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Tags | artificial intelligence , consciousness |
View Poll Results: Is consciousness physical or metaphysical? |
Consciousness is a kind of data processing and the brain is a machine that can be replicated in other substrates, such as general purpose computers. | 81 | 86.17% | |
Consciousness requires a second substance outside the physical material world, currently undetectable by scientific instruments | 3 | 3.19% | |
On Planet X, unconscious biological beings have perfected conscious machines | 10 | 10.64% | |
Voters: 94. You may not vote on this poll |
18th April 2012, 12:59 PM | #121 |
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OK, but simulation is a bit ambiguous. A flight simulator isn't the same as flying for real, but if I "simulate" your neurons using NAND gates on silicon chips, it's more than just some image on a screen.
There's something I vaguely recall about replacing one single brain cell with a single microchip. Your conscious mind still functions, and you are still you. Only then I replace another, and another, and another. You're still you, you're still conscious. But then I keep going, all the way. And all the way you're still you, and you're still conscious. Even though you end up being made of silicon. It was maybe just some science fiction story, but it stuck with me, and I ended up thinking what's the difference? |
18th April 2012, 01:17 PM | #123 |
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Personally, I would not consider that however to be a meaningful way of describing consciousness or as an argument for the existence for “the output of consciousness”, especially given the sugar/photosynthesis analogy (which started my curiosity).
Just to give my opinion here first (since it seems to be kind of difficult to get a straight answer here): I don't think there's such a thing as "output of consciousness"; or at least it’s not a meaningful approach when trying to understand consciousness.
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Thus, again, I don't think it's useful to go about explaining consciousness in such a way. |
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18th April 2012, 01:45 PM | #124 |
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Children under 18 months old failed the The Mirror Test. Even fully grown people cannot produce (or even comprehend) that stuff either. Consequently I agree with you .... there is A LOT more to it than any definitions we currently have. This all goes to illustrate how little we in fact know and how difficult and more complex it is of a topic than some simple minds think it to be. Accordingly I hope you can appreciate how frustratingly laughable it is when some simpletons come along and decide that it is a matter of COMPUTATION and that's it and anyone who disagrees must be a believer in metaphysics and a woo bagger while they arrogantly cite science FICTION and their programming abilities as qualifying justifications for their FAITH in their laptop replicating the "output" of even the human brain not to mention them thinking that they have already achieved nuclear fusion inside it too. |
18th April 2012, 02:00 PM | #125 |
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That isn't an instance of failing to fully understand computation, and it isn't what I am talking about.
A good example of what I am talking about is when people say things like "the brain may function by computing, but it isn't exclusively computation because input is needed as well," as if "input" is somehow not part of computation. This is easy to show to be incorrect, for instance at the point when a photon hits a retinal neuron and the neuron fires, the "input" just as much "pure computation" as everything else in the system. Meaning, if the retinal neuron fired "as if" there was a photon, the results would be identical as far as the brain can tell. |
18th April 2012, 02:08 PM | #126 |
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No programmers are simpletons (given the whole set of humanity).
No programmers have simple minds (given the whole set of humanity). Only a simpleton would believe that. |
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18th April 2012, 02:21 PM | #127 |
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18th April 2012, 02:25 PM | #128 |
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Ok.... so I then take it that you agree that Douglas Adams' brain was not doing mere calculations and running algorithms when he created his fiction and the brain is not a mere computer...right? If you think the brain is a mere computer and that all of its "output" can be simulated on a laptop running some clever programs....then please explain the algorithms and mathematical calculations that went on in Douglas Adams’ brain while producing his monumental trilogy in 5 parts. Now that Adams has tragically passed away too soon maybe we can program a computer to give us the REST of the unfinished Salmon Of Doubt story or even the sequel to Dirk Gently's adventures....who needs Adams' brain if we can just program a laptop to do the same...right... it is after all just calculations...no? |
18th April 2012, 02:45 PM | #129 |
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I am a programmer and I have personally known and managed numerous simpleton programmers and I guarantee you they were simpletons despite being programmers.... I know because I managed them (or fired them in many cases) So here is a programmer who thinks that there are simpleton programmers.... According to your assertion only a simpleton would think that there are simpleton programmers since according to you there are NO simpleton programmers. Thus I must be a simpleton. But then you state that there are no simpleton programmers and I am a programmer and thus I cannot be a simpleton. Can you see the paradox your illogic is producing?.... or is it perhaps just simplistic illogic? |
18th April 2012, 03:15 PM | #130 |
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Leumas, you baffle me.
