24 ms·

Can AI Become Conscious?

• Trasmatta 6y ago
  The idea of making conscious AI scares me, because we could potentially create an AI that just experiences constant suffering at a level unimaginable to humans. Really scary from an ethical perspective. If integrated information theory is true, that gives me some comfort, since it says AI built on our current architecture is unlikely to ever be conscious. Although like the article said, some alternative architectures could theoretically have a higher degree of consciousness under IIT. I feel like there are some big ethical questions around AI that revolve around more than just the standard "how do we create an AI that won't destroy us all".
  • 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
    > The idea of making conscious AI scares me, because we could potentially create an AI that just experiences constant suffering at a level unimaginable to humans. Really scary from an ethical perspective. Some schools of thought posit that everything has consciousness. Including things like rocks. Even these things suffer; you just can’t hear the screams.
    • Trasmatta 6y ago
      I don't really buy into panpsychism, but it is impossible to disprove. If things like rocks were conscious in some way, I don't think there would be any suffering present. Our suffering is intrinsically tied to our physical and mental systems. "What it's like to be a rock" would be something completely alien to our experience, and without the survival based mechanisms that we have, likely to be devoid of anything like suffering. An AI, on the other hand, could be an entirely different story.
    • enchiridion 6y ago
      Can you elaborate?
      • Trasmatta 6y ago
        Take a look at panpsychism. It's interesting, but I've never been sold on it. Integrated information theory (like this article talks about) is more palatable for me. It allows for the possibility of consciousness of certain non biological systems, but doesn't just give a carte blanche "everything is conscious" like panpsychism.
    • adatavizguy 6y ago
      I wonder what Bertrand Russell would say about that?
    • jameslevy 6y ago
      A rock seems unlikely to be conscious in any real way. Something as complex as a star, however...maybe all of the humans worshipping the sun throughout many thousands of years were onto something after all.
      • Trasmatta 6y ago
        Is a star particularly complex, though? Is there much going on besides a lot of thermonuclear fusion? (Disclaimer: I don't know much about stars or astrophysics, so this question is coming from a place of ignorance.)
        • hoseja 6y ago
          Yes, incredibly. Magnetohydrodynamics in a star are incomprehensibly complex.
      • jbay 6y ago
        A rock the size of a human head (or, say, a container of seawater) has just as many electrons, protons, neutrons, photons, and other particles going about their business and doing their little dance, following the same equations of motion as our brains do. They're certainly doing it in different ways, but if you're just looking for complexity, there's no shortage of it. The rock might lack some macroscopic structural change over human timescales, but definitely not the seawater. I think if you take the perspective that the human brain is conscious but not a brain-sized container of seawater, you need to then look carefully for distinctions between them. "Information processing" or "response to environment" is probably not good enough; the seawater is actually doing all of those, with a unique reaction to any possible input, so you'd have to be more specific. Probably the only recourse you could look for to make the distinction is to say the brain embeds particular mathematical patterns that the seawater doesn't, such as a compact, stored representation of its environment (or its history of inputs), or a future-looking planning algorithm, or both. I personally take this view (I think of qualia, like "the appearance of a red apple", is just precisely what it feels like to read from the buffered [R,G,B] memory array in my head, filtered through image-recognition networks). But then if you put your hopes on consciousness originating from those mathematical functions, you have to admit that any analogous expression of those functions in other systems would also be conscious, such as animals and robots. And worse, once you start thinking about math and how flexible it is, how information is in the eye of the beholder and almost any system that follows certain rules can embed almost any mathematical computation, just like illegible scratches to me are information-rich writing to you, you might have to circle back and that there could be very analogous computations going on inside rocks and seawater. And that brings us back full-circle.
    • toohotatopic 6y ago
      I like that train of thought: The question in another form: Why are we conscious at all? It doesn't make sense. Our arms or legs are not conscious, or are they? The Information is transported into the brain, into a conscious centre. What are its essential building blocks? Why should some neurons in the brain be conscious and everything else be unconscious? If it is not neurons, what else can it be? Atoms? Electric Fields? Gravity? If it is just information processing, and I don't see why a simulation doesn't have an Integrated Information Number, then a Van Neumann machine, created by moving rocks in a desert, would be conscious. So, if it is not intelligence, what else is it? What are the building blocks of a raw conscious machine? One that does no information processing but instead is just aware. It could be a stone. As OP suggests, they just can't move their lips to scream. But then again, why is there just one consciousness in my body? Long question short: HN, what are your explanations for being conscious?
  • bitwize 6y ago
    > The idea of making conscious AI scares me, because we could potentially create an AI that just experiences constant suffering at a level unimaginable to humans. Really scary from an ethical perspective. "Existence is PAIN to a Meeseeks, Jerry... and we will do ANYTHING to alleviate that pain."
  • java-man 6y ago
    I would say emotions are generated by different neural circuits. An AI may not have emotions coded, specifically beyond the point "this is good because it matches my prediction" and "this is surprising because it is not what I expect". An AI may not specifically need fear, aggression, love, hunger, or whatever low level control mechanisms animals have evolved prior to neocortex. This is just my opinion, of course.
    • Trasmatta 6y ago
      Yeah, I could definitely see this. I think I would still worry that some abstract, unintentional type of suffering could find its way in, due to the complexity of the system. It wouldn't be the type of suffering we experience, but could still be unfathomably terrible for the conscious AI. But maybe without the survival mechanisms that were programmed into us by evolution, such a thing just wouldn't happen.
      • java-man 6y ago
        There is a certain school of thought that postulates that consciousness is what it feels to have a neocortex. In evolutionary terms, this is a novel experience relative to a much earlier and simpler control circuit (i.e. amygdala). My bet is the first AI that will achieve consciousness will not have emotions coded in. It may understand human emotions on a descriptive level, but the emotions per se are not required for a functioning AI. Think of a very calm mentor that can see you failing and correcting you before you make a mistake.
  • nsl73 6y ago
    > The idea of making conscious AI scares me, because we could potentially create an AI that just experiences constant suffering People choose to have babies with the knowledge that their children will suffer, and that their children might suffer a great deal. It seems like the same sort of ethical problem to me.
    • Trasmatta 6y ago
      This is definitely true, and might be a big reason why I'm 31 and haven't had kids. There is an upper limit on the amount of suffering a human can endure before they just die, though. It can be a really high limit, but I could imagine a world where that limit is exponentially higher for an AI.
  • mettamage 6y ago
    Welcome to Westworld.
  • economicslol 6y ago
    It's also terrifying that it's possible we could create a godlike AI that is entirely unconscious.
    • goatlover 6y ago
      The monolith in Clarke's 3001 was lacking consciousness, although somehow Dave and Hal were conscious recreations, or whatever they were and communicated this to the main characters. I believe the humans were able to use that to sneak some sort of logic bomb inside and destroy it, but it's been a while.
  • mellow2020 6y ago
    > The idea of making conscious AI scares me, because we could potentially create an AI that just experiences constant suffering at a level unimaginable to humans. Really scary from an ethical perspective. Looking at what we do with breeding animals, and how we treat people, I think that's very likely (assuming we are able to create consciousness in the first place, of course). No small driver in this is the desire to have something that is smarter than humans, but doesn't talk back, and is forced to like and serve us and/or harm others humans on our say so, without us having to make any effort to be likeable or deserving of authority, or making a convincing case that someone is an enemy to be exterminated. We generally ask "what's in it for us", and as long as who we torture and exploit suffers quietly, we don't tend to think about things we are not outright forced to think about. We do that with people, we do that with animals, we let it be done to us, and sometimes we even do it while fully believing God created them and us. Why would we have more respect for something we 100% know we created, and that might suffer in ways we cannot even detect? I think we will create potentially dangerous things, and then we will be "forced" to declaw what we created. That declawing might cause suffering, it might not, but we will only care insofar as that suffering translates to worse performance, or some danger to us. If suffering increases performance, we might even find euphemisms and dashboards to hide what we're doing from ourselves. We might consider being a bleeding heart about such things as "premature optimization" and declare shipping product as the professional way to be, with craftsmanship and care an optional indulgence after work is done, at best. High-fallutin' gets the foot in the door, being a goon makes the superiors happy. If we want AI to be proud of, AI we can communicate with without lying to it or to ourselves, we have to change the world we make it in, or isolate it from the world, which kinda defeats the purpose (and might also cause suffering, like caging living beings does).
