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Computers can’t heal themselves. Our bodies do that on their own without conscious prompting. Humans evolve the complexity of a computers electron states, not

Computers can’t heal themselves. Our bodies do that on their own without conscious prompting. Humans evolve the complexity of a computers electron states, not the computers own inherent properties. My use doesn’t force transistors to evolve into better transistors. It has no self regeneration. You don’t see the issue in principle but here you have an article by an expert pointing them out. Perhaps be a better listener? A computer has observable, literal limitations relative to a humans mechanical functionality. You can’t scrape away literal reality to arrive at some reductionist idea of what a consciousness is. Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. A computer literally lacks a whole lot of literal information that’s embedded in the hardware and software of a person. Watch this and tell me the last time your computer reconfigured it’s literal shape when you altered its electric field properties: https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg https://youtu.be/RjD1aLm4Thg There’s something to “life” we’ll never be able to jam into silicon.

simonh 6y ago
This is exactly the sort of conflation of completely unrelated concepts as I found in the article. What on Earth has healing got to do with reasoning? You even say our bodies do it without conscious prompting, in other words it’s a completely irrelevant issue. Yes computers aren’t biological, they aren’t life, but so what? Why does that constrain their ability to interact with and learn from the world? AGI is defined as human like intelligence, human go to the toilet, computers don’t go to the toilet, therefore AGI is impossible. See? It’s easy to “prove” AGI is impossible. That’s really all their argument boils down to. I kept reading the article expecting to hit some essential argument, not to find one. Very disappointing.
- engineeringwoke 6y ago
  For all the pontificating about souls as a means to discredit OP's beliefs, you all seem to avoid this statement: > Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. Would you please provide a counterargument? Do you understand how difficult this really is? We can't even comprehend the physical constraints.
  - cygx 6y ago
    Technological progress is many orders of magnitudes faster than evolutionary change; assuming the 'magic' of the brain is indeed in the neural circuity, hardware is expected to be powerful enough to simulate that on a timescale of O(100) years in the future instead of O(10e9). Of course, it's not a given that simulating connected neurons with action potentials or whatever is sufficient to capture the relevant features of the brain (perhaps long-distance em interactions are relevant? quantum magic? do we need to drop to the molecular level?) - but without proof to the contrary, we'll just have to wait and see.
    - engineeringwoke 6y ago
      This is a well-balanced take. Maybe we will see emergent properties at that scale. If that were the case, then we could catch enough of a glimpse of what is really happening... But another part of me says that is silly. We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it. Here, we are shooting in the dark.
      - cygx 6y ago
        We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it. However, the standard model (which formed the basis for the prediction of the Higgs boson) was created to bring order to the chaos of unexpected experimentally discovered particles. In the words of I.I. Rabi on the discovery of the muon, "who ordered that?"
  - krisoft 6y ago
    That quoted sentence argues that we do not have AGI now. I have no counterargument against that. We do not have AGI now. That sentence on the other hand fails to argue it is impossible to develop AGI. Someone before the invention of the aeroplane could have said: Our only known good model for flying is birds and insects. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate birds and insects. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. And yet we know that it's not impossible to create flying machines.

simonh 6y ago

This is exactly the sort of conflation of completely unrelated concepts as I found in the article. What on Earth has healing got to do with reasoning? You even say our bodies do it without conscious prompting, in other words it’s a completely irrelevant issue. Yes computers aren’t biological, they aren’t life, but so what? Why does that constrain their ability to interact with and learn from the world? AGI is defined as human like intelligence, human go to the toilet, computers don’t go to the toilet, therefore AGI is impossible. See? It’s easy to “prove” AGI is impossible. That’s really all their argument boils down to. I kept reading the article expecting to hit some essential argument, not to find one. Very disappointing.

engineeringwoke 6y ago
For all the pontificating about souls as a means to discredit OP's beliefs, you all seem to avoid this statement: > Our only known good model for a machine that can create our consciousness is us. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate us. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. Would you please provide a counterargument? Do you understand how difficult this really is? We can't even comprehend the physical constraints.
- cygx 6y ago
  Technological progress is many orders of magnitudes faster than evolutionary change; assuming the 'magic' of the brain is indeed in the neural circuity, hardware is expected to be powerful enough to simulate that on a timescale of O(100) years in the future instead of O(10e9). Of course, it's not a given that simulating connected neurons with action potentials or whatever is sufficient to capture the relevant features of the brain (perhaps long-distance em interactions are relevant? quantum magic? do we need to drop to the molecular level?) - but without proof to the contrary, we'll just have to wait and see.
  - engineeringwoke 6y ago
    This is a well-balanced take. Maybe we will see emergent properties at that scale. If that were the case, then we could catch enough of a glimpse of what is really happening... But another part of me says that is silly. We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it. Here, we are shooting in the dark.
    - cygx 6y ago
      We had an expectation of what the Higgs was before we found it. However, the standard model (which formed the basis for the prediction of the Higgs boson) was created to bring order to the chaos of unexpected experimentally discovered particles. In the words of I.I. Rabi on the discovery of the muon, "who ordered that?"
- krisoft 6y ago
  That quoted sentence argues that we do not have AGI now. I have no counterargument against that. We do not have AGI now. That sentence on the other hand fails to argue it is impossible to develop AGI. Someone before the invention of the aeroplane could have said: Our only known good model for flying is birds and insects. It took billions of years of the universe churning at random to accidentally generate birds and insects. We have no clue how to replicate that scale. And yet we know that it's not impossible to create flying machines.