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The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious. The line is very blury between
by Lambdanaut 11y ago
The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious.
The line is very blury between a model of consciousness and the point where it can not only be described as conscious but truly has that ethereally, hard to define quality that we "feel" as consciousness.
Would the first truly general AIs simply be working models of consciousness, or would they also feel consciousness as we do? When does the viz creep into our model?
- geophile 11y ago> The eerie thing is that as far as we can tell, our brains are no more than models of consciousness, and yet they are conscious. Wow. That is an extremely good description of the problem of consciousness. Is this your own formulation? If not, where did you run into it?
- Lambdanaut 11y agoI've been thinking about it a long time and hadn't heard it from anyone else. I'm glad to get feedback :)
- orasis 11y agoRight, which is exactly why our brains do not directly perceive the "truth" of physical reality. It's models all the way down.
- escherplex 11y agoBingo. In common philosophical usage 'consciousness' is conflated with what is evinced in consciousness, or process contents (cogito ergo sum). Back in 1988, Bernard Baars in 'A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness' separated self-iterative 'awareness' from process and posited 'awareness' as a 'global workspace' interfacing with parallel subliminal neural subprocessors which collectively manufacture an interactive model of 'reality'. By extension this would reduce all human intellectual modeling of ascertained 'reality' to projections of native intellectual predispositions hard-wired into the neural architecture. But what's basic? Here you're still faced with the same problem which still confronts experimental physics: to study a phenomena you have to employ instrumentation synthesized from the same building blocks of which the phenomena itself is constituted.
- icebraining 11y agoIsn't a brain an implementation of a model of consciousness, rather than a model itself? I don't see how they are "no more than models of consciousness". Of course, this is using "model" as "mathematical/scientific model", not as "reproduction".