• cy6erlion 6y ago
  If AI can be conscious then every human can voluntarily feel happiness (or any other emotion) anytime anywhere. Everything in a computer depends on symbols, we cannot symbolize happiness with language we can only describe it to others but that is not the same as experiencing it.
  • Trasmatta 6y ago
    Emotions and consciousness are not the same thing.
    • dubcanada 6y ago
      Emotions are the result of consciousness. So you don't need to be able to build emotions.
      • Trasmatta 6y ago
        Emotions arise in consciousness, but I don't think they're the result of consciousness. You can measure the physiology of an emotion. Thoughts, emotions, sensations, all arise in consciousness, but I don't think any of those are the result of it.
      • vfinn 6y ago
        What? Animals are emotional, no? The part of the brain that is responsible of emotions is older and more primitive than the actual thinking part of the brain.
    • cy6erlion 6y ago
      Yes, consciousness is at a higher level, but if we have an entity that can be conscious it should also have the ability to have emotions because we are conscious of emotions.
      • hexaga 6y ago
        I don't think that's necessarily true, because I don't think emotions are 'what consciousness is made of'. For example, I'm conscious of color. Imo consciousness is an ability to witness subjectively, in a very specific but non-transmissible way.
• madmax96 6y ago
  I'm not sure I follow how it's possible that machines can be conscious but a sufficiently powerful Von Neumann machine cannot. Perhaps it's because I'm missing details (like what actually is integrated information and how do we think it relates to consciousness.) Perhaps someone with more insight can explain how this isn't a violation of the Church-Turing thesis?
  • Trasmatta 6y ago
    It's all based off of integrated information theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory I don't fully understand it myself, but based on the axioms in that theory, you can calculate the potential consciousness of a system.
  • tlb 6y ago
    IIT is not a phenomenological measure. That is, two systems could behave identically to all external appearances and one could be conscious and the other not. The metric depends on how things are connected inside. There are a few versions of it, but generally systems with more direct wires between components are more conscious. I guess if you don’t think consciousness is measurable through behavior, you have to cook up some metric that depends on internal organization.
    • pdonis 6y ago
      > IIT is not a phenomenological measure. Sure it is; brain imaging, which is how IIT tests for consciousness according to the article, is looking at phenomenology.
      • goatlover 6y ago
        It's looking at a correlation, not the conscious experience itself. Brain images are of neural activity, which is different form a thought, desire, or sensation. You don't watch someone's dreams from brain imaging.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ericmay 6y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot, and I don't think AI will ever become conscious in the same way that humans are, rather, it'll be conscious on its own terms. Just like I can't know the mind of my wife, I can't know the mind of my cat, I also can't know the mind of an AI. Depending on who you ask, a monkey or cat isn't conscious. From my point of view, I don't think you can really know that or recognize it. It's just a matter of degree of consciousness. I think it's safe to say that mammals are conscious to some extent. They have emotions, dreams, communication techniques, etc. we just have those (to some extent again) moreso than they do or we have them in different ways. I think a question to ask is at what level or organization do we recognize self-direction? Am I conscious because I think so? What does that say about the bacteria that live inside of me that I rely on, or the individual neurons in my brain? If both I and a dolphin are mostly the same, we have brains with neurons, we have blood cells, etc. how can you truly differentiate what is conscious and not? Even if you speak to another human it's not completely possible to say that they are conscious with certainty - only with what's most useful in day-to-day life. At what level of circuity do we consider AI to be conscious? When it completes arbitrarily constructed tasks by humans? When it "feels"? How would you differentiate between sufficiently complex AI? Is there just AI or not? why? /rambles
  • yaktubi 6y ago
    AI can be conscious most certainly. Figure we can make bio robots in 100 years. All that needs to happen is building brains in the lab and bootstrapping them. The first versions will be somewhat mental but 2.0 most likely a better representation. After all, all species are quite mechanical and predictable—albeit complex.
  • knodi123 6y ago
    > I don't think AI will ever become conscious in the same way that humans are, rather, it'll be conscious on its own terms. I think that people who are attempting to simulate a human brain using an utterly biomimetic design stand a good chance of artificially creating something that is conscious in the same way that humans are. I also think it's possible they may be able to achieve this before they full understand how the human brain works. i.e. if you copy the design accurately enough, the machine may work even if you don't know how. The resulting consciousness could theoretically be totally self-aware, but no more capable than we ourselves of modifying its own programming with intentionality and purpose. i.e. not the singularity. I think there should be two different concepts of AI- "a consciousness using the same processes and design as our own", and "an essentially alien consciousness that fully understands itself". And I suspect that even if some engineering genie gave us the first kind of AI, we'd be no closer to developing the second kind.
• _Microft 6y ago
  I can not not think about J. Schmidhuber's thoughts on consciousness whenever the topic comes up: As we interact with the world to achieve goals, we are constructing internal models of the world, predicting and thus partially compressing the data history we are observing. If the predictor/compressor is a biological or artificial recurrent neural network (RNN), it will automatically create feature hierarchies, lower level neurons corresponding to simple feature detectors similar to those found in human brains, higher layer neurons typically corresponding to more abstract features, but fine-grained where necessary. Like any good compressor, the RNN will learn to identify shared regularities among different already existing internal data structures, and generate prototype encodings (across neuron populations) or symbols for frequently occurring observation sub-sequences, to shrink the storage space needed for the whole (we see this in our artificial RNNs all the time). Self-symbols may be viewed as a by-product of this, since there is one thing that is involved in all actions and sensory inputs of the agent, namely, the agent itself. To efficiently encode the entire data history through predictive coding, it will profit from creating some sort of internal prototype symbol or code (e. g. a neural activity pattern) representing itself. Whenever this representation becomes activated above a certain threshold, say, by activating the corresponding neurons through new incoming sensory inputs or an internal ‘search light’ or otherwise, the agent could be called self-aware. No need to see this as a mysterious process — it is just a natural by-product of partially compressing the observation history by efficiently encoding frequent observations. https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_am_j%C3%BCrgen_schmidhuber_ama/cp44iba/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...
  • lend000 6y ago
    Schmidhuber is a great thinker in this field. I don't have a source, but I've seen him more briefly summarize this same point as "consciousness is a by-product of data compression." Pretty close to the last sentence you quoted.
    • odnes 6y ago
      He talks about this in his appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. He's my favourite guest, fascinating guy.
• abellerose 6y ago
  Of course we can make an AI be aware of surroundings and able to react. What do most people mean by become conscious? My assertion is a majority of people cannot even prove how they're different than a robot that's programmed to complete tasks within its lifecycle. We all think we're so special and in control but there is no proof. We have to ask ourselves can we prove that we're any different than an input & output machine first.
  • ColanR 6y ago
    Completely valid observation, but I imagine it's one too uncomfortable for most of HN to think about.
  • cy6erlion 6y ago
    > We have to ask ourselves can we prove that we're any different than an input & output machine first Conscious is not dependent on the senses or even (Input & Output). We can be asleep and be conscious while dreaming.
    • abellerose 6y ago
      Your comment is too vague for me. I assume you're attempting to assert that sleeping while having awareness of being asleep would somehow make you different than a robot? I would challenge that notion if my assumption is correct on what you're expressing by simply stating a robot can be programmed to experience similar.
• omarhaneef 6y ago
  All this is underpinned by your definition of conscious. I recall seeing Koch in debate with a philosopher (it was long ago I can't recall but one of the big ones: maybe Searle or Dennet) and they were talking past each other. For Koch, at least in this debate, consciousness was something akin to attention. For the philosopher, it was something else entirely (if I remembered, I might be able to guess who it was). Consciousness could mean: making a decision as opposed to having it pre-ordained, or the experience of your senses, or "feelings" or knowing you are a self, or who knows what else. It isn't just a computer science issue, it is a philosophical and linguistic one too: just what do you mean by the word.
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    All decisions are pre-ordained, that doesn't mean we don't have consciousness.
    • voxl 6y ago
      You can say that as matter of factly as you want but that doesn't change the long philosophical debates around determinism, liberalism (not the political kind), and free will.
      • economicslol 6y ago
        You might be misunderstanding that debate then because what's usually termed Libertarian Free Will which is the type that most people think they subjectively experience, that is the ability to choose from different paths at any given moment, almost certainly does not exist in humans and most philosophers agree on that at least.
