Quote:
Originally Posted by Dent
People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners
"YOU ARE JUST AN ALGORITHM IMPLEMENTED ON BIOLOGICAL HARDWARE."
"Consciousness is what a cognitive algorithm feels like on the inside"
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/How_an_algorithm_feels
If this is true then consciousness can "emerge" when you run an algorithm irrespective and the substance you run it in, most of the people I speak with believe in this and I think it's just the flavour of the century. They think there's something it's like to be the stock exchange. And the pulley logic gate thing I linked a few years back, and your computer.
I don't think this is the case.
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DP
Many (most?) AI researchers also seem to assume that the brain has a clean digital abstraction layer: phenomenally bound minds will "emerge" (why? how?) if and when organic minds are “implemented” in a classical digital computer.
However, such unexplained “emergence” of subjects of experience reflects an assumption, not a scientific discovery. It’s not a testable conjecture that leads to any novel, experimentally falsifiable predictions. Reality doesn’t really have "levels", or rather, reality only has one level, and we’re part of it.
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As long as we are speaking about flavors of centuries, I think the majority of the individuals engaged in the Consciousness debate are still looking at it from a purely material point of view. I think to understand consciousness in any personally satisfying way, it requires a deeper internal, subjective experience. We can write papers about water all day long but the ones who jump in the pool are the only ones who really know what it's like. It's not, "What is Consciousness", it is "Consciousness, IS!"
The Universe blooms consciousness in matter, using the machine of Nature. Why would this happen? Consciousness is not a fluke, indeed, it seems to be the end-all-be-all of the universe. What else is left for conscious entities to do in the universe but decrease suffering and enjoy Reality? Do you think we will escape our universe? Into what?
Denying that Reality has levels is a shaky statement, because existence is clearly absurd. Most people go their entire lives seeking without knowing what. Notice how difficult it even is to get people to talk about consciousness? Because they aren't even aware they are swimming in it. But what if you suddenly got the answers to consciousness you are looking for? Here are the options after that based on what I have read:
1. Kill yourself, because the Universe is devoid of meaning beyond what you make of it
2. Begin any of the various spiritual disciplines that exist to keep yourself from killing yourself
3. Go deeper into unconsciousness (poison your body and mind with what our cultures offer by Default until one's death)
4. Chill out and just try to enjoy the sensory and intellectual features you are lucky to have in this Universe for the time being
Science doesn't have the answers to consciousness, philosophy does. And the answers have already been known for thousands of years.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Albert Camus
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat's universe is not the universe of the ant-hill.
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Any being that has a form of consciousness/awareness, even at a low level, is clearly experiencing a wildly different reality than ourselves. Scientific fact tells us this; the olfactory organs of dogs are much more developed than ours. The eyes of birds of prey. Echolocation.
Nature does not develop a conscious entity's reality based on the human standard, our species-wide subjective "level" of perception of reality, it creates an entirely new one based on the materials it has at it's disposal + mutation.
So I guess I'm just not sure why you're so confident consciousness could not eventually arise in non-organic matter, especially when consciously designed.
Blind Nature created human beings capable of consciousness, so that event (consciousness in matter) is something that is possible within our universe. So what makes you think (relatively) intelligent Man can't do the same?