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> Imagine such a computer program fooling every human it interacts with for decades at a time, I think that would say something about ourselves and I think it w

by md224 12y ago

> Imagine such a computer program fooling every human it interacts with for decades at a time, I think that would say something about ourselves and I think it would render the question of consciousness meaningless. Maybe we're operating with different notions of "the question of consciousness", but I have to disagree that a perfect simulation of a human mind would dissolve the problem. And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really). I suppose my question to you is this: do you believe there is something it is like to BE that simulation, to have a first-person subjective experience from the perspective of the computer? I agree with you that elevating certain aspects of reality to "supernatural" status is unhelpful; it's the equivalent of saying "sorry scientists, but this stuff is out of bounds." (I'm also not convinced that dividing reality into natural and supernatural is even a coherent distinction, but that's another discussion.) However, I have to take issue with your suggestion that the answer to consciousness is "much simpler... than we are willing to admit." It may turn out that a future science will come up with a very satisfying answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, but I suspect that this will require a paradigm shift so radical that it will make current neuroscience look like phlogiston theory.

seiji 12y ago
to have a first-person subjective experience You actually can't prove _anybody else in the world_ besides you has a first person subjective experience. Trying to prove a magic talking box has experience when you can't prove another moist robot has experience is moving the goalpost too far out. require a paradigm shift so radical Not really, we just need more high speed training data. It'll all be available to way too many people, governments, and companies within the next few years.
- md224 12y ago
  > Trying to prove a magic talking box has experience when you can't prove another moist robot has experience is moving the goalpost too far out. Maybe I'm just confused about what goals we're talking about. If your goal is to understand cognition, then sure; a highly intelligent machine is a great way to do that. However, the comment I replied to was suggesting that strong AI would "render the question of consciousness meaningless"; that's a far stronger claim, and in my opinion, unrealistic. I think you and I are actually in agreement on this one... if anything, I was arguing against A.I. having the goalpost of understanding subjective experience.
  - seiji 12y ago
    strong AI would "render the question of consciousness meaningless"; that's a far stronger claim, and in my opinion, unrealistic. That's actually a great point many people misunderstand, largely due to nobody pinning down a definition for "Strong AI." I prefer the term "computational consciousness" instead of Strong AI. It gets the point across better about future AI actually _thinking_ and _experiencing_ instead of having people misconceive AI as just a clever if/else decision tree. Strong/Hard AI (and human consciousness) is a combinations of algorithms and data. People have hard-wired algorithms for processing data from their senses. Some people have better hard-wired algorithms than others. But, if you take the smartest person alive today back in time and raise them in an isolated environment (i.e. limit their data intake), they won't be the same person and they won't be able to think the same thoughts. Summary: AI = mostly data, with algorithms to help organize/cluster/recall things. You can't have recall and intent of agency without a self-directed consciousness controlling the internal state<->external world feedback gradient.
- rybosome 12y ago
  > You actually can't prove _anybody else in the world_ besides you has a first person subjective experience. That's absolutely true. My wife and I sometimes joke that each of us is an incorporeal figment in the other's dream. It's impossible for me to know with certainty that I am not the only real consciousness in existence. It's an interesting line of thought, but ultimately unproductive; what could I do if it's true? If it's not, then the validity of all of the other consciousnesses is just as pressing as mine. Either way it behooves me to behave as though it is true, so I suppose that's the starting point for all of my thoughts on this topic: I and all other humans have a first person subjective experience. I agree with (parent? gp?) that describing the nature of that experience is non-trivial.
macspoofing 12y ago
>Maybe we're operating with different notions of "the question of consciousness", but I have to disagree that a perfect simulation of a human mind would dissolve the problem. Because human brains are magic? > And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really). You have your answer, the effect of consciousness clearly arises from physical matter that is subject to natural laws of physics and shaped blindly by natural selection. That should tell you that it is quite possible. For example, for a related concept of Free Will, I think we can confidently say that for all intents and purposes we don't have any, and yet our brains produce a very powerful subjective feeling of having it. This is why I think Consciousness is a much simpler problem than it really is. We have a cognitive bias for seeing the world in a very specific way, just as we have a cognitive bias in visualizing 3-dimensional spaces and we have incredible problems visualizing higher dimensions (heck, we can't even visualize a 2-D or 1-D space without embedding it in a 3-D space). Consciousness and free will are very powerful illusions hard-wired into our brains, unless you think the particles that make us up, somehow don't follow deterministic (or random in case of QM) natural laws?
- md224 12y ago
  > Because human brains are magic? See, this is the problem with this virulent strain of Scientism making the rounds right now. There's this tendency to divide ideas into two camps: "explained by our current understanding of physics" and "magic". It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to religion, like anyone that posits that we don't have a complete understanding of reality is therefore a crypto-theist. It completely misunderstands the nature of scientific progress, the evolution of our conceptions of reality in response to empirical evidence. It's easy to picture human progress as millennia of trudging through continually-decreasing ignorance and finally arriving at the Correct Answers, but this can be a dangerous view. Science works best when we aren't constrained by dogma -- when we're allowed to "think outside the box" and consider the world in new and revolutionary ways. People in the thrall of this Scientism often act like raising the Hard Problem of Consciousness is some kind of intellectual weakness, that we're just not able to "get over" the fact that subjective experience happens to emerge from physical matter. Nobody here (or at least not me) is saying that the Hard Problem means that subjective experience is "magic" or that we have anthropomorphic souls that float up to heaven with angel wings when we die. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is still a scientific problem, and I'm not saying it can't be solved by science. But telling me that Strong AI will basically solve this issue (and that any protestation is an appeal to "magic") comes across as hand-waving; the simulation of a conscious entity does not help me understand why being in the world feels like anything.

