On April 15 2016 04:43 Baalim wrote:
the Turing test? come on, that probably will take 1 or 2 decades at most.
I dont see how this is even a discussion, where do people think consciousness comes from? magic? a soul?
Consciousness derives from intelligence, brain complexity, when A.I. have software and hardware enough for complex intelligence it will become self aware, the fact this was discussed with philosophers and not computer scientists makes me lose hope.
Fail to see how a how a computer scientist is more qualified to decide weather or not something has consciousness then a philosopher. And actually in regards to the Turing test that will likely be passed with in the next couple years. But does passing the Turing test show that something is actually conscious?
If you want to know what consciousness is ask a philosopher (and he wouldnt be able to answer it in the first place), if you want to know the potential of A.I., selfawareness, sigularity etc, you would ask a scientist, not a random philosopher who has no clue whatsoever about AI
And of course passing the Turing test doesnt mean anything, its a freaking test designed in the 1950s, nobody think thats current, googles Cleverbot can probably sustain a better conversation than some very ignorant people
It's interesting to see that all posters in this thread automatically consider all human beings conscious. But is it really so? Does every single human being experience qualia? I don't think so.
@OP: Since you are interested in strong AI, computationalism and consciousness, check this thread out. You can find much q&a there. Also, this link.
Nobody atm knows if strong AI is possible. There are people who research this. I personally hope we won't ever reach a stage, when we could design and create conscious entities. This would be too much power for our species. And as every power it could be abused.
Finding out how our brain produces consciousness is an ongoing research and likely not one to be solved soon. It does not directly relate to the brain complexity however - an elephant has way more synapses than we do for example, but its consiousness is most likely nowhere near our level.
It is believed that the part of brain primarily responsible for it is the Pre-Frontal Cortex - a part of brain that helps us with thinking about things before we make a decision, analyzing.
As far as AI consciousness goes - I am currently studying Artificial intelligence at a computer science university and the more I know about it the less I can think of a way how AI consciousness can be achieved, at least if we want it to mean the same thing as in humans. I believe we certainly can (and will) come up with complex programs that can learn what and how to learn itself and probably come up with better decision making in just about anything than humans, but at this point I fail to see how the program could somehow come up with self-awareness.
If you check what the learning algorithms really are, then you see they are simply sophisticated mathematical models that take some data, create a model (a decision tree, a vector of weights, a probabilistic table(s), ...) and then use it to classify new data or aproximate some values.
Take for example one popular algorithm, SVM (Support vector machines). What it does (in simple terms) is that it takes a lot of datapoints and tries to find a hyperplane (a line in 2-D, a plane in 3-D, a hyperplane in X-D) that can separate them into 2 parts (in case of binary classification). Doing this you can solve a lot of decision making problems and theoretically in the future you could have the same algorithm learn in a complex system that learns what to learn itself etc. But how is it going to get consciousness I just dont see.
But certainly I am looking to the future to see whats possible :-)
there is a light at the end of the tunnel... (but sometimes the tunnel is long and deep as hell)
On April 15 2016 18:39 Joe wrote:
Finding out how our brain produces consciousness is an ongoing research and likely not one to be solved soon. It does not directly relate to the brain complexity however - an elephant has way more synapses than we do for example, but its consiousness is most likely nowhere near our level.
It is believed that the part of brain primarily responsible for it is the Pre-Frontal Cortex - a part of brain that helps us with thinking about things before we make a decision, analyzing.
As far as AI consciousness goes - I am currently studying Artificial intelligence at a computer science university and the more I know about it the less I can think of a way how AI consciousness can be achieved, at least if we want it to mean the same thing as in humans. I believe we certainly can (and will) come up with complex programs that can learn what and how to learn itself and probably come up with better decision making in just about anything than humans, but at this point I fail to see how the program could somehow come up with self-awareness.
If you check what the learning algorithms really are, then you see they are simply sophisticated mathematical models that take some data, create a model (a decision tree, a vector of weights, a probabilistic table(s), ...) and then use it to classify new data or aproximate some values.
