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If we assume that humans are conscious, then yes, it is possible for a machine to be conscious. The only arguments categorically differentiating humans from ele

If we assume that humans are conscious, then yes, it is possible for a machine to be conscious. The only arguments categorically differentiating humans from electronic machines are religious in nature. I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing, so it is orthogonal to Church-Turing. Whether it is achieved will depend on economic forces. I don't see much economic value in making conscious computers, or things which seem to be down that line. So I expect consciousness will come out of pure research (perhaps within a corporation, like IBM), well after computers have exceeded the raw processing power needed. Because they will be so different from humans, it will have to demonstrate a significantly higher degree of consciousness than a human needs to in order for most people to be comfortable with the term.

drcode 17y ago
Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human? Doesn't it seem to be beyond what can be expressed by mere computer algorithms? I realize it is not a defensible argument to say that the human experience is just to "weird" to be computable- I wish I had a better argument for defending my position... Nonetheless, I find it hard to understand people, such as yourself, that are probably exposed to this same "weirdness" in their heads as I am and yet are so confident it is merely an illusion created by a sufficiently complicated computation.
- kevbin 17y ago
  Weird compared to what? I have no experience being anything other than a living, breathing human. Thomas Nagle wrote up the classic "qualia" argument you're making as "What is it like to be a Bat?" (here: http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf)Intuitively http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf..., it seems persuasive: that there is a certain subjective quality to consciousness & conscious experience— it must feel like something to be a bat, or a person, or whatever? Hofstadter's and Dennett's book, The Mind's I (http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252543137&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/...) is an interesting introduction to this kind of stuff, the authors have a lot of fun @ qualia's expense.
  - bkovitz 17y ago
    The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined". I agree, though, Hofstadter and Dennett have done an extraordinary job of devising such an answer. There is lots more work to be done, of course.
    - ewjordan 17y ago
      The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined". But what if the answer to the "weirdness" question is, in fact, that it's just an ill-formed question? What if it's just an illusion, and your brain is tricked into seeing something magical about itself where there is nothing there? Apart from a mystical explanation, I cannot imagine any satisfying answer to the question (i.e. one that doesn't leave you feeling uneasy like Hofstadter's answer does to most people), which usually means that there's something wrong with what we're asking, not with how we're trying to answer it.
      - bkovitz 17y ago
        I would be satisfied with a good explanation of why the question is ill-formed, how the illusion comes about, etc. I really don't think the question is ill-formed, though. There is a big explanatory gap. Denying that is simply dishonest. It would be like, if you don't know why a bicycle is easier to balance when it's moving, pretending that there is nothing to explain. "Oh, it's just bicycle parts."
  - ewjordan 17y ago
    If you're digging into Hofstadter (and if you aren't, you should be, whether or not you agree with him, almost every word he's ever written is worth reading, including the seemingly irrelevant stuff about translations), I Am A Strange Loop (http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785 http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/...) is a good read, as well.
- Tichy 17y ago
  "Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human?" From my perspective, being a computer would feel a lot weirder. I think drastically spoken, feelings are just firing neurons. I don't think there is really anything special about (apart from the degree of complexity of the human body). If a computer has an algorithm that says if(user hasn't typed anything for 14 days) lonely = true then it has feelings, too. It might sound absurd, but only because it looks so simple. But imagine an enourmously complex program, and the information "lonely" trickles through it. There might be a routine somewhere if lonely = true connect_irc_channel(#depression) and so on and so on. From a certain level of complexity onwards, it won't be so obvious anymore, and we won't be able to prevent feeling that the computer really feels.
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human? No - it's just normal. I think it would be weirder if it wasn't some kind of computation, if I was a unique spirit out of several tens of billions that appeared from some unknowable place and origin, or whatever else 'i' might be. Doesn't it seem to be beyond what can be expressed by mere computer algorithms? I have no reason to think it is - I haven't felt what it's like to be a quicksort or a face recognition algorithm for comparison, but I certainly feel like a heap of evolved feedback loops at times - when I fear the dark in a room I know, when I catch sight of living shapes where there are none, when I feel fight-or-flight at certain caller ID numbers, when I desire things that I also don't want, when I feel judgements of people based on some trivial detail. Nonetheless, I find it hard to understand people, such as yourself, that are probably exposed to