8 ms·

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 tha

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.
- engineeringwoke 6y ago
  Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. We literally cannot perceive the constraints of the latter's underlying physical system. Sometimes I feel computer scientists choose to misunderstand physicists because it would make them feel stupid if they did understand.
  - cygx 6y ago
    We literally cannot perceive the constraints of the latter's underlying physical system. Well, for one, I'm reasonably certain that such a system fits inside a skull...
  - glenstein 6y ago
    >Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. For pete's sake, it's an analogy, not a direct comparison, and it is perfectly valid as such when interpreted with due charity. You can say "Brains are complicated. They took time and evolution. That sure is hard. See how hard it is?" The same can be said of flight at a certain level of abstraction as a valid analogy, which can be charitably interpreted as such without the need for claiming anyone is purposely choosing to misunderstand physics. The fact that the examples of brains and of flight given to us by nature sure seem complicated doesn't establish as a matter of principle that their salient properties can't be modeled in machines, and that's the real thing that's at stake. Disputing that requires a different kind of argument than saying "gosh it sure is complicated", and that's what the analogy is pointing out.
lone-commenter 6y ago
We don’t understand something. It’s a complicated phenomenon. So it’s impossible to replicate? I think the “argument” is so silly it doesn’t need to be disproved. If one wants to prove something impossible they’d better avoid logical fallacies. A priori we can’t say that it’s impossible, nor that it’s certainly doable.
- simonh 6y ago
  Except that like flight it’s already been done - by evolution. I’m very confident that people will be ‘proving’ that it’s impossible like this article, right up to the day we actually do it.
  - lone-commenter 6y ago
    I meant that it's dubious whether we can reproduce a brain-like machine until we'll understand the matter well enough to either prove it possible or impossible. Anyway, I feel like you. If it's been done once, it can't be impossible in any meaningful sense. Further, the argument from lack of understanding would work only if knowledge (and science) could not advance any further; but that's tough to prove -- not to say that it's used over and over in faith vs. reason debates to the point it's become annoying -- so the argument is quite weak.
nl 6y ago
It's not entirely a given that consciousness is needed for intelligence. It's also not clear what consciousness is. Plenty of animals are self-aware, but they don't have human level intelligence. We only have a single example of general intelligence. It seems possible that there could be other kinds of general intelligence that don't require consciousness.

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.

engineeringwoke 6y ago
Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. We literally cannot perceive the constraints of the latter's underlying physical system. Sometimes I feel computer scientists choose to misunderstand physicists because it would make them feel stupid if they did understand.
- cygx 6y ago
  We literally cannot perceive the constraints of the latter's underlying physical system. Well, for one, I'm reasonably certain that such a system fits inside a skull...
- glenstein 6y ago
  >Flight and consciousness are not in any way compareable concepts. For pete's sake, it's an analogy, not a direct comparison, and it is perfectly valid as such when interpreted with due charity. You can say "Brains are complicated. They took time and evolution. That sure is hard. See how hard it is?" The same can be said of flight at a certain level of abstraction as a valid analogy, which can be charitably interpreted as such without the need for claiming anyone is purposely choosing to misunderstand physics. The fact that the examples of brains and of flight given to us by nature sure seem complicated doesn't establish as a matter of principle that their salient properties can't be modeled in machines, and that's the real thing that's at stake. Disputing that requires a different kind of argument than saying "gosh it sure is complicated", and that's what the analogy is pointing out.

lone-commenter 6y ago

We don’t understand something. It’s a complicated phenomenon. So it’s impossible to replicate? I think the “argument” is so silly it doesn’t need to be disproved. If one wants to prove something impossible they’d better avoid logical fallacies. A priori we can’t say that it’s impossible, nor that it’s certainly doable.

simonh 6y ago
Except that like flight it’s already been done - by evolution. I’m very confident that people will be ‘proving’ that it’s impossible like this article, right up to the day we actually do it.
- lone-commenter 6y ago
  I meant that it's dubious whether we can reproduce a brain-like machine until we'll understand the matter well enough to either prove it possible or impossible. Anyway, I feel like you. If it's been done once, it can't be impossible in any meaningful sense. Further, the argument from lack of understanding would work only if knowledge (and science) could not advance any further; but that's tough to prove -- not to say that it's used over and over in faith vs. reason debates to the point it's become annoying -- so the argument is quite weak.

nl 6y ago

It's not entirely a given that consciousness is needed for intelligence. It's also not clear what consciousness is. Plenty of animals are self-aware, but they don't have human level intelligence. We only have a single example of general intelligence. It seems possible that there could be other kinds of general intelligence that don't require consciousness.