Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/15/2015 10:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
The AI that I envisage will probably be based on a learning
program of some sort, that will have to learn in much the
same way as an infant human learns. I doubt that we will
ever be able to create an AI that is essentially an
intelligent adult human when it is first turned on.
I agree with that, but once an AI is realized it will be
possible to copy it. And if it's digital it will be possible to
implement it using different hardware. If it's not digital, it
will (in principle) be able to implement it arbitrarily closely
with a digital device. And we will have the same question -
what is that makes that hardware device conscious? I don't see
any plausible answer except "Running the program it instantiates."
But that does not imply that consciousness is itself a computation.
There is not some subroutine in your AI the is labelled "this
subroutine computes consciousness". Consciousness is a function of
the whole functioning system, not of some particular feature. That
is why I think identifying consciousness with computation is in fact
adding some additional magic to the machine.
So you don't believe that performing the same computations that your
brain does in another substrate will produce a copy of your mind? If you
don't believe that, then you must believe in some unknown property of
matter (magic?). If you do, then you believe that consciousness
supervenes on computation.
Consciousness arose in nature by a process of natural evolution.
How do you know that?
Proto-consciousness gave some evolutionary advantage, so it grew and
developed.
How do you know that?
Nature did not at some point add the fact that it was a computation,
and then it suddenly become conscious.
Of course not. Nobody claims that.
Consciousness is a computation only in the trivial sense that any
physical process can be regarded as a computation, or mapping taking
some input to some output. There is not some special, magical class
of computations that are unique to consciousness. Consciousness is
an evolved bulk property, not just one specific feature of that bulk.
How do you know it's evolved?
Are you seriously going to argue that homo sapiens did *not* arise by a
process of natural selection, aka evolution?
Bruce
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