this same "weirdness" in their heads as I am and yet are so confident it is merely an illusion created by a sufficiently complicated computation. What else could it be? There isn't anywhere else it could reasonably be that we know of. You're either suggesting something unknowable (e.g. magic) or some kind of cruel joke (i.e. like a quine is a program that prints it's own source code, we could be a consciousness that sees the world except for the blind spot around the part that allows us to see how we work - and a cover over where that would be). I'm not confident that we are 'just' a computation, but I'm fairly confident that I am in accordance with the laws of physics (including any we don't know yet) and that places limits on what's possible with the amount of matter in my head, the energy input and output, the sensory input and output bandwidths, the timescales involved, the known behavioural results of varying localities of brain damage, etc. Besides, what do you mean illusion? Consciousness is not 'fake'.
amalcon 17y ago
There is one nonreligious factor that significantly differentiates humans from machines: that humans evolved, while machines were built by humans. There's an argument to be made that humans cannot understand consciousness well enough to build it, because consciousness is our only tool for doing that. Of course, this only applies to intentional creation of consciousness. It says nothing about the distinct possibility that we could create a consciousness by accident.
- viraptor 17y ago
  But we know how to get the effects of evolution... on steroids: unsupervised, feedback/effect based learning (generic algorithms, NNs, etc.) We can already generate big enough NNs that we can understand them in general (some areas get "specialised" in some way and more active in some conditions), and we know that the result is what we expect - but there's no way someone will take a look at the weights / resulting model and tell you what it does. I think we can create consciousness intentionally, but not understanding the process completely.
  - joubert 17y ago
    Evolution does not have a goal in mind.
    - netsp 17y ago
      That doesn't mean it can't be used to achieve a goal. Selectively breeding cows for increased milk production allows evolution to find a way or ways of making that happen. The breeder doesn't need to worry about hormones or glands. Evolution doesn't need to worry about the breeder's motives, why are only the high milk producers producing offspring?
    - rjurney 17y ago
      No, but it is driven by external pressures, which we could apply to artificial consciousness by hacking it :) Ok, artificial selection - but no reason we couldn't game it to be genetic.
- 17y ago
codexon 17y ago
You are assuming that there is no innate quality of human organic compounds and processes that differentiates us from electrical components. It may very well be the case that this is either true or false. We simply don't have enough evidence. And given the fact that we are discovering new properties of matter and organic reactions all the time, there is a bias towards this being false.
- Mentat_Enki 17y ago
  Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able to become mentats, we'd still be limited by the tenants of information theory and what is computable. The fact that human intelligence is emergent leads me to believe that machine intelligence will be the same, albeit very different than a simian mammal's intelligence. Fish are smarter than we are at swimming. Think ants.
  - nwatson 17y ago
    humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance.
    - Freaky 17y ago
      See, there goes that story-telling and thinking we're "the shit" again. Thanks for providing a concrete example.
      - nwatson 17y ago
        any time
naveensundar 17y ago
>I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing, so it is orthogonal to Church-Turing. Do you have any proof or any testing that can be done to validate that?
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  He's defining a term. He doesn't need proof - though you're welcome to dispute his definition.
  - naveensundar 17y ago
    Thats what I am doing. Of course I did not use the right words, but I assume my intent was clear.
Locke1689 17y ago
I guess the question we're really asking is this: is the human brain a Universal Turing Machine? Everything we've learned so far points to yes (our study of neural networks has revealed a possible mathematical structure which is Turing Complete), therefore my vote is with the 'yay's. P.S. I am an atheist, therefore I do not believe there is anything metaphysical about the human brain. Maybe there is something special about our mushy carbon structure -- doesn't matter. In that case, we'll just build our artificial brain with wetware. Hardware is hardware is hardware (and physics is physics). Eventually we'll get an artificial neural net as complex as our biological one. The real question is software...
joubert 17y ago
Aren't humans also differentiated from machines in that the latter are designed, while humans are not designed? Machines are just an expression of humans' extended phenotypical effects on their environment.
- joeyo 17y ago
  Is that actually a quantifiable distinction? Does how something is constructed have any affect on it's properties? (assuming equivalent precision of the tools involved) Building a car by hand versus building one with a modern robotic assembly line both yield the same output.
  - joubert 17y ago
    Construction implies design. Evolved entities (read: complex entities) are not designed.
    - joeyo 17y ago
      Ok, but how is a constructed object and a ... (randomly? naturally? what ever word you want to use) evolved object quantitatively different? One could follow all the steps involved in getting a human from his evolutionary ancestor to his current state by using a pair of magic tweezers to make each mutation in the genome happen at the right time and in the right way. Could you tell the difference based on the result?