Take for example one popular algorithm, SVM (Support vector machines). What it does (in simple terms) is that it takes a lot of datapoints and tries to find a hyperplane (a line in 2-D, a plane in 3-D, a hyperplane in X-D) that can separate them into 2 parts (in case of binary classification). Doing this you can solve a lot of decision making problems and theoretically in the future you could have the same algorithm learn in a complex system that learns what to learn itself etc. But how is it going to get consciousness I just dont see.
But certainly I am looking to the future to see whats possible :-)
Arent you greatly underestimating the world possible?, or maybe you are thinking in a short timeframe,
Like if we say are we going to be able to leave fossil fuels and have bast amounts of energy in a future? well yeah its pretty much a certainty and probably we will eventually get endless energy from the sun from a dyson sphere thing unless we find an even easier source of infinite energy, and its pretty much inimaginably logistically how it can be archieved but thats pretty much how advancement works, people in earlys 1900s wouldnt be able to conceptualize most of our trivial technology
seems like a very good talk on the subject, probably too dense for a casual watch unless you're already very familiar with the vocabulary used in such discussions
Kurzweil is the first person in the question's period and I rarely see him give as much respect as he did to Mr Searle here
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asdf2000 United States. Apr 15 2016 23:19. Posts 7690
On April 14 2016 22:06 Baalim wrote:
Of course they can be conscious, consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence, we can see it in varying degrees in different animals
Wrong. Consciousness has certainly not been quantified yet.
not like a number, nor intelligence, but we can safely say that we are more aware than a cat, and a cat is more aware than a beetle etc.
I don't think that's true. We can say we are more intelligent, but not more aware.
Is one person more aware than another person? How would we know?
How aware are you? You only base it on short term memory, right? So what if you are aware of everything at all moments but it isn't in your memory?
consciousness *certainly* has nothing to do with self awareness. one experiences things regardless of any sort of feeling of perspective.
Personally I am not so much a materialist, I don't believe consciousness "magically appears" at a certain level of complexity. I believe consciousness has a correlation with energy(matter) but that it doesn't arise from it.
To answer the original question, I would say that it is likely that AI already is conscious, because everything is conscious.
Grindin so hard, Im smashin pussies left and right.
On April 14 2016 22:06 Baalim wrote:
Of course they can be conscious, consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence, we can see it in varying degrees in different animals
Wrong. Consciousness has certainly not been quantified yet.
not like a number, nor intelligence, but we can safely say that we are more aware than a cat, and a cat is more aware than a beetle etc.
I don't think that's true. We can say we are more intelligent, but not more aware.
Is one person more aware than another person? How would we know?
How aware are you? You only base it on short term memory, right? So what if you are aware of everything at all moments but it isn't in your memory?
consciousness *certainly* has nothing to do with self awareness. one experiences things regardless of any sort of feeling of perspective.
Personally I am not so much a materialist, I don't believe consciousness "magically appears" at a certain level of complexity. I believe consciousness has a correlation with energy(matter) but that it doesn't arise from it.
To answer the original question, I would say that it is likely that AI already is conscious, because everything is conscious.
We can know for sure who is more conscious, in the same way we cant know for sure who is smarter, if Steven Hawking or you, first you will argue what intelligence really is, maybe Hawkings cant do X or Y that you can, and you will argue that IQ tests really dont tell shit... however If we leave the bullshit aside, we can be pretty sure he is smarter than you, in the same way you can make the same arguments for consciousness but bullshit aside its pretty obvious we are more conscious than a bug.
Thats why I said earlier, this thread is either a boring philosophical discussion about what is consciousness or an actual discussion of the capabilities and future or artificial intelligence
On April 16 2016 07:35 Rapoza wrote:
What a great video Smuft, thanks for sharing!
Consciousness to me, is how someone perceives itself relative to the world around him.
I think machines will eventually be able to simulate consciousness in a observer-relative way, and at that point, it won't matter anymore if that is an intrinsic characteristic or not.
Our brain is made of water and other chemical reactions, which ultimately simulates consciousness, it isn't something that exists by itself. I see no reason why it can't be also reproduced through electronics.
