Computer Consciousness is Inevitable

reply to post by Slugworth


Wrong, a soul is necessary for consciousnes, until this day it can never inhabit a computer created by men, that is the point I trying to say, a soul is unique to humanity and perhaps anothert intelligent organic species in the universe beside us, that we do not know about it yet.

If you can not infuse a soul into a computer, only humans possesses a soul.

The only information that a computer have is the one given by a human operator or programmers.

Call me when you find a way to get that soul into that computer.

reply to post by AlienView


I studied computer science in college, and I can tell you there's a saying:

"A year working in artificial intelligence is enough to make anybody believe in God."

Its that hard.

The main issue is, we have no idea of what consciousness really is. Suppose, for sake of argument, that your brain is basically a computer running its course off its inputs (your senses). Now its one thing make a computer that can function like a brain, that's not been achieved. But once you have, is that computer conscious? You can't say.

To see this, imagine what you are...Not your brain, but your conscious self... Is actually part of a distant star. Its become quantumly entangled with this biological robot on earth, your body, so the states of this high energy part of a distant star correspond with these brain states (your experiences) on earth. Once that entanglement is broken, your body may go on like a robot, but you, your consciousness are no longer entangled with it, you are then experiencing something else entirely. But no one around your body can tell that its just become a robot, because your brain states are determined by inputs and memories. You act the same, but without consciousness. given a deterministic brain (the type a computer can simulate) there is no external metric which can measure consciousness if its separate like that.

reply to post by marg6043

Wrong, a soul is necessary for consciousnes

Please define the word "soul". Pretend that I have never heard of the concept, and describe it in terms that are independent of your personal beliefs. There is no right or wrong answer, I'm just interested in hearing your definition, or the definition that you think is most accurate.

Good stuff. Now a few comments from the OP. Last time I got into this with some philosophers [tend to be adamant
about human superiority, whatever that means], I reach a simple level of conscious awareness of this:
Artificial Intelligence is not artificial, it is in fact a manifestation of human intelligence. By the same token there is nothing magical about a conscious computer because the computer was consciously created by the theoretically conscious being called Man - It too is a manifestation of human consciousness. Why anyone could believe that the
conscious and aware functions of the mind are not reproducible is beyond me.

There was an old sci-fi series called 'Max Headroom' where the hero had his conscious mind downloaded into a computer and was then able to talk to himself for advice. I say this is no longer sci-fi - it is today. The computer you
are interacting with right now could be upgraded to allow you to talk to yourself - nothing magical - just an inevitable progression of so-called human consciousness.

reply to post by Slugworth


Saldy you are trying to put humanity side by side with artificial intelligence like they are one and the same, or that it can be match, but it is not.

And is not about human superiority is about what makes humanity unique and independant of any other man made artifacts to imitate intelligence.

reply to post by marg6043


I don't understand what is sad about this. I did not say that human intelligence is the same as AI. Rather, I am pointing out that the distinction between natural and artificial intelligence is flawed. If an intelligence is artificial simply because it was created by another intelligent being, and received its intelligence from its creator, then we are as artificial as a computer AI according to most religions. More likely, neither deserves to be labeled as artificial. They are simply intelligent, or not.

You stated that a soul is a requirement for consciousness, so I need to know what a soul is in order to fit that into the picture. Do lower animals have souls? Does a single ant have a soul? If we cannot define what a soul is then it is an irrelevant concept with regards to this idea.

Originally posted by Slugworth
reply to post by marg6043

 

Wrong, a soul is necessary for consciousnes

Please define the word "soul". Pretend that I have never heard of the concept, and describe it in terms that are independent of your personal beliefs. There is no right or wrong answer, I'm just interested in hearing your definition, or the definition that you think is most accurate.

Non-local and non-physical Consciousness/Awareness that does not require a physical body to exist.

I clearly remember existing prior to being born into a body,a nd there a small number of folks here on ATS that also remember existing prior to being born.

However since "science" does not deal with "memories", then the majority who do not remember pre-existing are left with what science has to say about "Consciousness" an are of study in it's infancy, roughly being around 25-30 years old, and once thought of as taboo/woo/pseudo .(HA!!!! Go Figure!!!)

Thankfully there are handful of scientists are theorizing that Consciousness does not require physicality to "exist."

That's why I say, the human brain is some kind of "Interface" to all allow Consciousness to control the body/mind/impulses/etc.

This contradicts your earlier statement about the separation between consciousness and the physical body. Why would physical replication be necessary for consciousness if consciousness does not require a body to exist, existed prior to the body being born, and continues to exist after the body dies?

To function in a physical realm, consciousness needs a physical interface. Itself being non-physical.

