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I never understood this. Evolution basically says humans are conscious matter...why would that not be replicatable via an intelligent designer (humans)? Random

I never understood this. Evolution basically says humans are conscious matter...why would that not be replicatable via an intelligent designer (humans)? Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would that be the most efficient solution?

jugg1es 2y ago
We can't replicate something we don't understand. The mechanism for consciousness is not understood at all right now and could actually be based on quantum effects that we haven't detected yet. It's also possible that it is only achievable in an organic machine. Until we understand how consciousness actually arises, the best we can do is a simulacrum of it.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  We can’t replicate it now but it doesn’t means it’s impossible. Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible, it’s just not something we can feasibly do right now.
  - thethimble 2y ago
    The framework of materialism posits that there’s a physical universe and consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. This view is so prevalent in the western world it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else. As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea). In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary. To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
    - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
      >I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain. Stated a bit differently: All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness? Do you believe that events must have causes?
      - thethimble 2y ago
        > The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true. How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness. It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability. The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.
        anon84873628 2y ago
        >Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability. Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- moi2388 2y ago
  Why not? I can replicate a book in a foreign without understanding the language?
  - fuzzfactor 2y ago
    IOW you are hardly conscious at all of what the book is about.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not even that if it uses a different character set, unless you're doing photocopies). Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language). So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is). (Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
    - davnicwil 2y ago
      As a tangent on this, it'd be such an interesting experiment to see how far one could go in deciphering/understanding a new language and attempting to write a new book in that language based on the content of a single, probably fairly long, book. It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I doubt it's ever been tried. Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from limited, fragmented sources is the closest natural experiment we have in practice to have tested it, but it's hardly the same as a full, substantial text in a consistent style.
      - hovering_nox 2y ago
        Congratulations, you have just invented large language models.
- __loam 2y ago
  I agree that people who think we can replicate brains on von Neumann machines with our current understanding of the brain are idiots who don't know what they're talking about, but humans build things they don't understand all the time. There's always a way to go deeper on a subject. The Romans were pretty good architects even without a modern understanding of metallurgy and structural engineering. We can treat mental illness with medications even if we don't fully understand consciousness.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I don't understand this "we have to understand consciousness first" stuff gets so much discussion. If it acts human, and is indiscernible from human or human like, it'll fit our definition. I don't understand why "organic machine" matters, it's the "machine" part that matters, and we are machines. I think all that needs to be seriously considered. Is it ethical to end such an intelligence because it could easily evolve far quicker than us and displace us? Do we just let "natural selection" happen? big questions, but I don't think we'll understand and have universal understanding of consciousness before we stumble onto the first AGI
  - silver_silver 2y ago
    Something which pretends to be something else, no matter how convincing, is still essentially different. A deepfaked video could be bit for bit identical to what the genuine recording would have been and it still wouldn’t reflect reality if the content never happened.