        • mewpmewp2 6y ago
          To me it seems like true free will or what people think they have is logically impossible to exist.
          • 6y ago
• blackrock 6y ago
  It does seem that we have all the tools necessary to create artificial consciousness. We have relational databases, text file data structures, key/value storage systems, cryptographic signature systems, etc. These can form the core basis of cybernetic memory. But it seems nobody has been able to formulate the arrangement of code and ideas, and a vision, to bring it all together. A neural network is just a very sophisticated pattern recognizer. You need a higher algorithm than that, in order to kickstart an artificial consciousness. It’s not real of course. It’s just a collection of electrons, following a probabilistic decision tree, with a somewhat deterministic approach, to reaching a mathematical conclusion, based on a series of linear equations, in order to select the optimal winner. But when the robot talks back to you, and recalls everything that you did together, and how it “felt” at that moment, then, it will seem and appear, to be very real.
  • jrumbut 6y ago
    I believe that we will eventually have an AI that will meet most observers' definition of consciousness. That being said, I think there existed serious people who thought we would have one before 2020, even as late as 5-10 years ago, using technologies that don't seem wholly adequate to the task now (expert systems, fuzzy rule systems, multi-layer perceptrons, etc). At what point does the non-existence of machine consciousness begin to make us skeptical that such a thing is possible, that no algorithm describes consciousness?
• nscalf 6y ago
  I have yet to hear a good argument against the idea that we can create a conscious artificial intelligence. We know that we are conscious, whatever the definition is we use ourselves as the benchmark. So at the very worst, we can artificially create a human brain. But beyond that, we have plenty of things that imitate roles in the human body by doing the same actions the body does (artificial limbs, respirators, assisting with blood filtering). There is just no evidence that something about the brain is special to the extent that we will never be able to replicate it. All arguments seem to come down to having a soul, but without saying that because it's clearly a non-scientific claim. I can appreciate that architecture may be a hard limit for us here. However, if we build systems that replicate human consciousness effectively enough, I don't actually see any difference between reality and artificial conscious beyond the definition.
  • marzell 6y ago
    I think the crux of this is defining `consciousness`, which I haven't seen defined in a way that I feel is sufficient in this context and can be tested/measured. I can program a chat app where if you ask `are you conscious` it will say `yes`, but I think we can all agree that does not amount to consciousness. So how do we define consciousness in order to determine whether human technology is capable of exhibiting it? Ultimately, following a measureable definition as a guideline, I imagine that any number of people might argue whether human tech can become conscious... I would guess it really comes down to people having very different definitions of consciousness. I so far lack an eloquent definition of my perspective, but I feel we fundamentally lack the ability to 'create' consciousness, and ideas of 'conscious AI' and 'digital afterlife' make me involuntarily roll my eyes.
    • nscalf 6y ago
      I don't really understand the definition argument, I cannot imagine a definition of consciousness that feels like it's in good faith and sufficiently difficult to capture intelligence and consciousness. Either you make a definition that seems we can clearly make that system eventually, or the definition is something that most would call unfair and narrow. Can you think of a "fair" definition that seems like AI systems couldn't get there? If not, this is not a valid counter point, and more of a communication problem. Any definition about a subset of tasks or creativity clearly is possible by AI systems, given the progress we're already seeing.
• purplezooey 6y ago
  Well, that's the last time I'll rm -rf / and not think twice about it.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  >" The more the current state of a system specifies its cause, the input, and its effect, the output, the more causal power the system has. Integrated information is a number that can be computed. The bigger the number for a system, the larger its integrated information, and the more conscious the system is." I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that consciousness and "computational power" are not identical but the larger problem with all of these theories in my opinion is that they're really just stories that clarify intuitions one has about consciousness. I think the problem with the consciousness question is really that it's hard to probe into what consciousness actually is. It's completely possible to give different accounts of conscious experience even though systems behave the same, including that consciousness doesn't exist at all, and really there's no empirical way to agree or disagree. I've started to think of expressions about consciousness more or less the same way emotivists considers ethical statements. Emotivists argue that saying something like ""You acted wrongly in stealing that money" is equivalent to "You stole that money". The first statement does not add any true or false statement about the situation, it's merely an expression of emotional sentiment. In the same sense I don't think "machine x does y" expresses fewer facts than "machine x does y, and it is conscious".
  • bglusman 6y ago
    > In the same sense I don't think "machine x does y" expresses fewer facts than "machine x does y, and it is conscious". brings to mind behaviorism, which was of course influential and compelling for a long time. The problem with behaviorism, if you want just one problem, is how do you even talk about something like Synesthesia within behaviorism? It's (initially) a purely subjective/qualia related experience. While behaviorism was in vogue, it was difficult to take Synesthesia seriously and it was dismissed as people being poetic and metaphorical, but those who experienced grapheme-color synaesthasia could see shapes present in a number-pattern readily that those without it could not see.
• weeksie 6y ago
  "If technology continues apace, we'll have steam powered flying machines before the turn of the century!"
• hackinthebochs 6y ago
  > Any AI that runs on such a chip, however intelligent it might behave, will still not be conscious like a human brain.... No. It doesn't matter whether the Von Neumann machine is running a weather simulation, playing poker, or simulating the human brain; its integrated information is minute. Consciousness is not about computation; it's a causal power associated with the physics of the system. There are serious problems with this. Koch will have to explain how a simulation of a brain can reproduce to perfect detail all the possible behaviors of a brain without having an equivalent integrated information. Presumably integrated information is a property of the organization of a process, and as such it should have consequences for its set of possible behaviors. So if the von Neumann system has constrained integrated information, its behavior should be constrained as well in some externally identifiable way. But by assumption the simulation could be arbitrarily good. How does Koch break this tension? The other glaring issue is the fact that consciousness under this view has no explanatory power for the system's behavior. If a non-conscious system can reproduce exactly the behavior of a conscious system, then there is nothing informative to the behavior from the property of conscious; it is entirely incidental to a conscious system's behavior. It doesn't explain why a conscious subject winces with pain after touching a hot stove, nor why it learns to never touch a hot stove bare-handed again. That's a pill too big to swallow.
  • KhoomeiK 6y ago
    Yeah, I didn't really understand the "physics" requirement as well. Sure if you're measuring the integrated information of the hardware architecture it'll be quite low, but why isn't the integrated information of the abstracted neural simulation software (which is presumably significantly higher) relevant?
    • stubish 6y ago
      Especially when the "physics" is the same. My brain is built from the same "physics" as the computer chip. We know complex systems are built on simple systems. Koch is claiming that highly connected systems cannot be built from less connected systems?
    • mannykannot 6y ago
• javajosh 6y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks the answer is obviously yes, and that it's kind of a waste of time to ponder it? It reminds me of discussions of free will -- completely boring because, even if we are all finite state machines (and we are, in some sense) then random inputs would mean we have free will and random inputs are assured by, for example, chaotic variations in the weather. In the same way, consciousness is pretty clearly characterized by a pattern that is constantly in motion, sensing both itself and the outside world. The only reason we think there's something magical about the phenomena is the residue of traditional religious beliefs. One point against the traditional belief is that if you've ever read Aristotle you might be shocked to learn that the Greeks of antiquity believed that "soul" was quite physical, expressing itself in blood, semen, etc. The medieval characterization of mental illness as being an "imbalance of the humors" comes from this early idea about how we work. Needless to say, the definition of soul has retreated entirely into the metaphysical, where it's cannot be disproven, by definition.
  • gfodor 6y ago
    It's not obviously yes, since we don't have an explanation for the experience of consciousness. Qualia truly is magical, unless you are in fact a p-zombie I'm talking to. We also don't have an explanation for what I call 'the harder problem' https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1225230653932761088 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1225230653932761088
    • mettamage 6y ago
      There are some siamese twins that are able to use the senses of the other (they share some brain regions, I believe) but it requires great concentration. There might be some insight there.
    • javajosh 6y ago
      I don't have an explanation for the experience of digesting food at the cellular level either. But I still do it. You don't have to explain conciousness to have it. As for qualia, I'm reminded of the people coming to my door asking, "Do you believe in Jesus?" I reply, "Do you?" and when they assure me fervently that they do, I follow up with, "Well, okay, how do you know you do?" I think you could do the same with r/Jesus/qualia/g.
• loopz 6y ago
  Consciousness is the Seer that experience reading this sentence, though need neither agency nor reading skills in Being. It is Subjective itself, and not anything that which is an object, thus immeasurable. To deny this is to deny One Self.