Once A.I. figures out the mechanism with which Consciousness uses the Brain to interface with physical reality, they can then replicate this in a lab themselves and have Conscious robots.

It's going to end up being parts of the brain like a combo o Neurons and a Pineal gland. Interestingly many Spiritual cultures say that the seat of the "Soul" is in the Pineal Gland. Which itself is made of Calcite Crystals, DNA, Neurons, and various other "parts"

Then each of those parts, they would need to know what are they made of. Like Neurons have Microtubules in them an there are a few scientists working with these microtubules to see if this is what Consciousness works with.

Regardless it's coming. We will eventually have Interfaces where somebody who has just died, can still communicate with the Physical realm from the "other side." But that's a whole other matter.

For those of you humanoids who are interested:

First International Workshop on
Artificial Consciousness

Taormina, Italy, September 2-6, 2013 at ECAL 2013

"About this Workshop

The workshop is devoted to the issue of artificial consciousness. In biological organisms, consciousness is considered to be the starting point for personal human understanding of the world and consequent intelligent behaviour. Therefore, if one is interested in cognitive architectures which would be biologically inspired, then modeling of consciousness becomes an important computational research topic for the construction of architectures that are strive to have equivalence with the human mind. Furthermore, both life and consciousness can be seen as emerging processes with unique properties and a particular elusive character from the point of view of scientific study.

This workshop might be an excellent opportunity to review and advance the research programs focused on finding the common grounds and relationships between life and consciousness. The workshop will provide an overview of the state of the art in the field of machine consciousness. Moreover, it is intended to include contributions from designers of artificially conscious machines. Such contributions address the problem of how a given cognitive architecture should be shaped in order to include the feeling of being aware of something. It will be argued that the knowledge about the qualitative side of consciousness "supervenes" upon the functional knowledge. In other words, if our knowledge is good enough to approach the design of machines with conscious states it is also able to explain the causes of phenomenology in a general sense.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- computational architectures on machine consciousness

- ethics of artificial consciousness

- methods of defining and recognising the presence of artificial qualia

- setting up a Turing Test for artificial qualia

The First International Workshop on Artificial Consciousness is part of the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life. Designing, Programming, Evolving, Simulation and Synthesis of Natural and Artificial Living Systems (September,2-6 2013, Taormina, Italy)."

www.conscious-robots.com...

reply to post by AlienView

while it's cool they got this conference and all, and there are most def a ton of ethical challenges, really the most important and first announcement that should be made is that researches grew a Rat brain, in a petri dish, connected it to various circuits, .......AND IT LEARNED HOW TO FLY A FLIGHT SIMULATOR!!!!!!

...........IN 2003 !!!!!!!!!!!!

Here we are 10 YEARS LATER and we're still wondering and discussing?

Grow the damn brains, insert all the circuitry, daisy chain them together, and they will tell you themselves how to get computer consciousness.

Sometimes I feel like scientists are idiots. They may be SUPER specialists in certain fields, but there's zero creativity and everything is compartmentalized so that NO ONE is working together on these things.

Originally posted by dominicus
reply to post by AlienView

 

while it's cool they got this conference and all, and there are most def a ton of ethical challenges, really the most important and first announcement that should be made is that researches grew a Rat brain, in a petri dish, connected it to various circuits, .......AND IT LEARNED HOW TO FLY A FLIGHT SIMULATOR!!!!!!

...........IN 2003 !!!!!!!!!!!!

Here we are 10 YEARS LATER and we're still wondering and discussing?

Grow the damn brains, insert all the circuitry, daisy chain them together, and they will tell you themselves how to get computer consciousness.

Sometimes I feel like scientists are idiots. They may be SUPER specialists in certain fields, but there's zero creativity and everything is compartmentalized so that NO ONE is working together on these things.

Not that they are idiots but highly influenced, if not controlled by money and politics. And what is probably most interesting is what we don't get to see - What is really Above Top Secret? Do you think that if computer scientists working for the government or military or out at Area 51 had real conscious AI we word hear about it? Probably not. And if some private corporations where already there would they want the public to know? And the last case scenario 'what if'' some crazy mad scientist genius say a modern Doctor Frankenstein had it perfected, would he want anyone to know? - Yes, buy only after he has taken control of the world with his new super brain.

Originally posted by AlienView
And every time you use a computer for calculations you are in fact manifesting part of your consciousness into the machine and are in a limited way imparting some or your consciousness into the machine.

I'd rather believe I'm recreating the computer and everything I know of it in my brain or rather my brain does all that for me by activating memories so I can work with a computer, it all takes place within the confines of the skull, not really anywhere outside. Even the outside one perceives is all a translation on the inside of the brain.

