6 ms·

Philosophical thought: if the aim of this field is to create an artificial human brain, then it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, t

Philosophical thought: if the aim of this field is to create an artificial human brain, then it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial brain and a real brain. This begs two questions: 1) Is the ultimate form of this technology ethically distinguishable from a slave? 2) Is there an ethical difference between bioengineering an actual human brain for computing purposes, versus constructing a digital version that is functionally identical?

russdill 1y ago
Disagree. It would be like saying the more advanced transportation becomes, then more like a horse it will be.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thechao 1y ago
  Shining-brass 25 ton, coal-powered, steam-driven autohorse! 8 legs! Tireless! Breathes fire!
ge96 1y ago
3) can we use a dead person's brain, hook up wires to it and oxygen, why not
thinkingtoilet 1y ago
I am certain this answer will change as generations pass. The current generations, us, will say that there is a difference. Once a generation of kids grow up with AI assistants/friends/partners/etc... they will have a different view. They will demand rights and protections for their AI.
energy123 1y ago
We should start by disambiguating intelligence and qualia. The field is trying to create intelligence, and kind of assuming that qualia won't be created alongside it.
- falcor84 1y ago
  How would you go about disambiguating them? Isn't that literally the "hard problem of consciousness" [0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- feoren 1y ago
  "Qualia" is a meaningless term made up so that philosophers can keep publishing meaningless papers. It's completely unfalsifiable: there is no test you can even theoretically run to determine the existence or nonexistence of qualia. There's never a reason to concern yourself with it.
  - drdeca 1y ago
    The test I use to determine that there exist qualia is “looking”. Now, whether there is a test I can do to confirm that there is any that anything(/anyone) other than me experiences, is another question. (I don’t see how there could be such a test, but perhaps I just don’t see it.) So, probably not really falsifiable in the sense you are considering, yeah. I don’t think that makes it meaningless, nor a worthless idea. It probably makes it not a scientific idea? If you care about subjective experiences, it seems to make sense that you would then concern oneself with subjective experiences. For the great lookup table Blockhead, whose memory banks take up a galaxy’s worth of space, storing a lookup table of responses for any possible partial conversation history with it, should we value not “hurting its feelings”? If not, why not? It responds just like how a person in an online one-on-one chat would. Is “Is this [points at something] a moral patient?” a question amenable to scientific study? It doesn’t seem like it to me. How would you falsify answers of “yes” or “no”? But, I refuse to reject the question as “meaningless”.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The term has some validity as a word for what I take to be the inner perception of processes within the brain. The qualia of a scent, for example, can be taken to refer to the inner processing of scent perception giving rise to a secondary perception of that processing (or other side effects of that processing, like evoking associated memories). I strongly suspect that that’s what’s actually going on when people talk about how it feels like to see red, and the like.
falcor84 1y ago
In my opinion, one of the best works of fiction exploring this is qntm's "Lena" - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- nis0s 1y ago
  Sorry, but no I think it overemphasizes the parent over the resultant progeny for no reason, and as such I think the story is limited in its vision and treatment of the subject.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Please say more
    - nis0s 1y ago
      Please bear with me, I read it a long time ago. I don’t think there’s any distinction between sentience resulting from organic or digital processes. All organic brains are subject to some manner of stochasticity which determines emergent behavioral properties, and I think the same will be true of digital or hybrid brains. So if you clone me in digital form, it’s not me anymore—it’s not even my twin, it’s something which was inspired from me, but it’s not me. This is now a distinct individual because of the random processes which govern behavior or personality etc., a different person, so to speak. So I never appreciated why MC felt any attachment or responsibility towards his images, other than perhaps the kindness you’d exhibit towards other persons. The images, or persons as I’d like to think of them, in the story were shown as sentient. But sentience is only one part of consciousness, and the images in the story Lena seem incapable of self-determination. Or maybe they’re some equivalent of a stunted form of animal consciousness, not human consciousness. Human consciousness is assertive about its right to self-determine by nature of being an apex organism. But even cows and sheep get mad and murderous when you’re unkind to them. Donkeys will lash out if you’re being a jerk. So I think two things: 1) simply creating an image of behaviors is not creating consciousness, and 2) human consciousness possesses a distinct quality of self-determination. The main thing I’ve noticed about conscious beings is that they have a will to assert themselves, and those that don’t possess or demonstrate that quality to an appreciable degree in animals or humans are usually physiologically damaged (maybe malnutrition or trauma). I don’t expect consciousness born out of digital processes to be any different.
antithesizer 1y ago
*shower thought
layer8 1y ago
For most applications, we don’t want “functionally identical”. We do not want it to have its own desires and a will of its own, biological(-analogous) needs, having a circadian rhythm, getting tired and needing sleep, being subject to mood changes and emotional swings, feeling pain, having a sexual drive, needing recognition and validation, and so on. So we don’t want to copy the neural and bodily correlates that give rise to those phenomena, which arguably are not essential to how the human brain manages to have the intelligence it has. That is likely to drastically change the ethics of it. We will have to learn more about how those things work in the brain to avoid the undesirables.
- kokanee 1y ago
  If we back away from philosophy and think like engineers, I think you're entirely right and the question should be moot. I can't help but think, though, that in spite of it all, the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the future will not be stopped from attempting to create something indistinguishable from flesh and blood.
  - tough 1y ago
    I mean have you watched Westworld?
dlivingston 1y ago
To 1) and 2), assuming a digital consciousness capable of self-awareness and introspection, I think the answer is clearly 'no'. But: > it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial brain and a real brain. I don't think it would be fair to say this. LLMs are certainly not worthy of ethical considerations. Consciousness needs to be demonstratable. Even if the synaptic structure of the digital vs. human brain approaches 1:1 similarity, the program running on it does not deserve ethical consideration unless and until consciousness can be demonstrated as an emergent property.
lo_zamoyski 1y ago
The burden of proof is to show that there is any real or substantive similarity between the two beyond some superficial comparisons and numbers. If you can't provide that, then you can't answer those questions meaningfully. (Frankly, this is all a category mistake. Human minds possess intentionality. They possess semantic apprehension. Computers are, by definition, abstract mathematical models that are purely syntactic and formal and therefore stripped of semantic content and intentionality. That is exactly what allows computation to be 'physically realizable' or 'mechanized', whether the simulating implementation is mechanical or electrical or whatever. There's a good deal of ignorant and wishy-washy magical thinking in this space that seems to draw hastily from superficial associations like "both (modern) computers and brains involve electrical phenomena" or "computers (appear to) calculate, and so do human beings", and so on.)