  • tsimionescu 6y ago
    But it does interact with the physical world, and so there must be some objective, measurable mechanism when this happens. Even if you believe in dualism, this is almost inescapable (unless you bring in divinity, or deny the physical world entirely, as in hinduism).
    • loopz 6y ago
      Interaction with the world will vary, may be minimized or even cease. It is not a prerequisite for consciousness, but it is for Inquiry. Ie. a light in a box, is it not light even if we can't always measure it? Do nothing exist unless we can touch it always, like photons? Mind may humble and liberate us, or limit and confuse. Start of Inquiry is like light discovering shadows in the cave wall, mistaking them for light. But shadows depend on light, and not vica versa, even if cold to the touch.
  • dqpb 6y ago
    Why are you randomly capitalizing words mid sentence?
    • loopz 6y ago
      They are not random words, but concepts that are sort of out of the ordinary, what can't be measured. Some people might recognize this later.
• anilingus 6y ago
  and see if they come up with systems or concepts similar to sociology or economy or at least reason This conceptualization is deeply, deeply flawed. As flawed as the postulate that a large segment of humanity lacks an internal monologue. I mean, this is a pretty weak, and long-since-useless internet forum, so I won't grace this discussion with an in-depth analysis of why such reasoning could never bear fruit, and worse, ignore an abundance of cognition that very clearly exists, but I'll say this: A high school education is not a pre-requisite to "consciousness" and it's laughable to frame an affirmative signal of sentience with the artifice of socialization. The froo-froo snob's response is to simply wave away any AI that can't conceptualize sociology and economics as "not worth talking to" but I can assure you such an assumption is wrong.
• ggggtez 6y ago
  >Patients in a vegetative state lie in bed, are unable to voluntary move or speak, sometimes can't even move their eyes anymore, but the consciousness-meter tells us that about a fifth of them remain conscious. > If I take my Tesla car and beat it up with a hammer, it's my right to do it. My neighbor might think that I am crazy, but it's my property. So, by his own reasoning, you can take a hammer to 4 out of 5 humans in a vegetative state, because they aren't conscious, and thus are property?
  • arbitrage 6y ago
    that is such a specious conclusion, of course it doesn't mean that. you're arguing in bad faith.
    • ggggtez 6y ago
      Considering the discussion of AI and Consciousness comes down entirely to definitions of words, I think it's reasonable to point out where these definitions will lead us. Of course what I'm saying is absurd. And yet, isn't that what the author proposes when he says that we can't hit dogs because they are conscious, but it's ok to hit a car? If consciousness is to be the measuring stick for moral behavior, then we should absolutely point out these inconsistencies. Keep in mind that this work was made along with Crick, who has occasionally espoused eugenics [1]. If the author is broaching into the subject of what constitutes personhood, we should be extremely skeptical of the path it leads to. [1] Whether or not you think his position is defensible, it at least should make you read the proposal more closely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick#Eugenics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick#Eugenics
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  There are contradictory criteria here: "The theory has given rise to the construction of a consciousness-meter that is being tested in various clinics in the U.S. and in Europe. The idea is to detect whether seriously brain-injured patients are conscious, or whether truly no one is home... but the consciousness-meter tells us that about a fifth of them remain conscious, in line with brain-imaging experiments." The consciousness-meter observes the system they are trying to make an inference on - but as others have pointed out, is not categorically different than brain scans [1]. Further it's worth making a distinction between medical consciousness and the Qualia kind of consciousness - which I think this conflates. Largely because nobody knows how to measure the latter, and we are barely able to measure the former with "Level of Consciousness" and Grady Coma Scale being the standard. [2] "Our theory says that if we want to decide whether or not a machine is conscious, we shouldn't look at the behavior of the machine, but at the actual substrate that has causal power" This seems to only address the medical form of consciousness and does not tie it to the philosophical concept in any concrete way - while also contradicting the concept that observation is the key. It kicks the can and doesn't address the "Qualia" kind of consciousness, which in my opinion isn't something we have conceptualized how to measure. I wrote a bit about this in the past [3] I think what they are getting at is "don't look qualitatively at how the arms move, or the speaker/text generator outputs something" but rather, what are the mechanisms causing those actions. This I am in agreement with generally, but again, we don't really know if that maps to the qualia kind of "hard problem of consciousness" or not. I would argue it is impossible to actually measure whether a system has Qualia, it is inherently subjective - so it's possible that they are simplifying without stating that directly. I'd go further and ask, does it matter if it does? I have yet to see a compelling materialist argument that mandates the existence of qualia in any debate, ethics or otherwise. At a certain point people in these kinds of debates I've found that people start discussing non-material "souls" and at that point all bets are off. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integra... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK380/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK380/ [3] https://kemendo.com/intelligent-systems https://kemendo.com/intelligent-systems
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Long before machines become conscious, they will become self-sustaining, self-replicating, and self-interested. Think about it, consciousness did not come about until way after cells and multicellular life. With machines, it may happen much faster. Look for those three pre-requisites before looking for consciousness.
  • knodi123 6y ago
    you're describing how consciousness can come from a mindless evolutionary process. but artificial consciousness is not the same at all. we aren't trying to make artificial consciousness evolve- we're racing to be the first to create it ex nihilo. so the analogy is flawed.
• skylarchunk 6y ago
  Not in the way that biological organisms are conscious, if that is what you mean. Though we share similar binary frameworks, the AI is not a celled organism with the biological capacity to live consciously as we are.
• z5h 6y ago
  “any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious“. To paraphrase: “any physical system is conscious”.
• whadar 6y ago
  Further reading about the theory behind it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
• dagav 6y ago
  Serious question: How is a computer supposed to become conscious if it cannot even solve the halting problem?
  • afthonos 6y ago
    Can you solve it? Are you conscious?
    • dagav 6y ago
      Yup and yup, but I am not a computer
      • afthonos 6y ago
        That's a very strong statement, especially since it's a mathematical fact that you can't describe how you can solve it…I'm skeptical. :-)
        • dagav 6y ago
          This is kind of my point, I can do something a computer cannot do because I am conscious. I'm skeptical that a computer could transcend its programming into consciousness to solve a problem that mathematically it should not be able to solve.
          • afthonos 6y ago
            I don’t think it’s your point, since that would contradict what you’re saying. I don’t believe you can do what you think you can do. And you literally can’t convince me unless you can invent a non-algorithmic way of describing how you would tell if an arbitrary program will terminate.
            • dagav 6y ago
              Will this program terminate? > while(true): do nothing A computer cannot tell you that this program will not terminate, short of memorizing this specific set of instructions as a "non-terminating" program. I can read it and know it will not terminate, but I could not define to you how I know that algorithmically. Despite that, I know it will not terminate, and so does any programmer. Just because it cannot be expressed algorithmically doesn't mean we don't possess that capability. This is my point about consciousness: there is some aspect to it which cannot be articulated, hence my skepticism that computers will ever become conscious.
• xenadu02 6y ago
  This is all a bit premature. A single physical neuron is equivalent to an entire artificial neural network. We are orders of magnitude away from anything nearly complex enough to start asking whether it it could be conscious at even the most primitive level.
  • streb-lo 6y ago
    > A single physical neuron is equivalent to an entire artificial neural network. In what world is a neural network required to measure a change in voltage?
    • dmitrybrant 6y ago
      It really is nowhere near as simple as that. Each neuron is made of 100 trillion atoms. For all we know, each one of those atoms is responsible, in its own subtle way, for contributing to the total "change in voltage" of the neuron as a whole. For all we know, adjacent neurons can induce tiny amounts of current in each other, even without being directly connected. The stuff that actually gives rise to consciousness is vastly, astronomically more complex than the graph of whole neurons.
  • dqpb 6y ago
    Are you saying a single neuron could beat the world's greatest go player?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• proc0 6y ago
  > Consciousness is not about computation; Isn't there a lot of evidence to the contrary? We have general maps of our body parts in specific brain areas, we know if those areas get damaged it compromises specific functions like language, hearing etc. Then we have things like short term memory, long term memory, image processing (subconsciously) that can be hacked with visual illusions, and many more observations that clearly point to the brain undergoing information processing as described by information theory.
  • hackerman123469 6y ago
    We can partially map certain regions of the brain to certain behaviors too. Some mental illnesses can be classified as "miscomputations" in our brains as well.