I think I'm on the same team, though only as a debate tool. Yet, you evidently reject my conjectures on the subject. Perhaps if I use your language? There are 'simpleton' organisms that display consciousness. |
18th April 2012, 03:19 PM | #131 |
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Simplistic logic is:
Only things that can write like Kipling are conscious. (dis-proven by children, by lupas_in_Fabula in above post and completely overlooked/missed by you.) Machines can't write like Kipling. Thus machines can never be conscious. Talk about simplistic. |
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18th April 2012, 04:22 PM | #132 |
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Note that you've described an emulation, not a simulation, so sure it should be conscious.
I've not voted. I really don't know at what level the computationalists envision; 4-forces? single neuron? If either I'd say no, you won't arrive at a simulation that is conscious. If we ever can get a definition at the symbol level, which might be a single neuron but presumably many many neurons, then I'd suspect a simulation could become conscious, iff the "I=self=me" definition can be provided either by coding or by further training. |
18th April 2012, 04:26 PM | #133 |
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I congratulate you on a vivid display of hotheaded partisanship…. Logically.... all I have to do is produce ONE programmer who is a simpleton to disprove your statements. Other than myself of course who is paradoxically a simpleton according to your illogic, let me tell you a story about a programmer colleague of mine long ago. He was a very good programmer and produced some really good work. One day in a party we were both attending the topic of religion came up. He made the statement that the Quran is all about violence and killing while the Bible is all about peace and love and god never orders anyone to kill anyone in it. This able programmer had never even opened a Quran according to his own admission and obviously from his statement about the Bible he never read it despite his claims to the contrary. Yet this very capable programmer felt himself to be logically qualified to make the above statements about the Quran and the Bible. I of course had to rebut and told him that in the Bible god actually orders people to genocide entire villages and to kill women and children but to keep the virgin little girls for sexual pleasures. He even orders people to kill their own children and kin etc. etc. He violently denied my assertions. In the place we were there was no bible. So when I went back home that night I researched my Bible and wrote out almost three A4 pages with just references, no verse content, just the verse references to where god orders people to kill and genocide and enslave. Next morning I TRIED to hand him the papers. He REFUSED to take the papers or even to look at them. He utterly refused to even take the papers and throw them in the trash....he would not touch them as if they were poisonous. He said that he would never accept my testimony on the Bible since I am an Atheist. I pointed out that they were verse references and he could look them up in whatever bible he wanted and verify their veracity for himself.... he still refused to even glance at the papers. Did his programming abilities endow him with logical thinking? Did his programming ability induce him to think rationally in regards to the above? Obviously, just because he was a programmer and a good one at that, it did not mean that he was a logical or rational thinker in ALL aspects of his thinking. So here is an example for you that shows that programmers (even good ones) are capable of being as stupid and irrational as any member of the "whole set of humanity". Do you think it is simplistic and irrational to make adamant statements about the contents of books one has never read? Would anything other than a simpleton refuse to even look at evidence that might modify his beliefs regarding these books that he never read by actually giving him page numbers from the very book he is sure does not contain the words he denies are in it despite having never read the book while claiming he did? If not.... then .... oh well. If yes…. then I hope you can see that being a programmer and even a good one does not exonerate one from being a simpleton when it comes to matters of FAITH in something one wants so badly to be true and cognitive dissonance sets in. |
18th April 2012, 04:38 PM | #134 |
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18th April 2012, 05:24 PM | #135 |
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I disagree. You missed the point. I think you are overstating your case.