      - joubert 17y ago
        Yes, you can easily tell the difference between entities that have evolved by natural selection, and constructed entities. (BTW, mutation is random, but evolution is not a random process). Two example quantitative differences (although, I'm not sure why the specific exclusion of qualitative differences): 1) The human eye, for example, has flaws (that are solved in other similarly evolved eyes) that an engineer laughs at - if you were building a human eye, you wouldn't make the same "mistakes". The deviation from the "better" version is measurable. 2) Evolved entities exist because of procreation. And their only reason for existence is to assist genetic material to replicate. Constructed objects reproduce exactly 0 times and have 0 genetic (or other replicator material).
christopherolah 17y ago
I'm not sure I agree. For several reasons: a) The phenomena of qualia remains unexplained. This has no bearing on making something that can mimic consciousness, but does become significant if one wants the real thing. The last argument on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766462 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766462 b) QM may be intrinsically linked to consciousness. (see Roger Penrose, _The Emperor's New Mind_) Of course, this a mute point given the QM computing seems to be around the corner.
- kevinpet 17y ago
  The fact that qualia are an inherently internal experience means that there can be no way to communicate them to anyone else. We are willing to accept that the other minds problem isn't a problem because we believe they are similar to us. This is why I say that machine intelligence would have to display a very high level of consciousness for us to accept it as conscious. Humans get a pass. I discount Penrose's argument because he offers no phenomena that actually require his QM effects to explain and offers no plausible evolutionary path by which human minds could have evolved the mechanisms relying on QM. Do other primates have QM effects in their brains? What do these explain, given that the current models of the brain that we have are capable of explaining everything that we see? (Though we don't yet have the practical capability to simulate an entire complex brain and suitable io.)
netsp 17y ago
I know virtually nothing about CS, which may be an advantage in seeing the sense in your thinking in abstract. If we assume that humans are conscious & material, without bothering to define either, we at least know it is possible to have consciousness embodied in something material. At least in theory we could figure out how human consciousness works and replicate it. There may be easier ways, but this is at least one theoretical possibility. You could in the same way have inferred that humans could figure out a way of creating flight from the fact that it exists in nature.
sroerick 17y ago
What if as Julian Jaynes says consciousness is a social creation rather than a biological one? Machine social interaction would be tremendously different and could be incapable of sustaining consciousness.
- StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  Why couldn't the machine partake in the social construct? It could be programmed in.
coffeeaddicted 17y ago
About those economic forces - I'm betting on games to get there first. With Creatures and Sims there have been already two examples that the public is absolutely keen on getting software that features lifelike behaviour. And the wide distribution of games also means that games can get access to a lot of distributed processing power beating even supercomputers. Also game AI programmers are probably the one with the most practical experience because they have actually to produce stuff that works.
- kalid 17y ago
  That brings up interesting ethical issues -- could you play a FPS game knowing the bad guys were 'conscious'?
  - coffeeaddicted 17y ago
    I play Multiplayer FPS even though I know my opponents are conscious. Doesn't prevent me from shooting them because I know I only kill their avatar and not themselves. Same with AI - I shoot at an avatar I won't destroy it's code. The ethical issues will rather be the moment when AI's are clever enough that they can be teached. What will humans teach them? Personally I believe the best protection from abuse will be to get that learning process in the public (as compared to AI's learning from companies or military for specific purposes). So my own long term target are distributed virtual worlds in which AI's improve by getting passed around. A single computer user might still teach them bad stuff, but I hope some sort of selection based on many people watching and exchanging bots will get the best possible results even though completely preventing abuse won't be possible.
    - ajuc 17y ago
      Code is not the avatar - it is the knowledge and memories (probably written in form of a big blob of neural net coefficients) that makes a concious being. Each time the game is restarted there would be new beings in it (unless their data is saved between games somewhere). Erasing knowledge and memories of such AI would be analog to killing, and it will become problem, because throwing out data is easier, and writing you enemies to DVD after each game of Quake 10 becouse of moral issues will be problematic after some time.
retrogradeorbit 17y ago
But we can't even successfully predict how proteins will fold (only about 70% are predicted correctly) and we presume we know all about chemistry and physics. Yet what we model, and what we observe, are quite different. If true machine consciousness is possible, it's a lot further off than we would like to think.

