On Consciousness

[Mr. Scott]

You can talk rubbish all day long, but I am not impressed yet.

I'm still waiting for you to impress me, too. Why do you bother with this thread?

 

[!Kaggen]

I'm still waiting for you to impress me, too. Why do you bother with this thread?

I am not the one making claims of machine consciousness.
I bother because making humans dumb is not the way to get machine consciousness accepted as gospel.

 

[Zeuzzz]

What is this thing you imagine consciousness to be?

Scientifically it's just the brain.

So I imagine the same as you I guess.

 

[Mr. Scott]

I am not the one making claims of machine consciousness.
I bother because making humans dumb is not the way to get machine consciousness accepted as gospel.

I've inferred you claimed machines can never be conscious because they can't write poetry or wing glide or some such thing. Didn't you make that claim?

How am I, or whoever else, making humans dumb? We know making smart machines is titanically difficult, but we've had some astonishing successes in specific areas. Deep Blue and Watson are smarter than us in their fields. Maybe your defensiveness comes from insecurity. You really feel that if a machine is smarter than you, then that would mean you are dumb?

You didn't answer any of the question in my previous post, and I emphasized they were not rhetorical. I'll repeat them:

You would call a non-working human brain an "it." After we fire it up with oxygenated blood containing nutrition and energy so that it functions just like yours and mine, you'd call it some-thing, rather than an "it." Why?

Would you say something like this about one of the proto-conscious robots? Turned off, it's an it, but turned on, it's some-thing?

 

[Roboramma]

You can talk rubbish all day long, but I am not impressed yet.

As far as I can tell that post wasn't an attempt to impress you, it was an attempt to engage you in dialog so as to better understand your viewpoint.

Saying that it's rubbish doesn't accomplish much in the way of mutual understanding.

 

[tsig]

As I thought "it" is no-thing at all.
Unlike a human which certainly is some-thing.

So all you got is word games.

 

[tsig]

I am not the one making claims of machine consciousness.
I bother because making humans dumb is not the way to get machine consciousness accepted as gospel.

Why would anyone want it accepted as magical stories?

 

[Mr. Scott]

I was just thinking how often it is that machines, even simple ones, appear conscious. Indeed, recently some computer game enemy intelligence algorithms passed a Turing Test (see below). Perhaps humans are too dumb to reliably recognize consciousness or unconsciousness in machines by their behavior alone. Actually, I think it's because we are genetically programmed to lean towards false positives in detecting agency (Agency (philosophy)^WP).

Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming's Turing test

The two winning programs, or bots, relied on strategies of direct human mimicry to win an annual software tournament called BotPrize – and beat an intriguing rival based on a stripped-down model of human consciousness

Though the character inhabits the first-person shoot 'em up video game, Unreal Tournament, there's no human player in the driving seat. This warrior, called Neurobot, is a character controlled entirely by a biologically inspired model of consciousness. The feat could help us to build more human-like machines, and even shed light on the workings of consciousness itself, one of the biggest mysteries in science.

 

[MuDPhuD]

As I thought "it" is no-thing at all.
Unlike a human which certainly is some-thing.

Just like all the girls in Germany "it" will remain an it until it passes puberty, then we will call her a she.

If your best counter-argument revolves around the gender of personal pronouns I will consider myself justified in not taking you seriously, and admit to being somewhat disappointed in you.

 

[Mr. Scott]

Just like all the girls in Germany "it" will remain an it until it passes puberty, then we will call her a she.

If your best counter-argument revolves around the gender of personal pronouns I will consider myself justified in not taking you seriously, and admit to being somewhat disappointed in you.

I don't think !Kaggen meant gender. I think she was glorifying the human mind as a supernatural entity, for which the pronoun "it" was an insult. A machine is an "it." A mind is, well, holy. That's my inference. I'm not straw-manning, just trying to fill in the gaps in her sketchy posts. She's encouraged to correct me if I'm mistaken.

What disappoints me is !Kaggen is discussing consciousness in a thread in the science/med/tech category, yet has offered no scientific, medical, nor technical arguments.

