4 ms·

What's your objection to "conscious" machines? (Putting it in quotes because that's a loaded, unscientific term and everybody has their own definition)

by Udo 4y ago

Maursault 4y ago
My objection is it would be cruel and horrifying. Also, as of yet, we don't understand what mind is, and we can slice up the brain in a thousand ways and never find it. We may never know, and all we do know is that consciousness is a phenomenon arising from healthy brain. So how are we supposed to make a machine conscious without knowing how we ourselves are conscious? Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- Udo 4y ago
  How do you know you're not interacting with a Chinese Room when you talk to another human being? Our own brains are an excellent proof of concept that machines can be made to think. We're all machines in a way, after all - unless you believe there is a special supernatural exception for human minds.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Let's not again confuse natural intelligence with artificial intelligence. You do not have artificial consciousness, you have genuine consciousness. Further, the brain is not a machine. To explain why, I'm just going to quote this excellent piece from mindmatters: A machine is an artifact. It is a human-built assembly of materials that have no natural inclination to work in unison. Silicon and copper, plastic and glass have no natural propensity to compute. We make artifacts, for example computers, out of these materials to serve our purposes. But they are not the materials’ natural purposes. In the classical hylemorphic (Aristotelian) perspective, an artifact is an artificial composite of substances and thus it has an accidental, not substantial, form. Machines work as they do “accidentally”; that is, their function as machines is not inherent to the matter that comprises them. Rather their function is imposed on the disparate parts by human intelligence. Unlike a machine, the brain is an organ, a functional part of a living organism. It (along with the body) has a substantial form; its activity is natural to it. One might say that the brain's activity is intrinsic to it, not imposed on it extrinsically, as is the activity of a machine.[1] [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-if-you-choose-to-see-it-that-way/ https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-i...
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      The brain absolutely is a machine. Just like everything biological in general: life is nanotech. We know that, because we can literally look through our microscopes and see how it ticks, at the atomic level. So we looked and saw that life is just molecular nanotech, but what we didn't see was any tags attached to carbon chains that would say, "this molecule's natural function is to think", or "that molecule's natural function is to be a part of an organ that pumps blood", etc. Because there is no such thing like a "natural function" in the sense used by your quote, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is itself artificial[0], and that whole quote represents a piece of magical thinking philosophy you'd think humanity abandoned at least a century ago. ---- [0] - https://abstrusegoose.com/215 https://abstrusegoose.com/215
      - Maursault 4y ago
        Words do have meanings, and "artificial" has a distinct meaning that is not the same meaning as that of "natural." Flavors natural and artificial are distinct from each other. There are natural functions. Pumping and circulating blood is a natural function of the heart. If you don't like "artificial," we can use "synthetic" or substitute "man-made." You have repeated assertions without any supporting argument. "The brain is absolutely a machine," is an assertion, but you have not remotely supported it. Proof by assertion[1] is fallacious argument. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
        Udo 4y ago
        You're talking about the origin of a mechanism when you make this natural/artificial distinction, not its function. And based on that distinction you postulate that one can never have traits of the other. Reading all your comments in this thread again it seems to me that "should it happen" and "can it happen" are highly overlapping concepts in your opinion, which underscores my impression that you're making a moral argument instead of a scientific one. You could just let the discourse end there - it's a strongly held belief and that's the end of the discussion. What confuses me, and maybe you can clear this up in a reply, that you still want to have a discussion about facts and reasoning. For that to happen, you would need to show that "nature" does indeed have the privileged and unreplicable position you assert it does. Just using the term "nature" is rhetorically evocative but not rationally meaningful in this context. To start with, you'd also have to definitionally delineate nature from artifice, because we humans have really been blurring those lines for a long time now and no cosmic force has stopped us yet. Your implication that "natural" processes can never be functionally replicated or continued upon by volitional development is not supported by evidence. There is, however, a lot of evidence for the other side of this debate. We are heavily altering "nature" to suit us, and wherever we looked so far we find machinery that can be rationally understood, manipulated, replicated, remixed, and used whole or in part in our own designs. If there is a supernatural component that somehow privileges "natural" life, we have not found it yet.
- eru 4y ago
  > My objection is it would be cruel and horrifying. That's an argument for why we _shouldn't_ build them. But not an argument for why we _can't_ build them. Do you see the difference? > So how are we supposed to make a machine conscious without knowing how we ourselves are conscious? Evolution didn't 'know' about conscious either. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution had only the faintest ideas about thermodynamics, yet managed to build working steam engines. (And we improved them over time, as we learned more.) For the 'Chinese Room' see eg https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html or just have a look at good old Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Though I'm not sure why you brought up consciousness in the first place. It's irrelevant for the Fermi Paradox.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > That's an argument for why we _shouldn't_ build them. But not an argument for why we _can't_ build them. Do you see the difference? This is a straw man fallacy, because I was asked "What's your objection to "conscious" machines?", and my objection is that it is cruel. > Evolution didn't 'know' about conscious either. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution had only the faintest ideas about thermodynamics, yet managed to build working steam engines. (And we improved them over time, as we learned more.) This is also a fallacious argument. Just because we don't know how evolution created consciousness doesn't mean that we can use our ignorance of how consciousness evolved to create machine consciousness. If you're only using this as evidence that consciousness is possible, the fallacy is begging the question, petitio principii. Also, I believe there is here equivocation and conflation of artificial intelligence with natural intelligence. If we have the time, we can spend 600M years to evolve consciousness directly, but then it would not be artificial, it would not be machine intelligence, it would be natural or biological intelligence, and it would be a massive waste of time because it is already here and we are it. > For the 'Chinese Room' see eg https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html or just have a look at good old Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Do you really expect me to argue against your citations when you're too lazy even to summarize any particular counter-argument? It has been said that most of the work done in AI has been in trying to prove John Searle wrong, which suggests his argument is significant. A Turing Test does not prove consciousness nor even intelligence. All it proves is whether a human can be fooled. Arguments suggesting emergent properties between a human and a rule book are patently ridiculous, absurd on their face, because learning a book could not possibly ever make a book conscious. Where the Chinese Room thought experiment breaks down is there is a human involved, and most counter-arguments get tripped up here forgetting that it is metaphor and there is no human inside a computer where these types of counter-arguments would ever come true: no matter how much machine learning you submit your program to, there is no mind to begin with that could ever become aware. > Though I'm not sure why you brought up consciousness in the first place. It's irrelevant for the Fermi Paradox. In fact, I did not, the OP of the tread asserted: "Seems pretty clear that we're on a path to machine intelligence," and I responded to that specifically and argued against the possibility.
- nullc 4y ago
  > Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment. I always found that experiment to be extremely unconvincing, to put it mildly. Using that framework I can prove that you are not conscious. I construct a "english room". You are in the back without any contact to the outside world. A Chinese speaker in the front can pass messages to you from the outside world, in English by laborious copying. Clearly you aren't conscious because the Chinese speaker can't understand the English. Or, alternatively, no one would dispute a single neuron is not conscious and can't understand english. I pass signals into your neurons and through some electrochemical magic you reply in english, yet the neurons involved don't understand english therefor you aren't conscious. All Searle has done is picked out one component of a composite system, concluded that in isolation it has no clue whats going on, and from that concluded the system as a whole doesn't. We have a hard time clearly defining consciousness, and it's not clear if some AGI would be conscious (maybe it's just an emergent phenomena)-- it's also not clear if there would be any particular advantage in it being so. But in any case, I don't think the chinese room is a useful argument for anything.

