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>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 dissolv

>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.
- welldefined 12y ago
  Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would result in something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). If no, then, again, you're contradicting the assumption in the question. You think consciousness is not determined by behavior. Ok, then what determines whether or not something is conscious?
  - md224 12y ago
    > Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would be able to create something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. Sure, I'll admit the possibility exists. > If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption given in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). I must've missed this... who was saying that identical behavior implies identical properties? Sure, I'd probably disagree that the A.I. is conscious in a subjective sense, and I'd also probably disagree that identical behavior implies identical properties. People can imitate each other without taking on the properties of the imitated.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - md224 12y ago
        > What determines whether something is conscious? I don't really have an empirical "test" for subjective consciousness beyond my own immediate, first-person experience of it. This may sound like a concession or even a defeat, but I think I'm allowed to posit that phenomena exist which we currently lack the empirical tools to investigate. "Currently" is the key word; as I said before, it is arrogant to assume consciousness will forever remain a mystery to scientific inquiry, just as it is arrogant to assume it must be a simple extension of existing theories. I admit I have nothing beyond my own experience to validate the idea of subjective perception, and I have no evidence beyond intuition as to whether or not a machine can "experience" input the same way a brain can. However, I think I'm still entitled to believe that subjective experience is a real phenomena whose nature can and should be explained, and that our scientific understanding is presently inadequate for this task. EDIT: I can understand the fear of relying on intuition. After all, it's the same thing that led us to believe that lightning came from the gods. But that doesn't mean that we should throw out the entire experience of perceiving lightning. Clearly lightning is a phenomena we experience, but we still don't understand how photons entering our eyes produce the subjective experience of blinding whiteness, or how vibrations from thunder translated into electrical signals by the ear result in the subjective experience of the sound itself. The information is in the brain, but we still don't know how information becomes experience. This doesn't mean we have to explain it via gods, but it does mean we still have something left to explain.

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.

welldefined 12y ago
Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would result in something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). If no, then, again, you're contradicting the assumption in the question. You think consciousness is not determined by behavior. Ok, then what determines whether or not something is conscious?
- md224 12y ago
  > Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would be able to create something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. Sure, I'll admit the possibility exists. > If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption given in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). I must've missed this... who was saying that identical behavior implies identical properties? Sure, I'd probably disagree that the A.I. is conscious in a subjective sense, and I'd also probably disagree that identical behavior implies identical properties. People can imitate each other without taking on the properties of the imitated.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - md224 12y ago
      > What determines whether something is conscious? I don't really have an empirical "test" for subjective consciousness beyond my own immediate, first-person experience of it. This may sound like a concession or even a defeat, but I think I'm allowed to posit that phenomena exist which we currently lack the empirical tools to investigate. "Currently" is the key word; as I said before, it is arrogant to assume consciousness will forever remain a mystery to scientific inquiry, just as it is arrogant to assume it must be a simple extension of existing theories. I admit I have nothing beyond my own experience to validate the idea of subjective perception, and I have no evidence beyond intuition as to whether or not a machine can "experience" input the same way a brain can. However, I think I'm still entitled to believe that subjective experience is a real phenomena whose nature can and should be explained, and that our scientific understanding is presently inadequate for this task. EDIT: I can understand the fear of relying on intuition. After all, it's the same thing that led us to believe that lightning came from the gods. But that doesn't mean that we should throw out the entire experience of perceiving lightning. Clearly lightning is a phenomena we experience, but we still don't understand how photons entering our eyes produce the subjective experience of blinding whiteness, or how vibrations from thunder translated into electrical signals by the ear result in the subjective experience of the sound itself. The information is in the brain, but we still don't know how information becomes experience. This doesn't mean we have to explain it via gods, but it does mean we still have something left to explain.