 

[!Kaggen]

I've inferred you claimed machines can never be conscious because they can't write poetry or wing glide or some such thing. Didn't you make that claim?

How am I, or whoever else, making humans dumb? We know making smart machines is titanically difficult, but we've had some astonishing successes in specific areas. Deep Blue and Watson are smarter than us in their fields. Maybe your defensiveness comes from insecurity. You really feel that if a machine is smarter than you, then that would mean you are dumb?

You didn't answer any of the question in my previous post, and I emphasized they were not rhetorical. I'll repeat them:

All technology is simply an extension of the human mind.
Any definition of machine behavior is a definition of the human mind.
Pretending its the other way around is the biggest mistake of modernity.

 

[!Kaggen]

Your both mistaken.
The 'it' mudphud was referring to was "the impossibly complex imaginary rope and pulley mechanism which imitates the actions of our brains down to the level of its molecular mechanisms." i.e. 'absolute nothing' or just 'nonsense'

 

[!Kaggen]

As far as I can tell that post wasn't an attempt to impress you, it was an attempt to engage you in dialog so as to better understand your viewpoint.

Saying that it's rubbish doesn't accomplish much in the way of mutual understanding.

Scott's not interested in my viewpoint let alone mutual understanding.
The conscious computer dogma? Yes.

 

[Zeuzzz]

I was just thinking how often it is that machines, even simple ones, appear conscious. Indeed, recently some computer game enemy intelligence algorithms passed a Turing Test (see below). Perhaps humans are too dumb to reliably recognize consciousness or unconsciousness in machines by their behavior alone. Actually, I think it's because we are genetically programmed to lean towards false positives in detecting agency (Agency (philosophy)^WP).

Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming's Turing test

Can it play the flute while hopping?

That's my personal Turing test. Only takes a few minutes for a human, even if what they play is only one note.

 

[!Kaggen]

Why would anyone want it accepted as magical stories?

The biggest sucker is the one that thinks his not.

 

[Zeuzzz]

I was just thinking how often it is that machines, even simple ones, appear conscious. Indeed, recently some computer game enemy intelligence algorithms passed a Turing Test (see below). Perhaps humans are too dumb to reliably recognize consciousness or unconsciousness in machines by their behavior alone. Actually, I think it's because we are genetically programmed to lean towards false positives in detecting agency (Agency (philosophy)^WP).

Mimicry beats consciousness in gaming's Turing test

That's like giving a super computer a mathematical problem and claiming it can complete the calculation quicker than most people so it must be conscious.

We've had supercomputers that quick for decades. Still no sign of the computers doing more than we program to, even if the code is a feedback loop and indeterminate; they are still following commands and not showing any sign of non algorithmic consciousness.

Even if the coding can be programmed to evolve by artificial selection, it's still not conscious. It's still following selection criterion we program into it.

What's more amazing is why you think this shows consciousness. Can be be more exact? I want the exact part of the code or the exact behavior of the coding that demonstrates it is conscious.

 

[Mr. Scott]

That's like giving a super computer a mathematical problem and claiming it can complete the calculation quicker than most people so it must be conscious.

We've had supercomputers that quick for decades. Still no sign of the computers doing more than we program to, even if the code is a feedback loop and indeterminate; they are still following commands and not showing any sign of non algorithmic consciousness.

Even if the coding can be programmed to evolve by artificial selection, it's still not conscious. It's still following selection criterion we program into it.

What's more amazing is why you think this shows consciousness. Can be be more exact? I want the exact part of the code or the exact behavior of the coding that demonstrates it is conscious.

I didn't actually say that any of this shows consciousness. It's worth noting, however, that when computers can't seem to do what brains do, we emulate neural networks, and suddenly they can. This is clear evidence that neural networks are well understood and we're successfully replicating their function. It's natural to extrapolate to what seems inevitable once the computing power is sufficient -- conscious computers that may equal, then exceed, the powers of human consciousness.

 

[Zeuzzz]

So can a calculator.

 

[PixyMisa]

So can a calculator.

No.

 

[Zeuzzz]

By the above dubious definition of it, yes, it can