What's your objection to "conscious" machines? (Putting it in quotes because that's a loaded, unscientific term and everybody has their own definition)

by Udo 4y ago

What's your objection to "conscious" machines? (Putting it in quotes because that's a loaded, unscientific term and everybody has their own definition)

Maursault 4y ago

My objection is it would be cruel and horrifying. Also, as of yet, we don't understand what mind is, and we can slice up the brain in a thousand ways and never find it. We may never know, and all we do know is that consciousness is a phenomenon arising from healthy brain. So how are we supposed to make a machine conscious without knowing how we ourselves are conscious? Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Udo 4y ago
How do you know you're not interacting with a Chinese Room when you talk to another human being? Our own brains are an excellent proof of concept that machines can be made to think. We're all machines in a way, after all - unless you believe there is a special supernatural exception for human minds.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Let's not again confuse natural intelligence with artificial intelligence. You do not have artificial consciousness, you have genuine consciousness. Further, the brain is not a machine. To explain why, I'm just going to quote this excellent piece from mindmatters: A machine is an artifact. It is a human-built assembly of materials that have no natural inclination to work in unison. Silicon and copper, plastic and glass have no natural propensity to compute. We make artifacts, for example computers, out of these materials to serve our purposes. But they are not the materials’ natural purposes. In the classical hylemorphic (Aristotelian) perspective, an artifact is an artificial composite of substances and thus it has an accidental, not substantial, form. Machines work as they do “accidentally”; that is, their function as machines is not inherent to the matter that comprises them. Rather their function is imposed on the disparate parts by human intelligence. Unlike a machine, the brain is an organ, a functional part of a living organism. It (along with the body) has a substantial form; its activity is natural to it. One might say that the brain's activity is intrinsic to it, not imposed on it extrinsically, as is the activity of a machine.[1] [1] https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-if-you-choose-to-see-it-that-way/ https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-i...
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    The brain absolutely is a machine. Just like everything biological in general: life is nanotech. We know that, because we can literally look through our microscopes and see how it ticks, at the atomic level. So we looked and saw that life is just molecular nanotech, but what we didn't see was any tags attached to carbon chains that would say, "this molecule's natural function is to think", or "that molecule's natural function is to be a part of an organ that pumps blood", etc. Because there is no such thing like a "natural function" in the sense used by your quote, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is itself artificial[0], and that whole quote represents a piece of magical thinking philosophy you'd think humanity abandoned at least a century ago. ---- [0] - https://abstrusegoose.com/215 https://abstrusegoose.com/215
    - Maursault 4y ago
      Words do have meanings, and "artificial" has a distinct meaning that is not the same meaning as that of "natural." Flavors natural and artificial are distinct from each other. There are natural functions. Pumping and circulating blood is a natural function of the heart. If you don't like "artificial," we can use "synthetic" or substitute "man-made." You have repeated assertions without any supporting argument. "The brain is absolutely a machine," is an assertion, but you have not remotely supported it. Proof by assertion[1] is fallacious argument. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion
      - Udo 4y ago
        You're talking about the origin of a mechanism when you make this natural/artificial distinction, not its function. And based on that distinction you postulate that one can never have traits of the other. Reading all your comments in this thread again it seems to me that "should it happen" and "can it happen" are highly overlapping concepts in your opinion, which underscores my impression that you're making a moral argument instead of a scientific one. You could just let the discourse end there - it's a strongly held belief and that's the end of the discussion. What confuses me, and maybe you can clear this up in a reply, that you still want to have a discussion about facts and reasoning. For that to happen, you would need to show that "nature" does indeed have the privileged and unreplicable position you assert it does. Just using the term "nature" is rhetorically evocative but not rationally meaningful in this context. To start with, you'd also have to definitionally delineate nature from artifice, because we humans have really been blurring those lines for a long time now and no cosmic force has stopped us yet. Your implication that "natural" processes can never be functionally replicated or continued upon by volitional development is not supported by evidence. There is, however, a lot of evidence for the other side of this debate. We are heavily altering "nature" to suit us, and wherever we looked so far we find machinery that can be rationally understood, manipulated, replicated, remixed, and used whole or in part in our own designs. If there is a supernatural component that somehow privileges "natural" life, we have not found it yet.
