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If by consciousness we mean "self-awareness", we can edit out animals, as only humans are aware of themselves.
Need, or affect, is what makes consciousness real. You cannot program needs without building it into the fabric of spacetime, as naturally emergent organisms do.
There is something "machine-like" about humans in that we follow regular habits and rules of functioning; except our dynamics are profoundly and irresolvably non-linear, and so, cannot be properly represented in mathematical languages.
originally posted by: Astrocyte
What we call "artificial intelligence" is more or less real thing, so long as we emphasize the "artificial" part, and recognize the "intelligence" part purely in terms of what this machine can do to make human beings happy. Otherwise, there is nothing or no one "in there" to experience the computing.
The problem, or the reason that this idea has been produced and become so popular is that the producers are uneducated in philosophy and spend most of their days working through math, tech books or staring at a computer - and none of these activities are relevant to the question: what is the nature of consciousness?
It is sad, very sad, and the future of our species, if there is a future, will look back upon this day and age as a period where people didn't understand how much like chemistry they really were. If I begin life on certain terms, with certain feeling needs put into me by the people I grow around (a function of how they feel when the communicate with me, or when I attempt to communicate with them) then reality will seem a certain way to me. This is more or less the very simple gist of why some people make baseless assertions without concern or interest in the nitty gritty details of what consciousness actually is.
Consciousness: what is it?
Well first of all, you can only claim consciousness in relation to that which exhibits it: human beings and animals. If by consciousness we mean "self-awareness", we can edit out animals, as only humans are aware of themselves. If by conscious we mean 'experience of life', then animals are very much conscious creatures, inasmuch as they experience their life through the affects (feelings) which arise in relation to the events both within and outside them. Thus, we have only two examples of consciousness: animals and humans. And furthermore, the existence of consciousness is emergent, which means that it appears first in very rudimentary form as a simple semiotic dialectic - as in prokaryotic cells; then, about 2 billion years ago, cells complexify to become Eukaryotic (with a nucleus and mitochondrion); and then 500 million years ago, an 'explosion' occurs whereby Eukaryotic cells symbiotically merge to produce super-structures - multicellular "slimemolds", and "algae" and then arthropods (shelled creatures like crustaceans). Evolution began in terms of an ecosystem of natural selection whereby one creature adapted to the presence of another creature (a predator), which then adapted to the adaptations of the creatures trying to avoid predation. In this way, arthropods evolved into fishes which evolved into amphibians, etc.
What is the core of this process? If each creature is adapting, they are adapting as a function of maintaining some sort of ideal state; this state is the biodynamical "coherency" of the total 'waveform' that is the organism. In other words, when the world moves, the organism moves. And when the predator kills you, conspecifics (like members of species) take note and seek to evolve in ways that will avoid the predators detection.
In all of this, there is one obvious characteristic: NEED
What is Need?
The work of Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures showed that the dynamics of a cell work on principles similar to dissipative structures like whirlpools, in that the whirlpool shape functions as the stable formation which works to dissipate the energy moving through that area in the most stable and coherent way possible.
The natural structures emerge naturally in this way more or less explains that the body of an organism is doing exactly the same thing. Indeed, the philosopher Terrence Deacon, in his book Incomplete Nature, has this idea at the core of it: that a living being is paradoxically built not so much by what is there, but by what is absent and how the absence forces the being into appearance.
Need, or affect, is what makes consciousness real. You cannot program needs without building it into the fabric of spacetime, as naturally emergent organisms do. This means that the very matter which moves through our system creates the property of need, inasmuch as that matter dissipates as heat loss overtime, and thus generates emergent states of affective perception which drive our system towards cognizing solutions.
This is the fact of the matter, which more or less means that Larry Page is probably a deranged lunatic - and ditto for Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the AI fanatics who haven't thought a lick about what it means to create an actual conscious lifeform.
I'm not saying AI is completely impossible. There is something "machine-like" about humans in that we follow regular habits and rules of functioning; except our dynamics are profoundly and irresolvably non-linear, and so, cannot be properly represented in mathematical languages.
In short, if we want to "create life", it would seem to be a matter of copying what evolution does with carbon and not silicon. We would look to mother nature, since it is from her, ultimately, that we even arise. So too, it is to her that our energies are given when we die.
originally posted by: Astrocyte
I'm not saying AI is completely impossible. There is something "machine-like" about humans in that we follow regular habits and rules of functioning; except our dynamics are profoundly and irresolvably non-linear, and so, cannot be properly represented in mathematical languages.
Living Machines Are Impossible