drcode 17y ago

Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human? Doesn't it seem to be beyond what can be expressed by mere computer algorithms? I realize it is not a defensible argument to say that the human experience is just to "weird" to be computable- I wish I had a better argument for defending my position... Nonetheless, I find it hard to understand people, such as yourself, that are probably exposed to this same "weirdness" in their heads as I am and yet are so confident it is merely an illusion created by a sufficiently complicated computation.

kevbin 17y ago
Weird compared to what? I have no experience being anything other than a living, breathing human. Thomas Nagle wrote up the classic "qualia" argument you're making as "What is it like to be a Bat?" (here: http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf)Intuitively http://www.clarku.edu/students/philosophyclub/docs/nagel.pdf..., it seems persuasive: that there is a certain subjective quality to consciousness & conscious experience— it must feel like something to be a bat, or a person, or whatever? Hofstadter's and Dennett's book, The Mind's I (http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/dp/0465030912/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252543137&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Fantasies-Reflections-Self-Soul/...) is an interesting introduction to this kind of stuff, the authors have a lot of fun @ qualia's expense.
- bkovitz 17y ago
  The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined". I agree, though, Hofstadter and Dennett have done an extraordinary job of devising such an answer. There is lots more work to be done, of course.
  - ewjordan 17y ago
    The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined". But what if the answer to the "weirdness" question is, in fact, that it's just an ill-formed question? What if it's just an illusion, and your brain is tricked into seeing something magical about itself where there is nothing there? Apart from a mystical explanation, I cannot imagine any satisfying answer to the question (i.e. one that doesn't leave you feeling uneasy like Hofstadter's answer does to most people), which usually means that there's something wrong with what we're asking, not with how we're trying to answer it.
    - bkovitz 17y ago
      I would be satisfied with a good explanation of why the question is ill-formed, how the illusion comes about, etc. I really don't think the question is ill-formed, though. There is a big explanatory gap. Denying that is simply dishonest. It would be like, if you don't know why a bicycle is easier to balance when it's moving, pretending that there is nothing to explain. "Oh, it's just bicycle parts."
- ewjordan 17y ago
  If you're digging into Hofstadter (and if you aren't, you should be, whether or not you agree with him, almost every word he's ever written is worth reading, including the seemingly irrelevant stuff about translations), I Am A Strange Loop (http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/0465030785 http://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp/...) is a good read, as well.
Tichy 17y ago
"Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human?" From my perspective, being a computer would feel a lot weirder. I think drastically spoken, feelings are just firing neurons. I don't think there is really anything special about (apart from the degree of complexity of the human body). If a computer has an algorithm that says if(user hasn't typed anything for 14 days) lonely = true then it has feelings, too. It might sound absurd, but only because it looks so simple. But imagine an enourmously complex program, and the information "lonely" trickles through it. There might be a routine somewhere if lonely = true connect_irc_channel(#depression) and so on and so on. From a certain level of complexity onwards, it won't be so obvious anymore, and we won't be able to prevent feeling that the computer really feels.
jodrellblank 17y ago
Wouldn't you agree that it feels awfully "weird" to be a living, breathing human? No - it's just normal. I think it would be weirder if it wasn't some kind of computation, if I was a unique spirit out of several tens of billions that appeared from some unknowable place and origin, or whatever else 'i' might be. Doesn't it seem to be beyond what can be expressed by mere computer algorithms? I have no reason to think it is - I haven't felt what it's like to be a quicksort or a face recognition algorithm for comparison, but I certainly feel like a heap of evolved feedback loops at times - when I fear the dark in a room I know, when I catch sight of living shapes where there are none, when I feel fight-or-flight at certain caller ID numbers, when I desire things that I also don't want, when I feel judgements of people based on some trivial detail. Nonetheless, I find it hard to understand people, such as yourself, that are probably exposed to this same "weirdness" in their heads as I am and yet are so confident it is merely an illusion created by a sufficiently complicated computation. What else could it be? There isn't anywhere else it could reasonably be that we know of. You're either suggesting something unknowable (e.g. magic) or some kind of cruel joke (i.e. like a quine is a program that prints it's own source code, we could be a consciousness that sees the world except for the blind spot around the part that allows us to see how we work - and a cover over where that would be). I'm not confident that we are 'just' a computation, but I'm fairly confident that I am in accordance with the laws of physics (including any we don't know yet) and that places limits on what's possible with the amount of matter in my head, the energy input and output, the sensory input and output bandwidths, the timescales involved, the known behavioural results of varying localities of brain damage, etc. Besides, what do you mean illusion? Consciousness is not 'fake'.

