of that idea, which is to suppose that we could make a silicon neuron that can perfectly replace an organic one (state and all). Then you can replace neurons in the brain one by one, and the brain carries on functioning exactly like it always has. Eventually the brain is entirely silicon, but to the owner subjectively nothing has changed, they are as 'conscious' as they ever were.

zyxzevn 7y ago

Your computer simulation does not solve the "stopping problem". This means that the artificial brain does not know what is good or what is bad. It can not know everything about itself. So the brain will be completely unstable and fail after a while. On the other hand, if there is some guiding (like a programmer), the artificial brain can be functional. If the real brain would be guided by some kind of consciousness, this would work the same. The consciousness needs to be in a different dimension, in a way that physics does not change. So it would be like a 2D pool table, where we can describe exactly the movement of every ball. But sometimes a ball gets hit by a player, outside the table. And this gives us events that bring the balls to a certain direction. In similar sense the brain can be played by a consciousness to get it working. In a way that is very hard to detect with physical instruments.

david-gpu 7y ago
Do you mean the halting problem in Turing machines? Okay, we have a proof that a machine can't solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine, but we can build algorithms that solve it for some cases. Now, can a human solve the halting problem for every arbitrary Turing machine? We obviously can't, either. Make the machine complex enough and we can't wrap our minds around it.

WhompingWindows 7y ago

The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have very serious personality deformation. So no, I don't think it's possible to create a simulated brain that behaves similarly as a human, as the biological medium is in a constant state of dissolution, repair, evolution, and adaptation. This is how we learn, get stressed, get tired, get certain emotions...it's a whole new layer of programming you'd need to perfect beyond just replicating a brain at one moment in time. A brain in silico would be apples:oranges different than a biological brain.

n4r9 7y ago
I'm get your point but I also think you've answered it yourself. You can give time and experience to a software mind by programming in that new layer...
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  How do you program a software mind to have had infancy, childhood, and a lifetime of social human interaction? I'm saying that's MUCH harder than simply making neural nets to perform specific duties.
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Yeah it'll be harder, but I don't see anything in principle which makes it impossible. If you can simulate the growth and plasticity of the brain to enough precision, then you could probably simulate 20 years of development in a very short time. Maybe I'm making a massively overly pedantic point. It's just that your post began with a claim that certain things "cannot be given" to an artificial mind, which sounded like you were proposing absolute limits to AI.
osmarks 7y ago

rsiqueira 7y ago

> you start with a baby brain and let it grow up You can grow biological brain structures from stem cell. It's called Brain Organoids and Neural Organoids, that may one day be used in machines and may one day have consciousness properties. Interview about this with Lex Fridman (MIT Artificial Intelligence teacher) and Paola Arlotta (Harvard brain neuroscientist): https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/ https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/ > We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. This is called "emergent property" (see "Emergence" in Wikipedia), that is a sub-area of Complex Systems theory. There's a theory that states it may be possible that consciousness may appear as an emergent property from a high complex, dynamical and evolutionary AI system. > imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation Some paradigms to approach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence / Superintelligence) are: 1. Simulate the brain in low level details; 2. Simulate the functioning of higher level structures of the brain (cortical columns, visual cortex, hippocampus...); 3. Create artificial neurons (that can be used to neural networks, deep learning, etc.); 4. Simulating simple brains and nervous systems (e.g jellyfish, insects, C.elegans connectome project, etc) to understand how intelligence works; 5. Simulating the behavior of the brain ("cognitive architectures"); 6. Creating en evolutionary system that could converge to brain-like funcionality.

willtim 7y ago

> imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) The laws of physics start to become relevant here. It is quite likely that it is not possible to simulate a human brain using a classical computer, at least not at any kind of speed such that it can experience the world as we do.

deelowe 7y ago
Agreed. Are Kurzweil's predictions holding true? I've not read any of his work, but I recall many doubting whether it would stand the test of time due to similar concerns around physical limitations.

eeZah7Ux 7y ago

> An interesting Not really. > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Obviously yes. Either that or our brains are filled with magic unicorn dust.

russdill 7y ago

The Goff answer to this is that since you've used intrinsically conscious matter to build this machine, it is conscious.

otikik 7y ago

Feelings are just that: numbers. A combination of tiny electrical currents and chemicals moving around inside your head. I would never make a copy of my brain (or somebody else's) with the intention of disconnecting it later.

iak8god 7y ago

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? I worry we'll never know the answer to this, even if we manage to pull off such a simulation.

infradig 7y ago

Ok, you can have the simulation of cells and neurotramsmitters, but what is the model of how they work? You are justmaking stuff up. It is not the same at all. It's cargo-cult level hubris.

coleifer 7y ago

That's the boat problem. Over time theseus' ship had every board and nail replaced (to preserve it). Is the ship still the same ship?