russdill 1y ago

Disagree. It would be like saying the more advanced transportation becomes, then more like a horse it will be.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thechao 1y ago
Shining-brass 25 ton, coal-powered, steam-driven autohorse! 8 legs! Tireless! Breathes fire!

ge96 1y ago

3) can we use a dead person's brain, hook up wires to it and oxygen, why not

thinkingtoilet 1y ago

I am certain this answer will change as generations pass. The current generations, us, will say that there is a difference. Once a generation of kids grow up with AI assistants/friends/partners/etc... they will have a different view. They will demand rights and protections for their AI.

energy123 1y ago

We should start by disambiguating intelligence and qualia. The field is trying to create intelligence, and kind of assuming that qualia won't be created alongside it.

falcor84 1y ago
How would you go about disambiguating them? Isn't that literally the "hard problem of consciousness" [0]? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
feoren 1y ago
"Qualia" is a meaningless term made up so that philosophers can keep publishing meaningless papers. It's completely unfalsifiable: there is no test you can even theoretically run to determine the existence or nonexistence of qualia. There's never a reason to concern yourself with it.
- drdeca 1y ago
  The test I use to determine that there exist qualia is “looking”. Now, whether there is a test I can do to confirm that there is any that anything(/anyone) other than me experiences, is another question. (I don’t see how there could be such a test, but perhaps I just don’t see it.) So, probably not really falsifiable in the sense you are considering, yeah. I don’t think that makes it meaningless, nor a worthless idea. It probably makes it not a scientific idea? If you care about subjective experiences, it seems to make sense that you would then concern oneself with subjective experiences. For the great lookup table Blockhead, whose memory banks take up a galaxy’s worth of space, storing a lookup table of responses for any possible partial conversation history with it, should we value not “hurting its feelings”? If not, why not? It responds just like how a person in an online one-on-one chat would. Is “Is this [points at something] a moral patient?” a question amenable to scientific study? It doesn’t seem like it to me. How would you falsify answers of “yes” or “no”? But, I refuse to reject the question as “meaningless”.
- layer8 1y ago
  The term has some validity as a word for what I take to be the inner perception of processes within the brain. The qualia of a scent, for example, can be taken to refer to the inner processing of scent perception giving rise to a secondary perception of that processing (or other side effects of that processing, like evoking associated memories). I strongly suspect that that’s what’s actually going on when people talk about how it feels like to see red, and the like.