amalcon 17y ago

There is one nonreligious factor that significantly differentiates humans from machines: that humans evolved, while machines were built by humans. There's an argument to be made that humans cannot understand consciousness well enough to build it, because consciousness is our only tool for doing that. Of course, this only applies to intentional creation of consciousness. It says nothing about the distinct possibility that we could create a consciousness by accident.

viraptor 17y ago
But we know how to get the effects of evolution... on steroids: unsupervised, feedback/effect based learning (generic algorithms, NNs, etc.) We can already generate big enough NNs that we can understand them in general (some areas get "specialised" in some way and more active in some conditions), and we know that the result is what we expect - but there's no way someone will take a look at the weights / resulting model and tell you what it does. I think we can create consciousness intentionally, but not understanding the process completely.
- joubert 17y ago
  Evolution does not have a goal in mind.
  - netsp 17y ago
    That doesn't mean it can't be used to achieve a goal. Selectively breeding cows for increased milk production allows evolution to find a way or ways of making that happen. The breeder doesn't need to worry about hormones or glands. Evolution doesn't need to worry about the breeder's motives, why are only the high milk producers producing offspring?
  - rjurney 17y ago
    No, but it is driven by external pressures, which we could apply to artificial consciousness by hacking it :) Ok, artificial selection - but no reason we couldn't game it to be genetic.
17y ago

codexon 17y ago

You are assuming that there is no innate quality of human organic compounds and processes that differentiates us from electrical components. It may very well be the case that this is either true or false. We simply don't have enough evidence. And given the fact that we are discovering new properties of matter and organic reactions all the time, there is a bias towards this being false.

Mentat_Enki 17y ago
Bah....I call bullshit. This is pure anthropomorphism. Humans think they are the shit, but in fact they are only story-telling animals (which does give us an evolutionary advantage, incidentally. We are not limited in our information transfer inter-generationally by genes alone.) We are limited by the same physics as the chips we make. This innate quality you speak of is pure vapor. Even if humans were somehow able to become mentats, we'd still be limited by the tenants of information theory and what is computable. The fact that human intelligence is emergent leads me to believe that machine intelligence will be the same, albeit very different than a simian mammal's intelligence. Fish are smarter than we are at swimming. Think ants.
- nwatson 17y ago
  humans are unique in the universe among all life forms and inanimate objects, are more than the sum of their physical parts, have a connection with something larger than the universe, and though in an insignifcant corner of an insignificant galaxy have an eternal significance.
  - Freaky 17y ago
    See, there goes that story-telling and thinking we're "the shit" again. Thanks for providing a concrete example.
    - nwatson 17y ago
      any time

naveensundar 17y ago

>I define consciousness as having an internal model of the world that includes yourself, as well as your own though processes (at a lower degree of fidelity). This says how you compute things, not what you are computing, so it is orthogonal to Church-Turing. Do you have any proof or any testing that can be done to validate that?

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
He's defining a term. He doesn't need proof - though you're welcome to dispute his definition.
- naveensundar 17y ago
  Thats what I am doing. Of course I did not use the right words, but I assume my intent was clear.

Locke1689 17y ago

I guess the question we're really asking is this: is the human brain a Universal Turing Machine? Everything we've learned so far points to yes (our study of neural networks has revealed a possible mathematical structure which is Turing Complete), therefore my vote is with the 'yay's. P.S. I am an atheist, therefore I do not believe there is anything metaphysical about the human brain. Maybe there is something special about our mushy carbon structure -- doesn't matter. In that case, we'll just build our artificial brain with wetware. Hardware is hardware is hardware (and physics is physics). Eventually we'll get an artificial neural net as complex as our biological one. The real question is software...

joubert 17y ago

Aren't humans also differentiated from machines in that the latter are designed, while humans are not designed? Machines are just an expression of humans' extended phenotypical effects on their environment.

