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Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some
by codeulike 5y ago
Certainly there are arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, but they tend to boil down to one of three assertions: one, that there is some vital field or other presently intangible influence exclusive to biological life - perhaps even carbon-based biological life - which may eventually fall within the remit of scientific understanding but which cannot be emulated in any other form (all of which is neither impossible nor likely); two, that self-awareness resides in a supernatural soul - presumably linked to a broad-based occult system involving gods or a god, reincarnation or whatever - and which one assumes can never be understood scientifically (equally improbable, though I do write as an atheist); and, three, that matter cannot become self-aware (or more precisely that it cannot support any informational formulation which might be said to be self-aware or taken together with its material substrate exhibit the signs of self-awareness). ...I leave all the more than nominally self-aware readers to spot the logical problem with that argument.
Iain M Banks - A Few Notes on the Culture
rec.arts.sf.written 1994
- notahacker 5y agoThe most standard objection of all is that we're trying to emulate an extremely complex long running chemical process in 1s and 0s on very different hardware, and whilst it may be logically possible to do this, the human brain isn't nearly smart enough to understand its own architecture well enough to design an even more complex emulation architecture (either a brain emulation program or an accurate evolution-of-consciousness simulator). I don't think that requires a "soul": I think it works quite well with the assumption that human self awareness is linked to complex organism-survival-biased chemical processes we call emotions which are pretty orthogonal to the sort of probability-estimation optimizations we select for with ML models. And also pretty orthogonal to those models yielding useful results...
- codeulike 5y agoSo the first assertion basically
- notahacker 5y agoIt's not an assertion that it cannot be emulated in any other form even if understood, it's an assertion that it's highly improbable that humans are capable of understanding in sufficient detail to design an emulator
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoWouldn't that also imply that we don't understand it well enough to say that we can't? All these complicated biological processes could be extraneous or very round-about ways of accomplishing with carbon what could be accomplished much more simply in silicon.