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The idea that the human mind is not simply a very complex thinking machine is simply a hypothesis. You can come up with examples and arguments all you want but
by elil17 4y ago
The idea that the human mind is not simply a very complex thinking machine is simply a hypothesis. You can come up with examples and arguments all you want but it doesn’t change the fundamental question about the nature of intelligence and consciousness. Unlike most spiritual questions it is falsifiable, which is exciting. Scientists need only emulate a sufficiently complex brain on a computer. Small worm nervous systems have already been simulated, so the real question is how big do we need to go. My guess is that by the time we have a mouse emulation behaving like a mouse within a physics simulation there will be little question left that intelligence and consciousness are computable.
- bannedbybros 4y ago
- foobarian 4y agoThe FPV feeling you get in your brain is what bugs me. If you managed to copy a brain down to the last quantum state chances are the copy would be a separate monad to borrow Leibniz's word. What is the mechanism behind that? If we were in a simulation running on a Unix kernel I would point to kernel threads. What bugs me with the "complicated enough ML software can think" lines of thought is that they don't explain that mechanism.
- soulofmischief 4y agoTo be fair, neuroscientists and psychologists alike do not yet know the mechanism behind the conscious observer, we can't currently describe machines in these terms because we can't even describe ourselves.
- spookybones 4y agoHow is pointing to kernel threads different than pointing to precise measures of brain activity? Even if it gets incredibly accurate, it doesn’t explain qualia. That is the so-called Hard Problem in philosophy.
- rbanffy 4y agoThere’s also a different question: what if we replicate similar behaviours, but based on a completely different model completely unrelated to the neural networks of an organic brain? Can we truly tell something it’s not conscious just because it was built on different principles? It’s very likely the first alien intelligences we get to observe and communicate with will be completely… alien to us and our mammalian brains and whatever thought processes they use will be wildly different from anything we observe in nature around us.
- tsol 4y agoThe question isn't whether they can think, it's if they can feel
- elil17 4y agoI don’t know that you can feel but I assume you can because you behave like me and I know I can feel (or I can’t feel and I’m just saying I can feel because that’s what people who can’t feel say automatically)