I think the point that Searle is making in the video is that our brain produces consciousness using "water and other chemical reactions" which is different from simulating consciousness. He makes a good point during the question period, at around 56 min, that we could create a machine that simulates digestion but we don't then attempt to feed it a pizza.
On April 16 2016 06:04 traxamillion wrote:
What if the brain is just a conduit for our consciousness to interact with our bodies
That would mean that conciousness is an entity in itself.
I wish one of your guys had children if I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you can feel my pain because thats the pain I have waking up everyday -- Mike Tyson
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traxamillion United States. Apr 16 2016 20:49. Posts 10468
^that's like talking about the soul in a pseudo scientific way
it's a very weird way to look at it, it's not like we can imagine conscious or unconscious mental states without the brain
"all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization"
Nietzsche makes this claim after proposing that the main difference between conscious and unconscious processes of the brain is the act of conceptualizing the content of our experiences.
The main idea is that consciousness rises through the need of communication and as the ability of conceptualizing the world gets stronger, so does the degree of development of a conscious mind; if there was only one person on earth consciousness wouldn't really be needed.
He then goes on about how the conscious interacts with the unconscious and eventually alters it.
Anyways, read it. My conceptualizing abilities (and/or consciousness?) were weaker before it
new shit has come to light... a-and... shit! man...
On April 16 2016 06:04 traxamillion wrote:
What if the brain is just a conduit for our consciousness to interact with our bodies
That would mean that conciousness is an entity in itself.
Yea I wouldn't rule it out
Rule out the existence of "spirits" ? Wrong discussion bro.
I wish one of your guys had children if I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you can feel my pain because thats the pain I have waking up everyday -- Mike Tyson
On April 16 2016 07:35 Rapoza wrote:
What a great video Smuft, thanks for sharing!
Consciousness to me, is how someone perceives itself relative to the world around him.
I think machines will eventually be able to simulate consciousness in a observer-relative way, and at that point, it won't matter anymore if that is an intrinsic characteristic or not.
Our brain is made of water and other chemical reactions, which ultimately simulates consciousness, it isn't something that exists by itself. I see no reason why it can't be also reproduced through electronics.
I think the point that Searle is making in the video is that our brain produces consciousness using "water and other chemical reactions" which is different from simulating consciousness. He makes a good point during the question period, at around 56 min, that we could create a machine that simulates digestion but we don't then attempt to feed it a pizza.
Even if is different, then what? If it can simulate "consciousness" it is impossible to tell the simulated and the "real" one apart.
To explain my point let's imagine a better example. Life.
Would you say a computer machine that can only answers simple questions with just "Yes" or "No" is alive?
And what about the same machine but that imitates life EXACTLY like ours?
Now lets assume humanity finds a race similar to robots, that has a society complex just like ours, could you say for sure they are not alive? If yes, how do you do that?
I don't think consciousness is any different.
Thats the point that Searle is making, relative to the observer the robots behavior appears to be conscious. When we talk about an AI performing some action I believe we are making a mistake by using "mental language" to describe its behavior which in some ways might clear it up.
Consider a man walks into a room, walks around in circles for several seconds, and then picks up an object and walks out of the room. When we are asked to describe the mans behavior we would typically say something like "oh he FORGOT(mental language) something and was trying to remember(more mental language) where he put it". If a robot AI where to perform the same set of actions as the man we would likely say something similar but are making a linguistic mistake when we are describing what is occurring. Computers can simply access stored information. We call the stored information memory but the way it operates is completely different from the way our memory operates. We also say things of our computers like "it's thinking" when the computer is taking awhile to load something. We are attributing mental states to something that has no mental states(beliefs, desires, propositional attitude, qualitative experience). The mental states are not an intrinsic property of the AI, its only when we observe their behavior that we are giving them mental states.
On April 17 2016 03:22 FMLuser wrote:
The mental states are not an intrinsic property of the AI, its only when we observe their behavior that we are giving them mental states.
Exactly. Just as most people observing other people attribute mental states to all of them. That is why I wrote in my previous post that there are people who I believe do NOT experience qualia. I can't prove it, because we don't have the tools yet, but maybe one day if consciousness is solved, I predict that 10% of the people will completely lack mental states and qualia, although their behavior will appear completely normal to the rest.