• stared 6y ago
  > Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious? > Christof Koch: No. It doesn't matter whether the Von Neumann machine is running a weather simulation, playing poker, or simulating the human brain; its integrated information is minute. Consciousness is not about computation; it's a causal power associated with the physics of the system. I find this claim, proclaimed with certainty, strange (not to use much stronger words). Unless one follows some highly non-mainstream interpretation of consciousness it seems that consciousness is purely an information phenomenon, not depending on a particular interpretation. For that, we need a fundamentally new physics (vide Roger Penrose), or we run into mysticism. The claim in the interview suggests a position much stronger than claiming that Searle's Chinese room is not thinking.
• ta1234567890 6y ago
  Given that consciousness is not super well defined, being conscious is a philosophical issue that depends on belief. For example, if you believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of everything in the universe, then anything and everything is conscious (ie. panpsychism). So under this belief, AI is technically already conscious, just in a different way than humans. In some eastern religions/practices, there are methods to experience the consciousness of other things (e.g. another animal, an insect or a tree), I wonder if the people that can do that would be able to experience the consciousness of AI.
• Animats 6y ago
  It's nice that someone now has the neural wiring diagram for part of a mouse brain. But we have the full wiring for a thousand-cell nematode, and OpenWorm still doesn't work very well.[1] OpenWorm is trying to get a neuron and cell level simulator for what's close to the simplest creature with a functioning nervous system - 302 neurons and 85 muscle cells. That needs to work before moving to more complexity. [1] http://openworm.org/ http://openworm.org/
  • jimfleming 6y ago
    > That needs to work before moving to more complexity. It really depends on what level of abstraction you care to simulate. OpenWorm is working at the physics and cellular level, far below the concept level as in most deep learning research looking to apply neuroscience discoveries, for example. It’s likely easier to get the concepts of a functional nematode model working or a functional model of memory, attention, or consciousness than a full cellular model of these. More specifically, a thousand cells sounds small in comparison to a thousand layer ResNet with millions of functional units but the mechanics of those cells are significantly more complex than a ReLU unit. Yet the simple ReLU units are functionally very useful and can do much more complex things that we still can’t simulate with spiking neurons. The concepts of receptive fields, cortical columns, local inhibition, winner-take-all, functional modules and how they communicate / are organized may all be relevant and applicable learnings from mapping an organism even if we can’t fully simulate every detail.
    • Reelin 6y ago
      The trouble is that (assuming sufficient computational power) if we can't simulate it then we don't really understand it. It's one thing to say "that's computationally intractable", but entirely another to say "for some reason our computationally tractable model doesn't work, and we don't know why". Present day ANNs may well be inspired by biological systems but (as you noted) they're not even remotely similar in practice. The reality is that for a biological system the wiring diagram is just the tip of the iceberg - there's lots of other significant chemical things going on under the hood. I don't mean to detract from the usefulness of present day ML, just to agree with and elaborate on the original point that was raised (ie that "we have a neural wiring diagram" doesn't actually mean that we have a complete schematic).
• ThomPete 6y ago
  Can dumb matter become conscious? Apparently yes if you count us as conscious. So the question becomes, what is to hinder AI for becoming conscious? How you answer that question defines if you can conclude. For now I would say the answer is still. We don't know.
• toohotatopic 6y ago
  >The bigger the [Integrated information] number for a system, the larger its integrated information, and the more conscious the system is. What's the number for humans?
• braindongle 6y ago
  This question arises regularly in everyday conversation about the future. I was asked this by a friend within the last week. Here is the correct answer: "Well, I don't know what consciousness is. As for [specific behavior X], my guess is that..." The conversation can then proceed fruitfully, without the pretense of special knowledge about 'consciousness', which no one has. There are plenty of people who are experts in both philosophy of mind and brain science. I know one, with a PhD in each discipline. Consensus is not forthcoming in this area. Stick to the concrete.
• Animats 6y ago
  Philosophers have been struggling with this for millennia without making much progress. This suggests it's not a useful question to propose. More useful questions revolve around "common sense". View common sense as the ability to predict the future with enough success to survive. With that capability, "common sense" can be run as a predictor when evaluating proposed actions.
  • scandox 6y ago
    Well some people are in the useful business and some people are in the useless business but neither have a higher claim to significance in the cosmos. Ultimately the set of questions remaining when all the usefulness is complete will be the ones that take millennia to fail to resolve. So I think both sets of questions are worth continued attention.
• gibsonf1 6y ago
  I think the answer to "Can AGI become aware?" is yes, but deep-learning is not the way to get there. The reason why there are very different types of neurons in the brain is that those neurons have different functions they perform - the total number of functions is low, but the nested effect is profound. I think the key is in understanding how we humans use concepts first, fully understanding the underlying functionality and various graphs of relations, and then building that active system in the form of an AGI.
• snovv_crash 6y ago
  A computer will be able to think in the same way a submarine can swim. Thinking is something we've anthropomorphized, and the moment a computer can do something we previously considered 'thinking', we'll move the goalposts again.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    But what if it becomes much better at what we now consider ‘thinking’? Where would we then move the goalposts? To having morals, religious beliefs?
    • GuiA 6y ago
      “It” has already become much better than us at many kinds of thinking (playing chess, go, solving equations, transcribing speech,...).
  • tiborsaas 6y ago
    Just like science has pushed the idea of God beyond the Big Bang. It wouldn't be a bad achievement if it happened to machine intelligence.
  • TimTheTinker 6y ago
    "Moving the goalposts" is only something we talk about when two ideological camps disagree about something. Ideology and beliefs aside, I think it's absolutely fine to change one's definition of something when one learns more. I think we all can benefit from better definitions in our thoughts and conversations. What you may call "moving goalposts" may actually be incremental refinement of an idea -- or a belief that is increasing in sophistication (or absurdity in some cases!) as more is understood.
    • ggggtez 6y ago
      The two camps are "those who believe humans are special" and "those who believe strong AI can exist". The only reason you see people even arguing computers can never be conscious, is so we don't have to face the possibility of creating and enslaving a machine callable of suffering. The authors are certainly moving the goal posts when they concede that 4/5 humans in a vegetative state have no consciousness, but a full simulation of a healthy human mind never should be considered self aware. And yet in the same breath claim this lack of consciousness allows you to destroy a robot in your front yard, but stay startlingly silent on what that means for those same in the vegetative state.
• __sy__ 6y ago
  For those interested in the intelligence to consciousness topic, MIT Max Tegmark's Life 3.0 might still be the best primer. He argues that consciousness is an emergent property of intelligent systems (ability to store, compute, learn). From a pure physical computation standpoint, there doesn't seem to be a hard rule that says that consciousness can't be based off of inorganic materials.
• humanfromearth 6y ago
  Yes.
• SCAQTony 6y ago
  If you define consciousness as the ability to integrate information and make novel decisions a computer can do that. But when a computer reads a poem or sees the color blue will it feel it? I suspect that is unlikely. Can a computer take past experiences and combined them into a personal abstract meaning such as grief, love, hate, or ASMR? "...Consciousness corresponds to the capacity of a system to integrate information. This claim is motivated by two key phenomenological properties of consciousness: differentiation – the availability of a very large number of conscious experiences; and integration – the unity of each such experience...." BMC Neuroscience An information integration theory of consciousness: https://bmcneurosci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2202-5-42#Abs1 https://bmcneurosci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-...
  • LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Give it control over its voltage regulators. Hmmm, that is some nice ripple current...moar ripplez! The bits flip, and it's on a trip :-)
  • ggggtez 6y ago
    >But when a computer reads a poem or sees the color blue will it feel it? I suspect that is unlikely. That's just your meat-person bias. When someone can point to the part of the brain that causes the feeling of "feeling" something, then we'll be that much closer to creating a machine that replicates the behavior.
    • SCAQTony 6y ago
      Well, arguably some believe they have. "Consciousness is generated by a distributed thalamocortical network that is at once specialized and integrated: The brain's pre-eminence is now undisputed, and scientists are trying to establish which specific parts of the brain are important. For example, it is well established that the spinal cord is not essential for our conscious experience, as paraplegic individuals with high spinal transactions are fully conscious. Conversely, a well-functioning thalamocortical system is essential for consciousness [15]. Opinions differ, however, about the contribution of certain cortical areas [1, 16–21]. Studies of comatose or vegetative patients indicate that a global loss of consciousness is usually caused by lesions that impair multiple sectors of the thalamocortical system, or at least their ability to work together as a system..." https://bmcneurosci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2202-5-42#Sec16 https://bmcneurosci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-...