joeyo 17y ago
Is that actually a quantifiable distinction? Does how something is constructed have any affect on it's properties? (assuming equivalent precision of the tools involved) Building a car by hand versus building one with a modern robotic assembly line both yield the same output.
- joubert 17y ago
  Construction implies design. Evolved entities (read: complex entities) are not designed.
  - joeyo 17y ago
    Ok, but how is a constructed object and a ... (randomly? naturally? what ever word you want to use) evolved object quantitatively different? One could follow all the steps involved in getting a human from his evolutionary ancestor to his current state by using a pair of magic tweezers to make each mutation in the genome happen at the right time and in the right way. Could you tell the difference based on the result?
    - joubert 17y ago
      Yes, you can easily tell the difference between entities that have evolved by natural selection, and constructed entities. (BTW, mutation is random, but evolution is not a random process). Two example quantitative differences (although, I'm not sure why the specific exclusion of qualitative differences): 1) The human eye, for example, has flaws (that are solved in other similarly evolved eyes) that an engineer laughs at - if you were building a human eye, you wouldn't make the same "mistakes". The deviation from the "better" version is measurable. 2) Evolved entities exist because of procreation. And their only reason for existence is to assist genetic material to replicate. Constructed objects reproduce exactly 0 times and have 0 genetic (or other replicator material).

christopherolah 17y ago

I'm not sure I agree. For several reasons: a) The phenomena of qualia remains unexplained. This has no bearing on making something that can mimic consciousness, but does become significant if one wants the real thing. The last argument on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766462 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766462 b) QM may be intrinsically linked to consciousness. (see Roger Penrose, _The Emperor's New Mind_) Of course, this a mute point given the QM computing seems to be around the corner.

kevinpet 17y ago
The fact that qualia are an inherently internal experience means that there can be no way to communicate them to anyone else. We are willing to accept that the other minds problem isn't a problem because we believe they are similar to us. This is why I say that machine intelligence would have to display a very high level of consciousness for us to accept it as conscious. Humans get a pass. I discount Penrose's argument because he offers no phenomena that actually require his QM effects to explain and offers no plausible evolutionary path by which human minds could have evolved the mechanisms relying on QM. Do other primates have QM effects in their brains? What do these explain, given that the current models of the brain that we have are capable of explaining everything that we see? (Though we don't yet have the practical capability to simulate an entire complex brain and suitable io.)

netsp 17y ago

I know virtually nothing about CS, which may be an advantage in seeing the sense in your thinking in abstract. If we assume that humans are conscious & material, without bothering to define either, we at least know it is possible to have consciousness embodied in something material. At least in theory we could figure out how human consciousness works and replicate it. There may be easier ways, but this is at least one theoretical possibility. You could in the same way have inferred that humans could figure out a way of creating flight from the fact that it exists in nature.

sroerick 17y ago

What if as Julian Jaynes says consciousness is a social creation rather than a biological one? Machine social interaction would be tremendously different and could be incapable of sustaining consciousness.

StrawberryFrog 17y ago
Why couldn't the machine partake in the social construct? It could be programmed in.

coffeeaddicted 17y ago

About those economic forces - I'm betting on games to get there first. With Creatures and Sims there have been already two examples that the public is absolutely keen on getting software that features lifelike behaviour. And the wide distribution of games also means that games can get access to a lot of distributed processing power beating even supercomputers. Also game AI programmers are probably the one with the most practical experience because they have actually to produce stuff that works.

kalid 17y ago
That brings up interesting ethical issues -- could you play a FPS game knowing the bad guys were 'conscious'?
- coffeeaddicted 17y ago
  I play Multiplayer FPS even though I know my opponents are conscious. Doesn't prevent me from shooting them because I know I only kill their avatar and not themselves. Same with AI - I shoot at an avatar I won't destroy it's code. The ethical issues will rather be the moment when AI's are clever enough that they can be teached. What will humans teach them? Personally I believe the best protection from abuse will be to get that learning process in the public (as compared to AI's learning from companies or military for specific purposes). So my own long term target are distributed virtual worlds in which AI's improve by getting passed around. A single computer user might still teach them bad stuff, but I hope some sort of selection based on many people watching and exchanging bots will get the best possible results even though completely preventing abuse won't be possible.
  - ajuc 17y ago
    Code is not the avatar - it is the knowledge and memories (probably written in form of a big blob of neural net coefficients) that makes a concious being. Each time the game is restarted there would be new beings in it (unless their data is saved between games somewhere). Erasing knowledge and memories of such AI would be analog to killing, and it will become problem, because throwing out data is easier, and writing you enemies to DVD after each game of Quake 10 becouse of moral issues will be problematic after some time.

retrogradeorbit 17y ago

But we can't even successfully predict how proteins will fold (only about 70% are predicted correctly) and we presume we know all about chemistry and physics. Yet what we model, and what we observe, are quite different. If true machine consciousness is possible, it's a lot further off than we would like to think.