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Well, it's a bit of an attention seeking title and it seems people are taking it literally. I wouldn't bet that Sussman literally means it. "We really don't kno

Well, it's a bit of an attention seeking title and it seems people are taking it literally. I wouldn't bet that Sussman literally means it. "We really don't know how biology computes" sounds more like it. I have never seen any reason to assume that there's something deeply different about the way the genome or the brain performs computations. My guess is it will turn out to be interesting from a technological point of view only.

babel17 15y ago
It always astounds me how people can completely blend out one major thing: consciousness Is it possible that machines develop consciousness like ours? THAT is the question that needs to be answered and which is far more interesting than "from a technological point of view only"
- Confusion 15y ago
  To me that's not a question at all. The answer is a ringing: yes, of course. I'm squarely in the 'consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of certain configurations of matter', so to me it is only a question of the technology to create those configurations. There is matter and only matter. Humans are a configurations of matter and those specific configurations have the property we hold so dear and call 'consciousness'. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose you couldn't synthetically arrive at a configuration of matter that displays the same emergent behavior. This is the basic thesis of the famous book 'Godel, Escher, Bach' by Hofstadter. I am a strange loop. Any similar strange loop will display the same properties. Any question to this regard probably makes you a closet Cartesian dualist. When you drill down, most people turn out to be that. (Some intermediate philosophical positions are possible, but they are subtle and rarely held consistently by someone that hasn't spent a course studying the matter in detail). What I'm guessing in my previous post is that it may turn out that you can most easily achieve a configuration that displays consciousness by using biological materials. In that case, any future conscious machine would probably have a core of material similar to our brain. Which more poignantly raises the ethical questions related to creating such machines. (BTW, note we are conflating 'any consciousness' and 'intelligent consciousness' by focusing on humans)

babel17 15y ago

It always astounds me how people can completely blend out one major thing: consciousness Is it possible that machines develop consciousness like ours? THAT is the question that needs to be answered and which is far more interesting than "from a technological point of view only"

Confusion 15y ago
To me that's not a question at all. The answer is a ringing: yes, of course. I'm squarely in the 'consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of certain configurations of matter', so to me it is only a question of the technology to create those configurations. There is matter and only matter. Humans are a configurations of matter and those specific configurations have the property we hold so dear and call 'consciousness'. There is no reason whatsoever to suppose you couldn't synthetically arrive at a configuration of matter that displays the same emergent behavior. This is the basic thesis of the famous book 'Godel, Escher, Bach' by Hofstadter. I am a strange loop. Any similar strange loop will display the same properties. Any question to this regard probably makes you a closet Cartesian dualist. When you drill down, most people turn out to be that. (Some intermediate philosophical positions are possible, but they are subtle and rarely held consistently by someone that hasn't spent a course studying the matter in detail). What I'm guessing in my previous post is that it may turn out that you can most easily achieve a configuration that displays consciousness by using biological materials. In that case, any future conscious machine would probably have a core of material similar to our brain. Which more poignantly raises the ethical questions related to creating such machines. (BTW, note we are conflating 'any consciousness' and 'intelligent consciousness' by focusing on humans)