eru 4y ago
> My objection is it would be cruel and horrifying. That's an argument for why we _shouldn't_ build them. But not an argument for why we _can't_ build them. Do you see the difference? > So how are we supposed to make a machine conscious without knowing how we ourselves are conscious? Evolution didn't 'know' about conscious either. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution had only the faintest ideas about thermodynamics, yet managed to build working steam engines. (And we improved them over time, as we learned more.) For the 'Chinese Room' see eg https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html or just have a look at good old Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Though I'm not sure why you brought up consciousness in the first place. It's irrelevant for the Fermi Paradox.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > That's an argument for why we _shouldn't_ build them. But not an argument for why we _can't_ build them. Do you see the difference? This is a straw man fallacy, because I was asked "What's your objection to "conscious" machines?", and my objection is that it is cruel. > Evolution didn't 'know' about conscious either. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution had only the faintest ideas about thermodynamics, yet managed to build working steam engines. (And we improved them over time, as we learned more.) This is also a fallacious argument. Just because we don't know how evolution created consciousness doesn't mean that we can use our ignorance of how consciousness evolved to create machine consciousness. If you're only using this as evidence that consciousness is possible, the fallacy is begging the question, petitio principii. Also, I believe there is here equivocation and conflation of artificial intelligence with natural intelligence. If we have the time, we can spend 600M years to evolve consciousness directly, but then it would not be artificial, it would not be machine intelligence, it would be natural or biological intelligence, and it would be a massive waste of time because it is already here and we are it. > For the 'Chinese Room' see eg https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec4.html or just have a look at good old Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room Do you really expect me to argue against your citations when you're too lazy even to summarize any particular counter-argument? It has been said that most of the work done in AI has been in trying to prove John Searle wrong, which suggests his argument is significant. A Turing Test does not prove consciousness nor even intelligence. All it proves is whether a human can be fooled. Arguments suggesting emergent properties between a human and a rule book are patently ridiculous, absurd on their face, because learning a book could not possibly ever make a book conscious. Where the Chinese Room thought experiment breaks down is there is a human involved, and most counter-arguments get tripped up here forgetting that it is metaphor and there is no human inside a computer where these types of counter-arguments would ever come true: no matter how much machine learning you submit your program to, there is no mind to begin with that could ever become aware. > Though I'm not sure why you brought up consciousness in the first place. It's irrelevant for the Fermi Paradox. In fact, I did not, the OP of the tread asserted: "Seems pretty clear that we're on a path to machine intelligence," and I responded to that specifically and argued against the possibility.
nullc 4y ago
> Dr. John Searle's objection is that software is not a mind, and goes on to explain why with his Chinese Room thought experiment. I always found that experiment to be extremely unconvincing, to put it mildly. Using that framework I can prove that you are not conscious. I construct a "english room". You are in the back without any contact to the outside world. A Chinese speaker in the front can pass messages to you from the outside world, in English by laborious copying. Clearly you aren't conscious because the Chinese speaker can't understand the English. Or, alternatively, no one would dispute a single neuron is not conscious and can't understand english. I pass signals into your neurons and through some electrochemical magic you reply in english, yet the neurons involved don't understand english therefor you aren't conscious. All Searle has done is picked out one component of a composite system, concluded that in isolation it has no clue whats going on, and from that concluded the system as a whole doesn't. We have a hard time clearly defining consciousness, and it's not clear if some AGI would be conscious (maybe it's just an emergent phenomena)-- it's also not clear if there would be any particular advantage in it being so. But in any case, I don't think the chinese room is a useful argument for anything.