Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 10:22 AM, Bruce Kellett
<bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 8:14 AM, Bruce Kellett
<bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>>> 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?
No, Darwinian evolution is my favourite scientific theory.
What I am arguing is that we don't know if consciousness is an evolved
trait. It is perfectly possible to imagine darwinian evolution working
without consciousness, even to the human intelligence level (producing
philosophical zombies).
For example, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter, then
evolution is something that happens within consciousness, not a
generator of it.
That is probably the strongest argument against computationalism to date.
Bruce
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