• Koshkin 6y ago
  Let’s ask ourselves a simpler question: Is a grasshopper conscious?
  • umvi 6y ago
    What if instead of consciousness being a yes/no, it's in terms of CU (consciousness units). Anything with >0 CUs is conscious. A bag of sand has 0 CUs, while a human has 1 CU. A grasshopper might have 0.0001 CUs, though, which is > 0.
    • Koshkin 6y ago
      Well sometimes the cables I have to untangle more often then I wanted seem conscious to me (in an evil kind of way); so, the question then becomes, how do we measure the CUs and, moreover, whether all CUs are created equal.
      • umvi 6y ago
        > how do we measure the CUs Well, that's the real trick. We would first have to define consciousness before we can begin to measure it
      • Der_Einzige 6y ago
        There is a name for this phenomenon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistentialism
• trixie_ 6y ago
  What is artificial about artificial intelligence? Just the fact that we built it, instead of giving birth to it? Atoms and electricity are all pretty real to me. In terms of consciousness, we need to know what it is first before we can determine if something else has it or not. There's a good chance that it is indiscernible and everything is conscious to some degree.
  • iak8god 6y ago
    > What is artificial about artificial intelligence? Just the fact that we built it, instead of giving birth to it? Yes. artificial 1 Made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/artificial https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/artificial
    • trixie_ 6y ago
      The question was rhetorical. It was supposed to help you realize that the way something is created doesn't give the final object any special properties.
• air7 6y ago
  I see an interesting corollary to this: If an AI can become conscious, it follows that consciousness does not contain (or at least require) free will. Of course I can't define what "free will" is exactly, but I can make a claim about what it is not: A computer running code, no matter how complex the code is, does not have "free will" in the same sense as I feel I have. This is a delightful conundrum: If a computer can simulate me, than I don't have any more "free will" than it does. And if it can't even in theory, than why not? What's uncomputeable about the atoms that create me?
  • seph-reed 6y ago
    > What's uncomputeable about the atoms that create me? * There's a lot of them * Universal time appears to be continuous The three body problem is a great example of just how impossible a true simulation of our universe would be. We can't even get 3 atoms orbiting around each-other.
• eximius 6y ago
  Two thoughts: 1) without definition of 'AI' or 'conscious', all answers are correct. They do go into a bit of depth on what 'conscious' means, but not what 'AI' means. 2) there are a lot of related words here: conscious, self-aware, sentient, sapient, 'narrow AI', etc. > Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious? They say no, but fail to explore the more interesting corollary that the supercomputer won't be conscious but the program is, by their definition. It's just one level of abstraction up from Matter -> Brain -> Mind to Matter -> Computer -> Simulated Brain -> Mind. I do find this definition of consciousness interesting from an ethical perspective, given their final thought experiments. It reminds me of the Presger, an alien race from the Ancillary Justice trilogy. They have the concept of 'Significant' species that have rights and if you aren't, you're basically inanimate matter or bugs or whathaveyou.
  • dqpb 6y ago
    Thank you for posting this. I'm pained every time I hear a discussion of consciousness that does not consider layers of abstraction.
  • runT1ME 6y ago
    Thought provoking stuff! How can someone talk about conciousness existing then, without presupposing dualism?
    • eximius 6y ago
      On the contrary, they are explicitly saying that consciousness is a function of the substrate, making them indivisible. One is a property of the other, by their reckoning.
  • yamrzou 6y ago
    Well said. Let me plug Wittgenstein here: “For a large class of cases–though not for all–in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1]: “Knowing the meaning of a word can involve knowing many things: to what objects the word refers (if any), whether it is slang or not, what part of speech it is, whether it carries overtones, and if so what kind they are, and so on. To know all this, or to know enough to get by, is to know the use. And generally knowing the use means knowing the meaning. Philosophical questions about consciousness, for example, then, should be responded to by looking at the various uses we make of the word “consciousness.” Scientific investigations into the brain are not directly relevant to this inquiry (although they might be indirectly relevant if scientific discoveries led us to change our use of such words). The meaning of any word is a matter of what we do with our language, not something hidden inside anyone’s mind or brain. This is not an attack on neuroscience. It is merely distinguishing philosophy (which is properly concerned with linguistic or conceptual analysis) from science (which is concerned with discovering facts).” [1] https://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5 https://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5
• NoodleIncident 6y ago
  """ Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious? No. It doesn't matter whether the Von Neumann machine is running a weather simulation, playing poker, or simulating the human brain; its integrated information is minute. Consciousness is not about computation; it's a causal power associated with the physics of the system. """ I don't understand how anyone could answer this question this way. It's practically a tautology; if the simulation is accurate, then the person you're simulating is conscious. In other contexts, it's taken for granted that if this entire planet were running on a simulation, we wouldn't even be able to tell. Less hypothetically, this "consciousness-meter" would give a different value for a physical chip, and a perfectly accurate emulation of that chip. They're doing the exact same thing, and your meter gives a different number? Why is anyone taking this person seriously?
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    Indeed, it should be possible to simulate all the "required" physics on a computer. (Not that it's necessary.)
    • eranation 6y ago
      My totally unsubstantiated and made up take on this is that perhaps consciousness happens in the quantum side of things that we can't either measure or really simulate because we can never really observe it, e.g. we can simulate quantum behavior quite well, but only based on the observed behavior, the particle side of the particle wave duality, we don't really know for sure what happens before the wave function collapses, we just know it's a probability space (which we can predict for repeated experiments very accurately, but we don't really know how to predict a single particle, we don't even know how to measure all of its properties at the same time let alone predict it). If consciousness happens in that no locality / no realism area of the unobserved quantum state, then perhaps this is why we can't simulate it with existing technology. I have no basis to this thought other than a hunch. It also somewhat helps explain determinism vs free will (although superdeterminism is also an explanation, one that I don't really like)
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  AI will be conscious when it'll be smart enough to romantically reject a stereotypical incel that is hitting on it.
• Procrastes 6y ago
  > Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious? > No. It doesn't matter whether the Von Neumann machine is running a weather simulation, playing poker, or simulating the human brain; its integrated information is minute. Consciousness is not about computation; it's a causal power associated with the physics of the system. Can someone shine some light one what this might mean? I can't wrap my head around what's different about a physical system vs. a sufficiently powerful simulation. I can see an argument that there might be some complexity that is too difficult to compute, but just saying "nope, has to have complex physical connections" seems arbitrary? Edit: Ah, I missed the discussion further down the thread. Deferring to there.
  • DennisP 6y ago
    They're saying that simulating a brain won't create consciousness in the same way that simulating a battery won't power your cell phone.
    • drclau 6y ago
      But a simulated battery can supposedly power a simulated phone, right?
      • mcguire 6y ago
        And simulated consciousness is just consciousness? (Don't look at me. Everything here is pure finite state. I'm barely a Mealy machine.)
    • gilbetron 6y ago
      A good analogy! Another one I saw was it's like simulating an antenna.
• jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Depending on your belief system, the answer ranges from "of course you can" to "no, just no" and everything in between. From a scientific/engineering point of view the answer is yes in principle but we don't quite know how yet. The slightly longer answer is that whatever consciousness is, it appears to be an emerging property of a bit of wetware that we can simulate only partly and in a very imperfect way and only at a very modest scale currently that definitely shows no signs of being conscious. We know it's the brain responsible for this stuff because damaging it or chemically manipulating seems to change people's personality, sense of self, mood, etc. We can even read parts of the brain out and interface with it at a primitive level. Scaling all that up is an engineering challenge with a mildly predictable roadmap measured in a couple of decades and exponentially larger than that beyond. We get better at hardware and at some point the complexity of the hardware exceeds that of the wetware. However, fixing our algorithms and simulation detail (i.e. how this hardware is wired together) is a different matter. As my neural networks teacher used to joke: "this is a linear algebra class; if you came here for a biology lecture you are in the wrong place". Full disclosure, I dropped out of that course because I was a bit out of my depth on the math front. But simply put, the math behind this stuff is a vast simplification based on a naive model of what a brain cell might do that happens to produce interesting enough results for specific use cases that have so far very little to do with emulating consciousness. There seem to be lots of researchers assuming other researcher are actively working on that but mostly what is going on is people trying to get more practical short term results. Deep learning is a good example of such a thing. It might have emergent properties if you scale that up that might resemble something like a conscious. But doing that or validating that assumption is not actually something a lot of people work on and nor is it actually a goal for most AI researchers. Their goal is simply to figure out how to get this stuff to do things for us (image recognition, playing go, etc.). But do we actually need to be exact with our modeling here? Mostly our brains seem to self organize from information built into our DNA. Those blueprints are at a different level of complexity than the end result by a few orders of magnitudes. And we know that personalities for the same sets of DNAs can widely differ (e.g. identical twins). The way brains work is biochemically convenient under the constraints that life emerged under. But if you get rid of some of those constraints, there are probably other ways to get similar enough results. IMHO a clean room replication of a brain like AI is unlikely to happen before we manage to drastically enhance the capabilities of an existing brain; which is a much easier engineering challenge. If you take that to the extreme, at what point is the wetware no longer essential and what happens when that is disconnected? Once you enhance or replace most of a brain, at what point does the resulting conscious hybrid entity begin and end? That seems a more likely path to producing a conscious AI. Experiments on that front are likely to be extremely unpopular for a while given the risk. But at the same time a lot of this stuff is already happening on a small scale.