    - Thiez 2y ago
      But since we can't yet define consciousness, how do you know the AGI is just 'faking it' instead of being the real deal? What are human brains but a bunch of neurons pretending to be a person?
      - silver_silver 2y ago
        That’s fair, we can’t even prove humans aren’t like you say - although the brain is vastly more complex than a neural network analogy lets on. I suppose once these models become sophisticated enough we’ll have to treat them as conscious until it can be proven one way or another.
        kaibee 2y ago
        > That’s fair, we can’t even prove humans aren’t like you say - although the brain is vastly more complex than a neural network analogy lets on. I suppose once these models become sophisticated enough we’ll have to treat them as conscious until it can be proven one way or another. I suspect that a lot of the complexity is legacy code and/or incidental to the implementation. Cells have to do a lot of things just to continue living. Likewise, a lot of what the brain does is just control the very complex biochemical reactor that it lives in. ie: whales have big brains relative to humans (though they are a much smaller % of their body).
- nox101 2y ago
  I replicate things I don't understand all the time. I replicate bread. I haven't a clue why it turns into bread. I just follow the instructions and it becomes bread. We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.
  - gls2ro 2y ago
    If you think about the bread example, what you do is to follow a very well known recipe even if you don't understand yeast. In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste. And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.
    - nox101 2y ago
      I would make the analogy to gunpower. We knew how to make gunpower from raw ingredients for nearly 3000 years before we knew how and why those ingredients actually caused the reaction they do. I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation. Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.
  - 2y ago
jacobsimon 2y ago
I agree but even if you take materialism for granted, we’ve yet to uncover the exact biological mechanism. It’s entirely possible that it is unique to carbon-based and/or analog brains.
- zeroonetwothree 2y ago
  That wouldn’t really be consistent with the laws of physics as we know them. So it would require a significant change in our scientific theories (which is possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it)
  - jacobsimon 2y ago
    I don’t follow you. I’m saying we haven’t discovered any inorganic consciousness, so it isn’t a given that we will be able to create it with digital computers. Not sure how that breaks the laws of physics.
    - __loam 2y ago
      Programmers seem to forget about how physics is the reason there's np-hard problems.
      - Thiez 2y ago
        Humans aren't better at solving NP-hard problems so I don't really see the connection with consciousness here.
    - anon84873628 2y ago
      "We haven't discovered any inorganic flying machines, so it isn't a given that we will be able to create them with metal." Turns out that if you get the structure right you can mimic the effect. Mimic the brain structure in silicon and you will get a similar effect. Just like how birds and airplanes are similar but different.
- anon84873628 2y ago
naasking 2y ago
Some people are convinced by p-zombies and The Knowledge Argument that not everything we experience can be reduced to matter interactions.
- chrsw 2y ago
  How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?
  - ikrenji 2y ago
    well the brain is special because it gives rise to consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't
    - astrange 2y ago
      There's a lot of nerves and bacteria in the digestive system that might contribute some of it. That and various hormonal glands and reproductive systems.
    - anon84873628 2y ago
      The brain evolved to be intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to model the outside world in order to make predictions and then choose an optimal course of action. More intelligent beings are generally more "fit" in the evolutionary sense. Hence how humans have conquered all the ecosystems on the planet. Turns out, consciousness/experience/qualia is an unexpected side effect of this process. We can "feel" the intelligence happening. Where we humans get lost is believing that it has any meaning, or that we are somehow in control. We're not; the feeling of free will is just a other trick of qualia.
    - nprateem 2y ago
      We don't know that either. We may be a collection of interacting consciousnesses arising from different organs that all pass around the baton called "I".
cambaceres 2y ago
> Evolution basically says humans are conscious matter. Evolution states nowhere that humans are concious.