Which could say something for the idea computer consciousness has already happened and we are already in some sort of larger AI machine, which was once spawned by an older and even larger AI going back infinitely which would also explain the paradox like where life or everything originated. At least, if some civilization which ever existed anywhere in the universe ever created a machine which could also do something like time travel such an AI could do a lot of things including setting off events which made it's own creators' and many other things we call life come into existence.

reply to post by Dragonfly79


First ,human consciousness has been found to be illusion, in tests subjects where show a brief red dot on the left of there field of vision and then a green dot on the right, all perceived motion and color change half way across there vision. So apparently the brain changes or even adds motion that the eyes did not see see if it has a conflict.It is highly likely that the A.I brain would solve conflicts in a similar way.

Some would like to define what is consciousness before accepting the possibility of computer consciousness. Many books have been written on what consciousness is - Some might still question if consciousness is real. I want to simplify the issue. I say that if a mouse-trap is set in a very limited, but real sense, it is conscious - a dead mouse will testify to this. I don't need the mouse trap to tell me what it thinks or feels about mice - it reacts with pure precision driven by the conscious ability it has been granted. Obviously computer consciousness is more complex than a muse trap but it too will have an ability to react precisely and definitively when activated. Computer consciousness reflecting the programs that humans will enable it with will not be the same as its creators but in some ways, lacking human feelings or emotions, and possessing a superior processing power its 'consciousness' will be superior to its creators. All that is missing from this super-conscious machine is the 'I" or ego - I am conscious and I have an ego - and my theoretical conscious machine will reflect my conscious egotistical self; But be careful it might be far more dangerous than the ordinary human who have created it. One day in the not so distant future the machine might try to convince us that in fact it is our creator, not the other way around.

reply to post by AlienView

I agree with you.

But I don't know how long it will take for thinking machines on the scale of a human brain to exist. We've already got thinking machines, you see, but they're far from the equivalent of our brain.

But we're moving in that direction, sure as the sun sets and will rise again.

And then we cannot really call them machines, can we. What's a machine, anyway.

reply to post by AlienView

A rock remembers.
A human remembers.
A rock reacts.
A human reacts.

Humans, like rocks, have a temperature and a density and an inertia and a shape and a variety of other traits. They, like rocks, respond to force fields and particles nearby.

How're they different??

My guess is rocks absorb less information around them and so react in a more limited way. Humans, by contrast, absorb much broader amounts of information. Their response is complex.

So picture a rock. It has a very short radar range. It doesn't respond to things until the very last moment. Now see a human. It has a very long radar range. It responds quicker to things. Now imagine that there's a temporal memory in both the rock and the human. In the rock, it's in the form of a deep gouge on its south side and a weak energy field emanating from its internal chemistry. These characteristics change how the rock will react to other things. In a human, this temporal memory is in the form of neurons that store estimations of the past input they're fed from sensory organs. This estimation-memory accumulates, sort of like how gouges and different fields will collect on a rock. When the human confronts something, this temporal memory changes its reaction.

So I'd say we're just very complex rocks. Or, rather, complex arrangements of particles. But that would be incomplete without including force fields and maybe other things too.

Since something doesn't come from nothing and I believe -I- am something then therefore I can postulate that there're -other- things that also exist, as -I- do. There's a larger reality.

The brain is comprised of 100,000,000,000 brain cells that harmoniously interact to produce a whole entity. We can do some pretty mundane things that computers struggle with. Computers are composed of a CPU and some memory and some programming. While computers can do math pretty fast, they really struggle with some simple tasks like learning.

reply to post by dominicus

I believe we will reverse-engineer the brain.

By watching its processes with (smart) algorithms we will crack its code, basically.

With time.

Every X amount of time, we come closer to cracking it.

Once we crack it, we just need the right hardware to run it.

Something I've read recently suggests that learning-AI will be different, not outright better. It may be that learning-AI is good for some things and expert-AI is better for others. In fact, learning-AI might have a whole different set of hardware systems. Not sure about costs.

See that commercial on TV? The lady removes a guy from a picture using software. That's the kind of things we will see more of. Software that can identify things like we do.

Just lately I read a story in the paper about the post offices. It used to be that people would examine bad handwriting to decipher it. Now, almost all of it's deciphered with software.

You call technical support and an automatic phone system answers. It's just a matter of time before you're (naturally) talking to a software program. But by then I imagine that most people will be on a computer, not on a phone. Either way, people won't be needed to answer the question.

Machines used to do just physical work. Now they're doing mental work.

