Scientists Can't Define Consciousness, Yet We Think AI Will Have It
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Is it computation? Information integration? Or something else we can’t yet measure?
If we can’t define the target, how can we tell whether a machine has hit it?
Are we building intelligence, or just better mimicry?
(Genuinely curious how the HN crowd thinks about this — engineers, neuroscientists, philosophers all welcome.)
Posted by f_of_t
The article questions whether we can truly determine if AI has achieved consciousness when scientists still lack a clear definition of consciousness, sparking a discussion on the nature of intelligence and consciousness.
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As for what consciousness actually is, I think the closest description is the summary of oneself. Meaning, all the computational power of the brain as a whole forms a person - a computational powerhouse with its own identity. That goes then to discussions where the "I", as in ego or oneself, ends. Is it at the limb, like a hand, or is it at an indivodual fallen hair or a dead skin flake? How about sperm or egg, is it still me?
Then we have the conundrum of people who get brain damage or some kind of degenerative brain desease, like Alzheimer. Where you can clearly see "them" fading away and you observe just a shell of a human being. So where is this "I" then? What defines it?
All of these are quite esoteric conversations more suitable for occasions where a lot of alcohol and few good friends are involved :)
Maybe sentience isn’t a technological threshold, but a phase shift — when a system starts to reference itself as part of the environment it models. That’s the moment A(t) becomes alive.
Also known as the (physical) church turning thesis.
Analog has the ability to represent much greater levels of information, but that's about it. Otherwise there's no material difference between analog/digital from an information theoretic view. It's all equivalent.
Lenny Bruce joking as Tonto to the Lone Ranger:
Who is "we" white man?
The lede observation depends upon whether "we" can expect our science to ever produce an intelligible theory of mind.
The difficulty of producing a theory of mind makes the Imitation Game a compelling approach to setting expectations for AI.
And also portends of the hazard that we become so distracted by simulacra that we lose all bearing upon ourselves.
The closer we get to simulating awareness, the harder it becomes to notice our own.
Maybe the Imitation Game was never about machines fooling us, but about showing how easily we forget what being real means.
The primary difference being the enormity of the size of database, but the concept is identical.
To think 13 year old me had AI sitting in my attic.
Is the AI algorithm not essentially a lookup table of sentences containing a word and then doing some statistical analysis of all the sentences in the lookup to determine the probably of the next word (in a very simplistic analogy)?
And isn't that precisely what the word index of the the Encyclopedia provides? Look in the word index for a word, the index will direct you to every page of the 23 prior volumes where that word occurs; go to every page, find the sentences on each page containing that word; now do your analysis of the sentences found to come up with the most probable next word.
Or manually review every sentence when you are 13 in 1965 to get the same understanding.
Am I missing something?
The consciousness will have to wait for another time. But that one's likely to be extremely contentious and more of a philosophy question without practical impact.
A system becomes closer to AGI not when it matches human tests, but when awareness starts to grow inside its own modeling loop.
We don't even have a universally accepted definition of intelligence.
The only universally agreed on artifact of intelligence that we have is the human brain. And we still don't have a conceptual model of how it works like we do with DNA replication.
Our society incentivizes selling out the mimicry of intelligence rather than actually learning its true nature.
I believe that there exists an element of human intelligence that AI will never be able to mimic due to limitations of silicon vs biological hardware.
I also believe that the people or beings that are truly in control of this world are well aware of this and want us to remain focused on dead-end technologies. Much like politics is focused on the same old dead-end discussions. They want to keep this world in a technological stasis for as long as they can.