simpleton noun /ˈsɪm.pl ̩.tən/ [C] Definition a person without the usual ability to reason and understand (Definition of simpleton noun from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press) http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dict...tish/simpleton No programmer does not have "the usual ability to reason and understanding". Thus, No programmer is a "simpleton." Your turn. |
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18th April 2012, 05:25 PM | #136 |
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18th April 2012, 05:27 PM | #137 |
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So what do you call this post then (also see below)? Which in fact you seem to have read already since you were responding to it earlier? How could you say I “missed/overlooked” the post that I have actually responded to and agreed with and you already saw that as evinced by your objection to the simpleton part of it? Did you perhaps “miss/overlook” the highlighted part in your zeal to defend your tribe..... of which I am a member by the way....but I do not let my partisanship blind me to the faults of the party.... I do not allow my tribalism to take over my reason. So yes let's Maybe you should read the highlighted bit AGAIN because it looks like you may have “missed/overlooked” it. Is it honest to put words in my mouth and misrepresent my position? I never said As evidenced by the highlighted bit above….. make sure you read it and understand it. If you are able to follow the depth of the conversation… the Kipling part was in response to Rocketdodger’s definition of the “output of consciousness” Which I was conjecturing might be correct (in this post), but then I agreed with Lupas as shown in my quoted post highlighted above, that it is not so simple as that…..make sure you read that part carefully so that you can understand it. And the whole thing started with this question So yes….there are plenty of things the brain "outputs" that a machine cannot….one of them is Kipling’s poetry to say the least….but also see this post. And by the way... I have already stated my position about the possibility of machine consciousness in another thread that I know you have participated in on various occasions. But you may have “missed/overlooked” this |
18th April 2012, 05:51 PM | #138 |
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The complex intelligence is the interaction of the parts that make up the replica brain. That can change over time, just as a wave on the ocean is the interaction of the water molecules that make it up, even though which water molecules make up the wave can change over time.
This is true of our brains: my intelligence is not located in my foot, but my foot (or at least the nerves in it) is a part of that intelligence, in so much as the signals it sends are a part of that complex interaction. The atoms that make up my brain are replaced over time, but at any particular moment there are particular atoms interacting in a particular way and we can say that is the physical location of my intelligence. Where else would it be? I find this discussion odd: whatever it is that brains do, they are made up of fundamental particles. It's the interactions of those fundamental particles that defines the system. If we can find another way to create interactions that do the same thing, then we'll have reproduced what brains do, and consciousness is a part of that. Just as you can have different bridges made to different designs with different materials both capable of supporting traffic over a river, there's no reason that two brains couldn't be made of different materials with different designs. That doesn't suggest, of course, that we know how to design such a thing now, but that's an engineering problem, not a fundamental theory problem. |
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18th April 2012, 06:11 PM | #139 |
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It just didn't seem that you acknowledged that that argument was bogus, which he and everybody else saw and thought you may be implying.
And simpleton is over-stating your case. That's all. But let's say you win. |
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18th April 2012, 06:36 PM | #140 |
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18th April 2012, 06:40 PM | #141 |
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18th April 2012, 06:58 PM | #143 |
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This is getting dull.
I'm going back to claiming that consciousness is/was an aspect of the singularity from which all has sprung. A rock is fully conscious. It simply can't do much about it. A quark is fully conscious. Why not? The brain is something else entirely. Its not the seat of consciousness. Its more like a computer. Of course, the computer is also conscious, if the atoms that compose it are conscious. Buddists wouldn't object to such notions, particularly. Some quantum physicists wouldn't either. It has nothing to do with religion. Everything is alive. Even pedantic atheists and computer programers. |
18th April 2012, 07:06 PM | #144 |
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18th April 2012, 08:20 PM | #145 |
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I don't think the poll choices exhaust all the possible answers, like "None of the above".
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18th April 2012, 09:15 PM | #146 |
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But conscious of what?
I can actually accept that a rock may be conscious in some way. But the experience of consciousness is dependent upon it's context. My experience is dependent upon what my brain is doing, upon it's internal architecture and external stimuli that affect that. There's something there for me to be conscious of. If I get bored, it's because I have the (evolved) capacity to be bored. If I feel something tastes delicious it's because I have that (evolved) capacity. A rock doesn't have sense organs, nor the information processing organs to turn sensory data (that it doesn't have) into meaningful context. Lacking that, perhaps it does have some sort of experience: it interacts with the world regardless, but it can't be a particularly deep experience.
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So the brain certainly has something to do with consciousness. |
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18th April 2012, 09:16 PM | #147 |
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18th April 2012, 09:30 PM | #148 |
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I don't think you understand at all what I was talking about.