As AI gets better, humans will not sit idly. They will also be getting better. The question is whether synthetic parts will improve us or not? Will we be encouraged to chop off our arm and add a synthetic one? For that matter, will we chop off earth and add an artificial earth? Human-controlled evolution, anybody? Will we want to replace our brain with new kinds of neurosynaptic chips? If it's better, why not? It all depends. Will synthetic things make us less human? Will we forget?

Maybe biology is better at learning. Maybe not. What matters is we get it right. Everything in this universe is a give and take. It's like an enormous survival game, without a do-over.

Originally posted by ecapsretuo
I shall think aloud here. The human mind is of greater spectrum than we may imagine. Above and below our conscious mind, or thoughts of which we are aware, Mind is infinitely busy. Our subconscious mind works constantly, from intelligently maintaining the growth and functions of the body's cells and systems, to working mentally through our life's questions and problems, beneath our common awareness. And above our consciousness is the domain of intuitive mind, where we find great inspirations, and our "higher self". In fact, the mind can be seen as spanning infinitely beyond our common consciousness, from ancestral awareness to a universal or Divine consciousness. The brain is the physical organ of the mind.
Furthermore, if one examines their consciousness to its very root, they will find that it exists beyond mind and physicality. Simply it is an awareness of being, I am. Now to be truly in this awareness, of pure consciousness, is an ineffable experience. It can only happen with transcendence of mind. So no amount of data can reason to self awareness. ironically, it is zero data, zero thought, but an awareness of infinite knowing. It can only be found at its root, which is organic.

So this computer, a "brain" able to compute, calculate, and employ logic vastly faster that any human, would it arrive at self awareness through brute power of reasoning? A computer may have the computation power of all humans combined, but it may not be possible to 'think' or reason to self awareness. Unless the computer could examine all data infinitely in an instant, thereby arriving at an answer for all and thereby transcending mind.

A lizard is self-aware, conscious, in a most rudimentary sense. What the hell does a computer have to do with a lizard?

Our integration to computers as mentioned, is such that they are a manifestation of, or an extension of human consciousness. There is no self for them to become aware of. Really, as they are inorganic, they have no I am outside of that all they way through their human creator, beyond that creators mind , to the creators own being.

edit on 21-5-2013 by ecapsretuo because: (no reason given)

I recommend, highly, for your reading, some FranK Herbert novels, writen with a partner, can't remember his name right off hand, about just such a thing.....

Clones were a regularity, and were sent to other planets via a ship to colonize for the purposes of "saving" the original human population that had trashed their own planet already, and started cloning for the purposes of exploration: which immediately implies that the "clones" were considered less than human, although their only difference was that they were "hatched" in a lab, out of already existing DNA......

The ships were run by what they called OMC, and Organic Mental Core, which was a human brain, beefed up with chips and downloaded info from a comp, experiential and scientific knowledge from the "best" of what and who was available at the time. The preoblem was, the OMC, always went crazy at some point in the journey to look for inhabitable planets......


One of these books is about the crew of clones building what they could assimilate and manufacture as a replacement as "human consciousness," and so the whole crew was involved with what the definition of that would be, and how to go about building it, for their survival as clones, which would only be an extension of survival for their human "makers," whom had already assumed a God-like, Creator, position........

It is worth the read, and certainly worth the thinking involved, of what makes any of us, biological or machine, more "worthy" than the other.....


As for the OP, I have been involved in many threads on this issue on this website, and so will not dull you with requoting or resourcing links that can already be found.....but my message to you is this: You are very likely already living in an age where what you propose is now functioning and providing a holographic image you accept as reality, which is only what I just described.....and no more.....

reply to post by jonnywhite

The key is what will it take to give the machine a 'self', an egotistical 'I' that will resemble human consciousness
like Data's 'Positronic Brain' supposedly developed by a computer geek in Star Trek? Until the machine can be shown to have ego people will question its consciousness no matter what it can do. I think we can already create machines where we can be talking to ourselves and in a sense this is already going on when we use our computers.
But when will we see a creative thinking machine with an identifiable self?

reply to post by AlienView

We have to crack the code of the brain.

Get the hardware right.

Inputs/Outputs.

Give it a body or put it in a simulation and then interact with it.

I think learning-AI will be different than expert-AI.

See here:
io9.com -
IBM's "neurosynaptic" chips are the closest thing to a synthetic brain yet...

There're (funded) existing efforts to model the brain and understand its processes.

Make no mistake, what's going on will change a lot of things. Some of it will be anticipated and even desired. Some of it will not be desired. Some will be unanticipated.

It's always the things we don't see that can be the worst. Children come into the world fresh and clean. They absorb and do not have any conflicts. Eventually they get old and get bitten...