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There is no reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions require a biological base.
by Workaccount2 1y ago
There is no reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions require a biological base.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoIs there more reason to believe otherwise? I'm not being contrarian, I'm genuinely curious what people think.
- ComplexSystems 1y agoWhat is the "irreplaceable" part of human biology that leads to consciousness? Microtubules? Whatever it is, we could presumably build something artificial that has it.
- dangus 1y agoWe “could presumably build” it, maybe we can do that once we figure out how to get a language prediction model to comprehend what the current date is or how to spell strawberry.
- lijok 1y agoDon’t fool yourself into believing artificial intelligence is not one breakthrough away
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoAll right, same question: Is there more reason to believe that it is one breakthrough away, or to believe that it is not? What evidence do you see to lean one way or the other?
- lijok 1y agoIt’s clearly possible, because we exist. Just a matter of time. And as we’ve seen in the past, breakthroughs can produce incredible leaps in capabilities (outside of AI as well). We might not get that breakthrough(s) for a thousand years, but I’m definitely leaning towards it being inevitable. Interestingly the people doing the actual envelope pushing in this domain, such as Ilya Sutskever, think that there it’s a scaling problem, and neural nets do result in AGIs eventually, but I haven’t heard them substantiate it.
- AnimalMuppet 1y agoYou didn't answer the question. Zero breakthroughs away, one, or more than one? How strongly do you think whichever you think, and why? (I'm asking because of your statement, "Don’t fool yourself into believing artificial intelligence is not one breakthrough away", which I'm not sure I understand, but if I am parsing it correctly, I question your basis for saying it.)
- lijok 1y agoThere are definitely breakthroughs in the way. “one breakthrough away” as in some breakthrough away
- dangus 1y ago> It’s clearly possible, because we exist. This is not much different than saying that it’s possible to fly a spacecraft to another galaxy because spacecrafts exist and other galaxies exist. Possible and practically attainable are two far different things.
- munksbeer 1y ago> This is not much different than saying that it’s possible to fly a spacecraft to another galaxy because spacecrafts exist and other galaxies exist. It is very different. We have never seen a spacecraft reach another galaxy so we don't know it is possible. We have an example of what we call intelligence arising in matter. We don't know what hurdles there are between current AI and an AGI, but we know that AGI is possible.
- dangus 1y agoI can think of a whole host of nearly impossible things that are one breakthrough away. Let me know when I’ll be able to buy my $30,000 car with level 5 self driving.
- nativeit 1y agoDouglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach in the late 1970s. He used the short-hand “strange loops”, but dedicates a good bit of time considering this very thing. It’s like the Ship of Theseus, or the famous debate over Star Trek transporters—at what point do we stop being an inanimate clump of chemical compounds, and become “alive”. Further, at what point do our sensory organs transition from the basics of “life”, and form “consciousness”. I find anyone with confident answers to questions like these immediately suspect.
- Lerc 1y agoThat asks you to consider the statements There is reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions require a biological base. Or There is no reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions do not require a biological base. The first is simple, if there is a reason you can ask for it and evaluate it's merits. Quantum stuff is often pointed to here, but the reasoning is unconvincing. The second form There is no reason to believe P does not require Q. There are no proven reasons but there are suspected reasons. For instance if the operation that nerons perform is what makes consciousness work, and that operation can be reproduced non-biologicLly it would follow that non biological consciousness would be possible. For any observable phenomenon in the brain the same thing can be asked. So far it seems reasonable to expect most of the observable processes could be replicated. None of it acts as proof, but they probably rise to the bar of reasons.
- nebezb 1y agoI’m certainly not informed enough to have an intelligent conversation about this, but surely the emotions bit can’t be right? My emotions are definitely a function of the chemical soup my brain is sitting in (or the opposite).
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoYour emotions are surely caused by the chemical soup, but chemical soup need not be the only way to arrive at emotions. It is possible for different mechanisms to achieve same outcomes.
- nebezb 1y agoAh, I understand the statement now.