I wasn't even making a statement about the brain or consciousness. I was making a statement about a certain viewpoint regarding a "partial" computational model. I merely pointed out that IF someone accepts that the "main" part of the brain functions by computing, THEN it is logically inconsistent to assert that the "input" part does not function by computing, BECAUSE input is part of computation. For example there has been this idea put forth by some forum members that the abstract computational notion of a Turing machine doesn't include "input." That is simply false -- in a Turing machine, the input and output and program are merely the same thing, the "tape." Input is still there for every operation. To say there is no "input" is absolute nonsense, if there was no input there would be nothing to compute. |
18th April 2012, 10:26 PM | #149 |
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18th April 2012, 10:33 PM | #150 |
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18th April 2012, 10:36 PM | #151 |
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The brain has a lot to do with self reflection. Thought is the likely cause of our sense of being an individual entity. This might be delusional, actually, this notion of being an individual entity. Individual cells in our conglomerate organism, in some cases, are indistinguishable from free ranging single celled organisms. These organisms show all the necessary signs of awareness.
Without awareness, an amoeba couldn't function. Yet, it lacks a brain. Its not a machine. Its something else. I work with rocks. They get a big kick out of being moved. They are generally very slow. Sometimes, after thousands of years of not much happening, they find themselves being crushed by a large machine. Suddenly, they aren't the same entity anymore. The entity known as quarky emerged into this world as a conscious 8 lb blob of protoplasm. He soon expanded 20 fold, and remained conscious. We have little in common, these various forms of me. I wax philosophic, for which I apologize. This thread should have been in R&P. Our collective biomass may well have an individual consciousness, of which we remain unaware. Much as our cells may be unaware of their collective entity. |
19th April 2012, 12:45 AM | #152 |
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19th April 2012, 01:00 AM | #153 |
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Quarky, my point is pretty simple: without a brain consciousness lacks context. If a rock is conscious of being crushed, in what way is it conscious of it? If I am crushed I'll experience pain and I'll probably have thoughts about death, but both of those things are dependent upon the specific way in which my brain works.
Every conscious experience we have exists within that context. So what does it mean for a thing to be conscious without that context? |
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19th April 2012, 02:18 AM | #154 |
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Yes, its an interesting idea which may in principle work, but I have my doubts about its practicality from reading these threads.
Going back to my point about simulations, I am happy with the idea of an intelligent simulated entity on a screen or virtual stage of some sort. Provided it is acknowledged that the computation going on to sustain the simulated entity is performed by a piece of hardware which is a replica brain. Rather than an in its stead, an entirely virtual computation. Whatever that is. |
19th April 2012, 02:22 AM | #155 |
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19th April 2012, 02:26 AM | #156 |
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19th April 2012, 02:44 AM | #157 |
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Well, anything can be coded, but I have a hunch that the present architecture of both hardware and software may pose an obstacle, because it is basically constructed to be as deterministic as possible, and I don't think determinism is a main feature of consciousness, quite the opposite, it seems to be 'designed' to find new combinations of input data.
Another obstacle is that the big buck in software is not in consciousness; we are designing computers to be our obidient slaves, and we really don't want them to have consciousness. A conscious machine is an interesting project, but might require more serious funding than it can attract. Hans |
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19th April 2012, 02:49 AM | #158 |
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19th April 2012, 02:54 AM | #159 |
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19th April 2012, 02:59 AM | #160 |
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Do you even understand the concept of "simulation"? (I explained it back in post 80, but that was the last post on the page so you might have missed it.)
I think you're confusing "simulation" with "animation" or "graphics". A simulation doesn't need to be capable of being represented visually to function. It doesn't need to be interpreted by a viewer. For example, you could create a numbers-only orbital simulation of the solar system, with the only output being a list of the co-ordinates for each orbital body at regular time intervals in the future, printed out on fan-fold paper via a daisy-wheel printer, and it'd still be a valid simulation of the solar system. (There's a good chance this may have actually been done by someone, somewhere, back in the 70's). No screen or graphical representation needed, no graphical representation even needed in memory. (You could even have a simulation that provides no output all, and it'd still be a valid simulation. But it wouldn't be much use, except possibly for testing system resources.) A simulation that numerically duplicates all the processes occurring in the brain is a replica of the brain. An functional replica rather than a physical replica, but still a replica. ETA: Physically? In the CPU, ROM and other parts of the computer being used to run the simulation. Of course, it only has this intelligence while the simulated brain is functioning, the same way that a flesh-and-blood person only has intelligence when their meat brain is functioning. (If we stopped your brain from functioning, possibly by freezing it solid or physically disconnecting the neurons from each-other without damaging them, you wouldn't be intelligent anymore even though all the same components are there. Same applies for stopping the simulation.) |
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