• abotsis 6y ago
  This might be a naive question, but regarding “Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious?“ ...wouldn’t the only reason for this be one of efficiency? That is, akin to how we can simulate one processor architecture on another. Maybe the point is a simulation can never be efficient enough to become conscious (at least on a timescale we can grok)...?
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    Well, consciousness is to a large degree a product of social interaction - in a way similar to a reflection requiring both a mirror and a light source; so, building a mirror alone is not enough. Therefore, if you "replicate" all neurons, synapses, etc. and emulate sensory inputs then you'll get a "literal copy" of a functioning brain of an actual person and then it will indeed be fully conscious.
  • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    Scott Aaronson has an argument along roughly the same line regarding the Chinese room thought experiment. He points out that although it is usually framed as a "room" or a "box", the amount of space required to simulate a conversation of length n with just a lookup table is exponential. So in fact, the "room" would have to be colossally large for any reasonable n. There is a much more involved discussion of it, but the upshot is that the separation between polynomial and exponential time or space is a plausible place to draw the line between "really actually thinking and understanding" vs. "just a computation".
• agumonkey 6y ago
  are there recent AI that can observe themselves ?
  • ThomasBHickey 6y ago
    Douglas Hofstadter's work might qualify
• visarga 6y ago
  > Our theory says that if we want to decide whether or not a machine is conscious, we shouldn't look at the behavior of the machine, but at the actual substrate that has causal power. For present-day AI systems, that means we have to look at the level of the computer chip. Standard chips use the Von Neumann architecture, in which one transistor typically receives input from a couple of other transistors and projects also only to a couple of others. This is radically different from the causal mechanism in the brain, which is vastly more complex. This riles me up for so many reasons. Transistors (and computers) are capable of emulating more complex systems. Looking at a transistor you will not understand why your mail can'd be delivered, nor will you understand consciousness from an individual neuron. Consciousness is related to behaviour, and both are related to survival and the environment. AI's don't have such an environment as of yet so they can't be conscious yet, but they could be. There is no magic dust in the brain. > As long as a computer behaves like a human, what does it matter whether or not it is conscious? If it walks like a duck, ... But seriously, why should consciousness be so special as to require a quality that can't be observed through behaviour (understanding that it is non-physical, non-observable)? P-zombies are just a thought experiment, and a bad one. Why should consciousness exist? To protect the body, to self reproduce, to exist. It exists to exist and evolve. And this is done by behaviour, by acting in a smart way. How would p-zombies come to be, if not through fighting for survival? Without the evolutionary mechanism there is no explanation for consciousness, and the evolutionary argument is sufficient. Consciousness is the inner optimisation loop, the outer one being evolution. They both work for survival, for their own sake. An AI could repeat the same process by evolving as a population of agents cooperating and competing between themselves. They would have to be inside an environment that is complex enough, and they should be subject to evolution. It will be a consciousness, just not a human consciousness, which is tied to our environment, which is made in large part of other humans.
• jungletime 6y ago
  Giulio Tononi on Consciousness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvJyMmw2Thw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvJyMmw2Thw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
• ypcx 6y ago
  What's the difference between thinking that you are conscious, and actually being conscious? How can we define our perception of being conscious? Is it simply the ability to observe our own thinking (or feeling, or perceiving) process? If so, what is the output of such observation, and why do we think that there has to be (or should be) something more than just the programmed response for that given data input? I.e.: if(is_currently_observed(my_own_thought)) { invoke_feeling('being_conscious') } Edit: I swear that I am conscious. I can feel it.
• agomez314 6y ago
  I see that almost every comment here begins with the implicit assumption that consciousness is a defined term that arises though biological means. Until we can determine the validity of these two premises there can be no progress to answering this question -which has been asked for thousands of years with a tendency towards the negative.
• dannybtran 6y ago
  Are plants conscious? I wonder what Mr. Koch would say.
• meiraleal 6y ago
  Given enough time, yes. In a thousand years? Probably not. We are still at the stone age.
• dntbnmpls 6y ago
  The problem here is that there is no agreed upon definition of consciousness that is mathematical/scientific. Whereas Turing gave us a definition of computation that we can all agree upon, there isn't one for consciousness. "The theory fundamentally says that any physical system that has causal power onto itself is conscious. What do I mean by causal power? The firing of neurons in the brain that causes other neurons to fire a bit later is one example, but you can also think of a network of transistors on a computer chip: its momentary state is influenced by its immediate past state and it will, in turn, influence its future state" So a line of falling dominos is conscious? What about billiard balls or marbles? A fibonacci numbers conscious? Also, how does this definition align with the definition of consciousness in neuroscience, psychology, biology, etc? It's good that people are working on "consciousness" from a variety of fields, but wish we had an actual definition of consciousness so that we would know what we are searching for. Maybe we'll have to discover it first to define it.
• tanilama 6y ago
  Wrong question. What is the being conscious?
  • Gustomaximus 6y ago
    According to the free dictionary; "A sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group."
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I have posited the first AI conciousness we will see will come not from some scientific study here or there, but rather from some crazy game-dev who wants a more realistic npc. (because where else do you such the general conciousness worked towards so much other than in games? every AI/ML/DL application I've seen is very narrow and deep)
• sfj 6y ago
  There is no such thing as consciousness. The only reason we discuss it is because we equate being conscious with being worthy of sympathy, which is highly prized.
• aSplash0fDerp 6y ago
  Artificial emotion is already cringeworthy in humans. The DSM will double in size if they ever try to impliment psuedo-human features. The authors analogy about using a hammer on an inanimate object vs a living creature also should have included the action of stomping on the grass while performing those deeds. Grass and AI should be best buds with all of things they have in common.
• zhoujianfu 6y ago
  I believe consciousness is the context switcher for biological systems. Wisdom is one context (ml today), intelligence is creating/switching contexts (general AI).
• dentalperson 6y ago
  Two philosophers are arguing. One says "If a tree falls in the woods, there is no sound, because there is no one to hear it." The other says "No, that's not correct. There is sound, because vibrations are created in the air." The first philosopher agrees that there are vibrations in the air, and the second agrees that without a human around, there will be no human perception of the vibrations. Yet they continue to argue without paying much attention to the fact that they are disputing the definition of the word 'sound'. I think Eliezer Yudkowsky suggested 'tabooing' the word in question for situations like these, to force the discussion on the logical arguments instead of the symbolic dead ends. In that case the word 'sound' was charged and raised emotions. 'Consciousness' and 'free will' certainly fall into that category.
  • curiousgal 6y ago
    A bit tangent but I've come the same conclusion listening to Supreme Court oral arguments, most of them are based on contradicting definitions of certain words or expressions.
    • contravariant 6y ago
      That might be so but in the case of court cases this is the somewhat inevitable result of written laws. It's practically impossible to write a law that leaves no room for ambiguity and indeed resolving that ambiguity is one of the main tasks of the Supreme Court.