- chongli 1y agoHow do we know we've achieved that? A machine that can feel emotions rather than merely emulating emotional behaviour.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago> How do we know we've achieved that? A machine that can feel emotions rather than merely emulating emotional behaviour. Let me pose back to you a related question as my answer: How do you know that I feel emotions rather than merely emulating emotional behavior? This gets into the philosophy of knowing anything at all. Descartes would say that you can't. So we acknowledge the limitation and do our best to build functional models that help us do things other than wallow in existential loneliness.
- lijok 1y agoBecause I can watch you dream and can measure the fact you’re asleep.
- 1y ago
- dangus 1y agoWhat if our definition of those concepts is biological to begin with? How does a computer with full AGI experience the feeling of butterflies in your stomach when your first love is required? How does a computer experience the tightening of your chest when you have a panic attack? How does a computer experience the effects of chemicals like adrenaline or dopamine? The A in AGI stands for “artificial” for good reason, IMO. A computer system can understand these concepts by description or recognize some of them them by computer vision, audio, or other sensors, but it seems as though it will always lack sufficient biological context to experience true consciousness. Perhaps humans are just biological computers, but the “biological” part could be the most important part of that equation.
- sim7c00 1y agothey do not, but the same argument can hold true by the fact the true human nature is not really known and thus trying to define what a human like intelligence would consist of can only be incomplete. there are many parts of human cognition, phycology etc. especially related to consciousness that are known unknowns and/or completely unknown. a mitigation for this isaue would be to call it generally applicable intelligence or something, rather than human like intelligence. implying ita not specialized AI but also not human like. (i dont see why it would need to be human like, because even with all the right logic and intelligence a human can still do something counter to all of that. humans do this everyday. intuitive action, or irrational action etc. what we want is generally applicable intelligence, not human like intelligence.
- zkmon 1y agoNone of that comes from outside of your biology and chemistry.
- vhantz 1y agoWhat non-biological systems do we know of that have consciousness, sentience or emotions?
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoWe have no known basis for even deciding that other than the (maybe right, maybe wrong) guess that consciousness requires a lot of organized moving complexity. Even with that guess, we don't know how much is needed or what kind.
- nativeit 1y agoIt’s frequently pretty funny, anyway.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y agoThis sounds like a bot comment.
- nativeit 1y agoWell, you do tend to repeat yourself, maybe ChatGPT really is your peer with language?
- runarberg 1y agoThere is exactly one good reason, at least for consciousness and sentience. And the reason is that those are such a vaguely defined (or rather defined by prototypes; ala Wittgenstein [or JavaScript before classes]). And that reason is anthropism. We only have one good example of consciousness and sentience, and that is our own. We have good reason to suspect other entities (particularly other human individuals, but also other animals) have that as well, but we cannot access it, and not even confirm its existence. As a result using these terms of non-human beings becomes confusing at best, but it will never be actually helpful. Emotions are another thing, we can define that outside of our experience, using behavior states and its connection with patterns of stimuli. For that we can certainly observe and describe behavior of a non biological entity as emotional. But given that emotion is something which regulates behavior which has evolved over millions of years, whether such a description would be useful is a whole another matter. I would be inclined to use a more general description of behavior patterns which includes emotion but also other means of behavior regulators.
- mat_b 1y agoThere's equally no reason to believe that a machine can be conscious. The fact is, we can't say anything about what is required for consciousness because we don't understand what it is or how to measure or define it.
- someguyiguess 1y agoThis is the only correct answer. People are trying to hit an imaginary target that they dont even know for sure exists.
- mxkopy 1y agoI disagree, I think the leap of faith is to believe that something in our brains made of physical building blocks can’t be replicated on a computer that so far we’ve seen is very capable of simulating those building blocks
- mat_b 1y agoI don't actually believe that. I think it's entirely possible. What I'm saying is: "I don't know what consciousness is, it makes no sense." Even if a machine really is conscious, we don't have enough information to ever really know if it is.
- potamic 1y agoIs there a reason to believe that consciousness, sentience and emotions exist?