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My point is more that computers are already conscious, but that we're constantly redefining our definition of consciousness to exclude it. From a philosophical

by mtrimpe 14y ago

My point is more that computers are already conscious, but that we're constantly redefining our definition of consciousness to exclude it. From a philosophical perspective it's saying that consciousness is a property of reality rather than of humans / animals and that we're merely choosing to define an essentially arbitrary subset of it that's sufficiently similar to our own as 'true consciousness'.

seiji 14y ago
My point is more that computers are already conscious Saywhatnow? consciousness is a property of reality Again, saywhatnow? Perhaps your usage of 'reality' is throwing me off. Consciousness is just a very high dimensional aggregation of "stuff" (e.g. synaptic connections) with a processing framework (e.g. neural architecture) for recall/storage/action based on outward perception and internal state. We're both agreed that consciousness doesn't require squishy brains. I'm just saying human level consciousness, at this point in time, only exists in our squishy brains. We'll figure out different ways of creating computational consciousness in the future, but we aren't there yet. Our tiny recommender systems, search engines, face detectors/recognizers, and "my first backprop neural net 101" aren't conscious.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  I can tell that the full gist of what I'm trying to explain will be hard to do in an HN comment, but for simplicity's sake let's just say that I'm defining consciousness as a scale which includes "my first backprop neural net 101" (and your table, but that's the saywahtnow part of a would-be philosophical discussion ;) Given that assumption, all I'm saying is that as computers progress along that scale we are currently continually moving the point on that scale at which something becomes "human level" to specifically exclude computers.
- omarchowdhury 14y ago
  Any time I see someone that thinks they can put conciousness into words, and they start off by saying "Consciousness is just..." I know that person has no clue.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - seiji 14y ago
    Much like http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/guidance.html http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/guidance.html

by mtrimpe 14y ago

seiji 14y ago

My point is more that computers are already conscious Saywhatnow? consciousness is a property of reality Again, saywhatnow? Perhaps your usage of 'reality' is throwing me off. Consciousness is just a very high dimensional aggregation of "stuff" (e.g. synaptic connections) with a processing framework (e.g. neural architecture) for recall/storage/action based on outward perception and internal state. We're both agreed that consciousness doesn't require squishy brains. I'm just saying human level consciousness, at this point in time, only exists in our squishy brains. We'll figure out different ways of creating computational consciousness in the future, but we aren't there yet. Our tiny recommender systems, search engines, face detectors/recognizers, and "my first backprop neural net 101" aren't conscious.

mtrimpe 14y ago
I can tell that the full gist of what I'm trying to explain will be hard to do in an HN comment, but for simplicity's sake let's just say that I'm defining consciousness as a scale which includes "my first backprop neural net 101" (and your table, but that's the saywahtnow part of a would-be philosophical discussion ;) Given that assumption, all I'm saying is that as computers progress along that scale we are currently continually moving the point on that scale at which something becomes "human level" to specifically exclude computers.
omarchowdhury 14y ago
Any time I see someone that thinks they can put conciousness into words, and they start off by saying "Consciousness is just..." I know that person has no clue.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- seiji 14y ago
  Much like http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/guidance.html http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/guidance.html