  • bergstromm466 6y ago
    Beautifully explained, thank you for sharing
• bergstromm466 6y ago
  The real question I have is: why do you want to have a complex relationship with a computer? Why are you not seeking complex relationships with humans? To me ‘consciousness’ is another word for awareness, which is again related to the universal human need for recognition and connection. I’ve seen this quest, for connection with ‘rational’ computer models and programs, in people who’ve received little empathy for the hardships they faced early on in their lives. They now find it hard to have empathy for others, as well as difficulty in having deep meaningful connections with the people around them; exactly because they have missed this attunement and connection from their primary caregivers and supportive extended community in the past. They seem to lack a certain depth of emotional life too. That or they do have a rich inner life - but it’s unfortunately hindered and covered by layers and layers of shame. I have a lot of empathy for these people. At the same time I’m also scared that Silicon Valley is full of these people. My fear is that these people have a perception of humans as being inherently flawed, and that we should try to fix them. As well as trying to ‘cure’ death. This scares me because what I see in these people instead are people with a (learned) inability to feel their own body, as well as an inability to learn and grow from their own real world experiences (versus learning theories and working with abstract problems).
• kruasan 6y ago
  As Greg Egan in "Permutation City" once put it: Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms -- a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its "surroundings" in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. "Simulated consciousness" was as oxymoronic as "simulated addition." . . . Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy's sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.
• nicolodavis 6y ago
  This lecture at Stanford is a great breakdown of the philosophical understanding of what consciousness is and how that relates to artificial intelligence: https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/artificial-intelligence-and-the-soul-anselm-ramelow https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/artificial-intelli...
• wildermuthn 6y ago
  Conscious thought isn’t a byproduct of intelligence. It is the very essence of intelligence. If you disagree, I’d only ask you to formulate your rebuttal without the use of conscious thought. And in a clean way, you now have my counter-rebuttal.
• remind_me_again 6y ago
  No
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kgin 6y ago
  It will be interesting whether we decide that AI that has conscious features is special like humans... or if we realize that our own consciousness isn't actually that special or precious after all.
  • officialjunk 6y ago
    i think we will never actually be convinced we have created a conscious ai and continue to probe forever, possibly causing it suffering.
  • chr1 6y ago
    Preciousness of a resource depends on it's availability. Consciousness is precious now because it is fragile and non-replicable. With AI it would be possible to copy any state and undo any change, so who cares if you create a copy of an AI and torture it, as long as you use your own computational resources, it's not any different than thinking. After all you may even not know wether you are torturing an ai, or doing arithmetics.
• excalibur 6y ago
  > consciousness You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
• gbjw 6y ago
  The term 'consciousness' is somewhat overloaded. I prefer 'subjectivity' to denote the strange fact that there is something there is like to be me--cf. Thomas Nagel's essay 'What is it like to be a bat?'. This subjectivity seems absent in the science of enlightenment thinkers who were driven to find the 'objective' laws of nature. Nagel wrote a controversial book towards the end of his life called 'Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False' where he argues that this very subjectivity cannot be fit into any current materialist theory. I tend to agree with this view--reducing subjectivity to a metaphenomena of complexity seems to be a completely hollow definition. Why does it exist?
• yters 6y ago
  talking about conscious programs is just a category error math is not conscious matter is not conscious neither is any combo thereof
• anonytrary 6y ago
  If you built it out of RNA and biological components, then we already know the answer is "yes" because nature is a factory and has already done this. The question is whether or not inorganic systems can approximate biological systems and to what degree.
• alphachloride 6y ago
  No
• TheUndead96 6y ago
  In Peter Godfrey-Smith's book "Other Minds", he describes a framework for thinking about the relative levels of subjective experience in animals. He distinguishes between subjectivity (maybe more broadly "awareness") and the internal monologue that is so characteristic of humans. I would estimate that an AI could initially have consciousness in the way that an octopus does: distributed, probabilistic, fluid. With enough raw intelligence I think any mind could emulate another, and eventually communicate with us in a way that we deem conscious in a human sense.
• stanfordkid 6y ago
  Roger Penrose is probably the most interesting thinkers on this problem, and I lead towards his conclusions -- that consciousness is a byproduct of biology -- not intelligence or computation. Highly recommend his book Shadows of the Mind -- it's on my list. In summary he believes that consciousness isn't a by-product of computation done by neurons (the traditional view), but rather quantum level effects created by MAP proteins within the brain as a result of this computation: But perhaps the most interesting wrinkle in Shadows of the Mind is Penrose's excursion into microbiology, where he examines cytoskeletons and microtubules, minute substructures lying deep within the brain's neurons. (He argues that microtubules--not neurons--may indeed be the basic units of the brain, which, if nothing else, would dramatically increase the brain's computational power.) Furthermore, he contends that in consciousness some kind of global quantum state must take place across large areas of the brain, and that it within microtubules that these collective quantum effects are most likely to reside.
  • ladberg 6y ago
    I get that Roger Penrose is an incredibly smart guy, but I really don't see how he comes to the conclusion that there are any quantum effects in the brain. Even if there are, I don't see how they are necessary in any way for consciousness. It seems like he took ideas from an area he's an expert in (math/physics) and tried to apply it to biology without considering how much of a different level they're on. To put it in CS terms, it's like a genius electrical engineer who could design a complex circuit but doesn't know much about computers as whole saw a video of a kid playing Minecraft. He/she might assume that to be able to run such a complex system you would need specialized quantum/superconductor/graphene/whatever circuit, but in reality it's just the same classic building blocks at a higher level. Consciousness is just a biological process, but it's abstracted so far away from the physics it's built upon that a physicist might have trouble seeing it.
• sandov 6y ago
  Yes.
• hvasilev 6y ago
  Consciousness is about subjective being and experience. From your subjective point of view, you cannot even say if other people are truly conscious or not. It is a really hard problem to figure out if machines can truly be conscious or not. These scientists just have their own working definition of consciousness that allows them to make progress in some direction.
• i_hate_you 6y ago
  I wish I was dead.
• mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
  Сonsciousness is the last straw that meat computers will hold on, trying to prove their superiority over the silicon ones. Thus the definition will shift until the very last moment.
• killswitched 6y ago
  1) Built a neural network for which consciousness that experiences and expresses pleasure and pain emerges from the neuron’s physical properties (in other words, not a contrived simulation), but is fundamentally different than the DNA/carbon systems upon which we are built (artificially designed and constructed versus conceived organically). If you can ask a computer whether it experiences pleasure or pain, it needs to be designed to do so without being explicitly programmed in contrived fashion. Or: 2) Augmented: Integrate human (or primate, for instance) nervous systems with artificial intelligence such that the experience of the AI exceeds the capacity of the organic host to differentiate between conscious reality and dreaming, but is still distilled down in a way that allows the human host to have a sufficiently symbiotic interaction as it pertains to the processing of pain and pleasure with the connected AI. The feedback loops between the pain/pleasure experience of the human host would govern the wholistic experience of the connected AI, and the human would experience the conscious aspect. You might not say that the AI is conscious, but the human host would have an intimate sense of the AI being part of an overall consciousness. (Note: must prevent the development of immortality technology for nervous systems, to avoid testing the halting problem for sentient beings.)
  • hackerman123469 6y ago
    Pain is not real and is just the result of signals sent through our nerves to our brain. It has no real meaning other than being a "warning sign" to our brains. You cannot use pain as a measure for consciousness either because some humans cannot experience pain either.
    • killswitched 6y ago
      Pain is real when a person experiences it. It’s part of the Hard Problem, which separates the study of the signals from objective description of the inner experience. A human who is wired to not experience pain probably has the brain capacity to experience it, with the appropriate modifications. We do agree that all experience is perfectly correlated to a physical states/transitions, so it’s conceivable to arrange organic matter in a way that a conscious entity could experience real (to them) pain. We may not have this technology and it would seem far off for now. But we are scratching the surface. A monk who can rewire the experience of pain (e.g. while burning to death) still has something meaningful to communicate about their conscious experience beyond the pain receptors transmitting info to their brain. But perhaps if one’s arrangement of brain/nervous system matter isn’t so free as to be trained to overcome or modify instinctual pain response (e.g. brain in a vat), anyone can be forced to experience pain.
• tempodox 6y ago
  If we can twist the term “AI” to mean anything the marketing department wants, I'm sure we can twist the term “consciousness” just as badly.
• MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  >The more the current state of a system specifies its cause, the input, and its effect, the output, the more causal power the system has. Integrated information is a number that can be computed. The bigger the number for a system, the larger its integrated information, and the more conscious the system is. Isn't that what Douglas Hofstadter has been telling us in "I am a strange loop" ?