by md224 12y ago

seiji 12y ago

to have a first-person subjective experience You actually can't prove _anybody else in the world_ besides you has a first person subjective experience. Trying to prove a magic talking box has experience when you can't prove another moist robot has experience is moving the goalpost too far out. require a paradigm shift so radical Not really, we just need more high speed training data. It'll all be available to way too many people, governments, and companies within the next few years.

md224 12y ago
> Trying to prove a magic talking box has experience when you can't prove another moist robot has experience is moving the goalpost too far out. Maybe I'm just confused about what goals we're talking about. If your goal is to understand cognition, then sure; a highly intelligent machine is a great way to do that. However, the comment I replied to was suggesting that strong AI would "render the question of consciousness meaningless"; that's a far stronger claim, and in my opinion, unrealistic. I think you and I are actually in agreement on this one... if anything, I was arguing against A.I. having the goalpost of understanding subjective experience.
- seiji 12y ago
  strong AI would "render the question of consciousness meaningless"; that's a far stronger claim, and in my opinion, unrealistic. That's actually a great point many people misunderstand, largely due to nobody pinning down a definition for "Strong AI." I prefer the term "computational consciousness" instead of Strong AI. It gets the point across better about future AI actually _thinking_ and _experiencing_ instead of having people misconceive AI as just a clever if/else decision tree. Strong/Hard AI (and human consciousness) is a combinations of algorithms and data. People have hard-wired algorithms for processing data from their senses. Some people have better hard-wired algorithms than others. But, if you take the smartest person alive today back in time and raise them in an isolated environment (i.e. limit their data intake), they won't be the same person and they won't be able to think the same thoughts. Summary: AI = mostly data, with algorithms to help organize/cluster/recall things. You can't have recall and intent of agency without a self-directed consciousness controlling the internal state<->external world feedback gradient.
rybosome 12y ago
> You actually can't prove _anybody else in the world_ besides you has a first person subjective experience. That's absolutely true. My wife and I sometimes joke that each of us is an incorporeal figment in the other's dream. It's impossible for me to know with certainty that I am not the only real consciousness in existence. It's an interesting line of thought, but ultimately unproductive; what could I do if it's true? If it's not, then the validity of all of the other consciousnesses is just as pressing as mine. Either way it behooves me to behave as though it is true, so I suppose that's the starting point for all of my thoughts on this topic: I and all other humans have a first person subjective experience. I agree with (parent? gp?) that describing the nature of that experience is non-trivial.

macspoofing 12y ago

>Maybe we're operating with different notions of "the question of consciousness", but I have to disagree that a perfect simulation of a human mind would dissolve the problem. Because human brains are magic? > And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really). You have your answer, the effect of consciousness clearly arises from physical matter that is subject to natural laws of physics and shaped blindly by natural selection. That should tell you that it is quite possible. For example, for a related concept of Free Will, I think we can confidently say that for all intents and purposes we don't have any, and yet our brains produce a very powerful subjective feeling of having it. This is why I think Consciousness is a much simpler problem than it really is. We have a cognitive bias for seeing the world in a very specific way, just as we have a cognitive bias in visualizing 3-dimensional spaces and we have incredible problems visualizing higher dimensions (heck, we can't even visualize a 2-D or 1-D space without embedding it in a 3-D space). Consciousness and free will are very powerful illusions hard-wired into our brains, unless you think the particles that make us up, somehow don't follow deterministic (or random in case of QM) natural laws?

md224 12y ago
> Because human brains are magic? See, this is the problem with this virulent strain of Scientism making the rounds right now. There's this tendency to divide ideas into two camps: "explained by our current understanding of physics" and "magic". It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to religion, like anyone that posits that we don't have a complete understanding of reality is therefore a crypto-theist. It completely misunderstands the nature of scientific progress, the evolution of our conceptions of reality in response to empirical evidence. It's easy to picture human progress as millennia of trudging through continually-decreasing ignorance and finally arriving at the Correct Answers, but this can be a dangerous view. Science works best when we aren't constrained by dogma -- when we're allowed to "think outside the box" and consider the world in new and revolutionary ways. People in the thrall of this Scientism often act like raising the Hard Problem of Consciousness is some kind of intellectual weakness, that we're just not able to "get over" the fact that subjective experience happens to emerge from physical matter. Nobody here (or at least not me) is saying that the Hard Problem means that subjective experience is "magic" or that we have anthropomorphic souls that float up to heaven with angel wings when we die. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is still a scientific problem, and I'm not saying it can't be solved by science. But telling me that Strong AI will basically solve this issue (and that any protestation is an appeal to "magic") comes across as hand-waving; the simulation of a conscious entity does not help me understand why being in the world feels like anything.