falcor84 1y ago

In my opinion, one of the best works of fiction exploring this is qntm's "Lena" - https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

nis0s 1y ago
Sorry, but no I think it overemphasizes the parent over the resultant progeny for no reason, and as such I think the story is limited in its vision and treatment of the subject.
- falcor84 1y ago
  Please say more
  - nis0s 1y ago
    Please bear with me, I read it a long time ago. I don’t think there’s any distinction between sentience resulting from organic or digital processes. All organic brains are subject to some manner of stochasticity which determines emergent behavioral properties, and I think the same will be true of digital or hybrid brains. So if you clone me in digital form, it’s not me anymore—it’s not even my twin, it’s something which was inspired from me, but it’s not me. This is now a distinct individual because of the random processes which govern behavior or personality etc., a different person, so to speak. So I never appreciated why MC felt any attachment or responsibility towards his images, other than perhaps the kindness you’d exhibit towards other persons. The images, or persons as I’d like to think of them, in the story were shown as sentient. But sentience is only one part of consciousness, and the images in the story Lena seem incapable of self-determination. Or maybe they’re some equivalent of a stunted form of animal consciousness, not human consciousness. Human consciousness is assertive about its right to self-determine by nature of being an apex organism. But even cows and sheep get mad and murderous when you’re unkind to them. Donkeys will lash out if you’re being a jerk. So I think two things: 1) simply creating an image of behaviors is not creating consciousness, and 2) human consciousness possesses a distinct quality of self-determination. The main thing I’ve noticed about conscious beings is that they have a will to assert themselves, and those that don’t possess or demonstrate that quality to an appreciable degree in animals or humans are usually physiologically damaged (maybe malnutrition or trauma). I don’t expect consciousness born out of digital processes to be any different.

antithesizer 1y ago

*shower thought

layer8 1y ago

For most applications, we don’t want “functionally identical”. We do not want it to have its own desires and a will of its own, biological(-analogous) needs, having a circadian rhythm, getting tired and needing sleep, being subject to mood changes and emotional swings, feeling pain, having a sexual drive, needing recognition and validation, and so on. So we don’t want to copy the neural and bodily correlates that give rise to those phenomena, which arguably are not essential to how the human brain manages to have the intelligence it has. That is likely to drastically change the ethics of it. We will have to learn more about how those things work in the brain to avoid the undesirables.

kokanee 1y ago
If we back away from philosophy and think like engineers, I think you're entirely right and the question should be moot. I can't help but think, though, that in spite of it all, the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans of the future will not be stopped from attempting to create something indistinguishable from flesh and blood.
- tough 1y ago
  I mean have you watched Westworld?

dlivingston 1y ago

To 1) and 2), assuming a digital consciousness capable of self-awareness and introspection, I think the answer is clearly 'no'. But: > it would be fair to say that the more advanced the field becomes, the less difference there is between the artificial brain and a real brain. I don't think it would be fair to say this. LLMs are certainly not worthy of ethical considerations. Consciousness needs to be demonstratable. Even if the synaptic structure of the digital vs. human brain approaches 1:1 similarity, the program running on it does not deserve ethical consideration unless and until consciousness can be demonstrated as an emergent property.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago

The burden of proof is to show that there is any real or substantive similarity between the two beyond some superficial comparisons and numbers. If you can't provide that, then you can't answer those questions meaningfully. (Frankly, this is all a category mistake. Human minds possess intentionality. They possess semantic apprehension. Computers are, by definition, abstract mathematical models that are purely syntactic and formal and therefore stripped of semantic content and intentionality. That is exactly what allows computation to be 'physically realizable' or 'mechanized', whether the simulating implementation is mechanical or electrical or whatever. There's a good deal of ignorant and wishy-washy magical thinking in this space that seems to draw hastily from superficial associations like "both (modern) computers and brains involve electrical phenomena" or "computers (appear to) calculate, and so do human beings", and so on.)