jugg1es 2y ago

We can't replicate something we don't understand. The mechanism for consciousness is not understood at all right now and could actually be based on quantum effects that we haven't detected yet. It's also possible that it is only achievable in an organic machine. Until we understand how consciousness actually arises, the best we can do is a simulacrum of it.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
We can’t replicate it now but it doesn’t means it’s impossible. Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible, it’s just not something we can feasibly do right now.
- thethimble 2y ago
  The framework of materialism posits that there’s a physical universe and consciousness is an emergent property of physical processes. This view is so prevalent in the western world it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else. As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea). In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary. To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    >I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain. Stated a bit differently: All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness? Do you believe that events must have causes?
    - thethimble 2y ago
      > The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true. How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness. It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability. The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.
      - anon84873628 2y ago
        >Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability. Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
moi2388 2y ago
Why not? I can replicate a book in a foreign without understanding the language?
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  IOW you are hardly conscious at all of what the book is about.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not even that if it uses a different character set, unless you're doing photocopies). Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language). So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is). (Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
  - davnicwil 2y ago
    As a tangent on this, it'd be such an interesting experiment to see how far one could go in deciphering/understanding a new language and attempting to write a new book in that language based on the content of a single, probably fairly long, book. It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I doubt it's ever been tried. Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from limited, fragmented sources is the closest natural experiment we have in practice to have tested it, but it's hardly the same as a full, substantial text in a consistent style.
    - hovering_nox 2y ago
      Congratulations, you have just invented large language models.
__loam 2y ago
I agree that people who think we can replicate brains on von Neumann machines with our current understanding of the brain are idiots who don't know what they're talking about, but humans build things they don't understand all the time. There's always a way to go deeper on a subject. The Romans were pretty good architects even without a modern understanding of metallurgy and structural engineering. We can treat mental illness with medications even if we don't fully understand consciousness.
EasyMark 2y ago
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. I don't understand this "we have to understand consciousness first" stuff gets so much discussion. If it acts human, and is indiscernible from human or human like, it'll fit our definition. I don't understand why "organic machine" matters, it's the "machine" part that matters, and we are machines. I think all that needs to be seriously considered. Is it ethical to end such an intelligence because it could easily evolve far quicker than us and displace us? Do we just let "natural selection" happen? big questions, but I don't think we'll understand and have universal understanding of consciousness before we stumble onto the first AGI
- silver_silver 2y ago
  Something which pretends to be something else, no matter how convincing, is still essentially different. A deepfaked video could be bit for bit identical to what the genuine recording would have been and it still wouldn’t reflect reality if the content never happened.
  - Thiez 2y ago
    But since we can't yet define consciousness, how do you know the AGI is just 'faking it' instead of being the real deal? What are human brains but a bunch of neurons pretending to be a person?
    - silver_silver 2y ago
      That’s fair, we can’t even prove humans aren’t like you say - although the brain is vastly more complex than a neural network analogy lets on. I suppose once these models become sophisticated enough we’ll have to treat them as conscious until it can be proven one way or another.
      - kaibee 2y ago
        > That’s fair, we can’t even prove humans aren’t like you say - although the brain is vastly more complex than a neural network analogy lets on. I suppose once these models become sophisticated enough we’ll have to treat them as conscious until it can be proven one way or another. I suspect that a lot of the complexity is legacy code and/or incidental to the implementation. Cells have to do a lot of things just to continue living. Likewise, a lot of what the brain does is just control the very complex biochemical reactor that it lives in. ie: whales have big brains relative to humans (though they are a much smaller % of their body).
nox101 2y ago
I replicate things I don't understand all the time. I replicate bread. I haven't a clue why it turns into bread. I just follow the instructions and it becomes bread. We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.
- gls2ro 2y ago
  If you think about the bread example, what you do is to follow a very well known recipe even if you don't understand yeast. In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste. And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.
  - nox101 2y ago
    I would make the analogy to gunpower. We knew how to make gunpower from raw ingredients for nearly 3000 years before we knew how and why those ingredients actually caused the reaction they do. I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation. Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.
- 2y ago

jacobsimon 2y ago

I agree but even if you take materialism for granted, we’ve yet to uncover the exact biological mechanism. It’s entirely possible that it is unique to carbon-based and/or analog brains.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago
That wouldn’t really be consistent with the laws of physics as we know them. So it would require a significant change in our scientific theories (which is possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it)
- jacobsimon 2y ago
  I don’t follow you. I’m saying we haven’t discovered any inorganic consciousness, so it isn’t a given that we will be able to create it with digital computers. Not sure how that breaks the laws of physics.
  - __loam 2y ago
    Programmers seem to forget about how physics is the reason there's np-hard problems.
    - Thiez 2y ago
      Humans aren't better at solving NP-hard problems so I don't really see the connection with consciousness here.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    "We haven't discovered any inorganic flying machines, so it isn't a given that we will be able to create them with metal." Turns out that if you get the structure right you can mimic the effect. Mimic the brain structure in silicon and you will get a similar effect. Just like how birds and airplanes are similar but different.
anon84873628 2y ago

naasking 2y ago

Some people are convinced by p-zombies and The Knowledge Argument that not everything we experience can be reduced to matter interactions.

chrsw 2y ago
How is that different than saying the function of the lungs, kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions? How is the brain special?
- ikrenji 2y ago
  well the brain is special because it gives rise to consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't
  - astrange 2y ago
    There's a lot of nerves and bacteria in the digestive system that might contribute some of it. That and various hormonal glands and reproductive systems.
  - anon84873628 2y ago
    The brain evolved to be intelligent. Intelligence is the ability to model the outside world in order to make predictions and then choose an optimal course of action. More intelligent beings are generally more "fit" in the evolutionary sense. Hence how humans have conquered all the ecosystems on the planet. Turns out, consciousness/experience/qualia is an unexpected side effect of this process. We can "feel" the intelligence happening. Where we humans get lost is believing that it has any meaning, or that we are somehow in control. We're not; the feeling of free will is just a other trick of qualia.
  - nprateem 2y ago
    We don't know that either. We may be a collection of interacting consciousnesses arising from different organs that all pass around the baton called "I".

cambaceres 2y ago

> Evolution basically says humans are conscious matter. Evolution states nowhere that humans are concious.