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I think that leaving aside theological and philosophical discussions of what consciousness "really" is, anything we would recognize as AGI would exhibit what we

I think that leaving aside theological and philosophical discussions of what consciousness "really" is, anything we would recognize as AGI would exhibit what we perceive as consciousness: it would demonstrate a sense of itself as distinct from the world around it, a mental model of the world and the agents (like us) and entities/objects in it, and the ability to reason abstractly about these things.

graderjs 4y ago
Sure, sure probably. But there might be some interesting test, where something that is really AGI, and fails something like a "recognizing yourself in a mirror" test (not that specific test obviously, but you see what I'm getting at--some sort of trick)...that works for intelligence + consciousness but not just intelligence. No idea what that could be, but it's possible it could exist. Again I think we need to separate out that consciousness doesn't imply soul. So we have a few things: soul, consciousness, intelligence, and we are really only interested here in constructing the latter in an AGI. Just thinking about a nice analogy just now: may be a glib oversimplification but one way to characterize soul, consciousness, intelligence is as: memory, present awareness, imagination. What is a soul if not a memory of all experiences of that soul? What is consciousness if not awareness of the present? What is intelligence if not some sort of sophisticated imagination that is useful/aligns with some model (reality, or another)? Just an idea Another interesting thing is: if your reasoning is fast enough, it doesn't have to be abstract. You can probably get the same speedup that abstraction/generalization provides to categories of observations with enough parallel processing of specific observations. Obviously from that view then abstraction is like a hack for humans to overcome neural speed limits/memory limits, but it may not be necessary for AGI: I think this is one reason why AGI (or at least its inner workings) may remain incomprehensible to us.

graderjs 4y ago

Sure, sure probably. But there might be some interesting test, where something that is really AGI, and fails something like a "recognizing yourself in a mirror" test (not that specific test obviously, but you see what I'm getting at--some sort of trick)...that works for intelligence + consciousness but not just intelligence. No idea what that could be, but it's possible it could exist. Again I think we need to separate out that consciousness doesn't imply soul. So we have a few things: soul, consciousness, intelligence, and we are really only interested here in constructing the latter in an AGI. Just thinking about a nice analogy just now: may be a glib oversimplification but one way to characterize soul, consciousness, intelligence is as: memory, present awareness, imagination. What is a soul if not a memory of all experiences of that soul? What is consciousness if not awareness of the present? What is intelligence if not some sort of sophisticated imagination that is useful/aligns with some model (reality, or another)? Just an idea Another interesting thing is: if your reasoning is fast enough, it doesn't have to be abstract. You can probably get the same speedup that abstraction/generalization provides to categories of observations with enough parallel processing of specific observations. Obviously from that view then abstraction is like a hack for humans to overcome neural speed limits/memory limits, but it may not be necessary for AGI: I think this is one reason why AGI (or at least its inner workings) may remain incomprehensible to us.