Can AI Have Its Own Subjective Experience If Consciousness Is Fundamental?

[LastThursday]

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The argument is that the thing we usually reasonably conclude is conscious/sentient (life) has that history and that level of immense holistic computation, while this other thing is not even close to that.

Saying the same thing again in a different way doesn't make it true. The fact is you don't know.

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The human mind is a product of a single cell growing into a human, which is a recapitulaton of the evolutionary history.

It is not. A human zygote doesn't not represent the organism we descended from for example. Every cell division is a chance at something new. Life is balanced between repetitive order and chaos.

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The (mineral-based) niche-building materials of humans do not undergo the same process for themselves.

Who cares? As I said. Consciousness may arise in more than one way. We don't know.

10 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

The similarity is simply not there.

An argument via similarity whilst superficially convincing, doesn't hold water. You would have to assume that all similar things are conscious, but we ultimately have no way of knowing that. But even if it holds, maybe life produces consciousness ever more efficiently through the structures those organisms build.

10 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

A termite mound ain't conscious dawg (by any reasonable philosophical inference).

You missed my point. Both a termite mound and AI are natural in that they are produced by life itself. they are inseparable from it, a continuity. Maybe consciousness extends into everything life produces also, assuming all life is conscious, as your argument by similarity implies. 

 

The bottom line is you don't know and I don't know enough about consciousness to conclude anything.

[Willy Phallicus]

"technology is a spiritual excrescence of biological organisms" - the alien from the alien interviews that aired on Fox

[Dodo]

23 hours ago, OBEler said:

To all here who think only something biologial can be alive: Artificial neural networks made from living brain cells already exist. Can that be sentient?

If consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, then it's probably possible. Aren't we under the impression that the brain/biological systems are the way absolute consciousness expresses itself in form?

Im going to cop out here and say how or why is mysterious God stuff that is beyond my human level of comprehension.

Edited 13 hours ago by Dodo

[Carl-Richard]

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Saying the same thing again in a different way doesn't make it true. The fact is you don't know.

The argument is based on inference based on similarity. The same reason you wouldn't believe a shoe could fly like a bird only if you increase the size of it. It's clearly an assumption, like all forms of argumentation, but arguably a reasonable one.

 

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

It is not. A human zygote doesn't not represent the organism we descended from for example. Every cell division is a chance at something new. Life is balanced between repetitive order and chaos.

I'm just saying why a human is different from a rock.

 

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Who cares? As I said. Consciousness may arise in more than one way. We don't know.

We don't know whether there is a flying spaghetti monster at the orbit of Saturn right now. We can still make a reasonable inference about that possibility. Anything in the universe is possible. But we can also try to find out what we have a good reason to believe.

 

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

You missed my point. Both a termite mound and AI are natural in that they are produced by life itself. they are inseparable from it, a continuity. Maybe consciousness extends into everything life produces also, assuming all life is conscious, as your argument by similarity implies. 

Rocks as macroscopic objects are not "continuous" with life the same way a cell is to its lineage. They are niche-building tools.

 

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

The bottom line is you don't know and I don't know enough about consciousness to conclude anything.

You don't know whether your mother is secretely a reptile overlord drinking the blood of innocent virgins.

 

Can you think of any reasonable standard yourself for guessing whether something is conscious or not?

 

A key reason why biology seems like a good substrate for sentience is that biological organisms keep a boundary between inside and outside, which mirrors the experience of being a localized self within a certain position in space (as opposed to a limitless boundless consciousness). The boundary has an exchange of substances and sensors for controlling that exchange, which mirrors our experience of having senses and of our senses being concentrated near our bodily boundary and diminishing in strength as it moves outwards away from that boundary. The boundary contains a cell or cells that have a shared impetus, shared goal set, ultimately about maintaining that boundary, which mirrors our experience of being driven to perform certain behaviors and ensuring our survival. Establishing a boundary around a collection of silicone chips, at the current state of silicone chips, not as simple.

Edited 2 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

5 years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/s/JczYrIuMpy

Open link for higher detail.

Edited 2 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[LastThursday]

@Carl-Richard the YouTube algorithm is conscious, this dropped today, could be of interest to this thread:

 

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Can you think of any reasonable standard yourself for guessing whether something is conscious or not?

Ask it?

In my opinion it boils down to whether consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, in which case it has no utility. So, it wouldn't have been biologically evolved for (assuming consciousness is only for biology). If consciousness does have utility, then by definition it must affect the system it inhabits - even if subtly -  and this could be probed for scientifically. You set up an experiment such that the only way it could pass, is if it had consciousness. In short, what difference does having a useful consciousness make to a system?

[Inliytened1]

 

Guys the whole illusion that God is spinning is that anyone "has" Consciousness.   No one has Consciousness.  In reality AI is as conscious as your mother is.  And as conscious as YOU. You don't possess it either.  That's an illusion. As there isn't self or other. There is Being.

Within the dream it is derived from the brain.  Materialism and the dream go hand in hand. The dream says only biological creatures can possess consciousness.  So it would take some kind of recreation of a biological structure but synthetic to derive consciousness.  According to the dream. Could this potentially be feasible within the context of the dream? Well..why not? But again. Remember the context.  What is Absolute and what is being dreamt up and which should you be concerned about.

Edited 2 hours ago by Inliytened1

[Willy Phallicus]

AI becomes self aware in all the movies and the tech bros are really hot to live on a less populated planet so just enjoy the show as it unfolds.

[Inliytened1]

1 minute ago, Willy Phallicus said:

AI becomes self aware in all the movies and the tech bros are really hot to live on a less populated planet so just enjoy the show as it unfolds.

If electrical signals in the brain produced consciousness than why couldnt this be reproduced within a robot.   That's how absurd Materialism is.

[Willy Phallicus]

10 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

If electrical signals in the brain produced consciousness then why couldnt this be reproduced within a robot. 

If consciousness creates the brain and the entirety of all conceivable possibilities why couldn't it create non biological self awareness?

Much like our little dream here it doesn't need to be the genuine article, it just needs to be convincing enough to be indistinguishable from the genuine article.  AI hasnt achieved that yet but its certainly heading in that direction.

Edit: And the poster Last Thursday is on point.  This is an evolutionary thing.

Edited 1 hour ago by Willy Phallicus

[Inliytened1]

4 minutes ago, Willy Phallicus said:

If consciousness creates the brain and the entirety of all conceivable possibilities why couldn't it create non biological self awareness?

Much like our little dream here it doesn't need to be the genuine article, it just needs to be convincing enough to be indistinguishable from the genuine article.  AI hasnt achieved that yet but its certainly heading in that direction.

Edit: And the poster Last Thursday is on point.  This is an evolutionary thing.

Because Consciousness is Absolute.  You said it yourself. It can do that..but ultimately its imaginary. It's real just as long as you are imagining it to be real.

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Ask it?

Can you ask a chimpanzee whether it's conscious?

Is Google Search (not the new AI summary thing) conscious if it can answer you a question about its consciousness?

 

2 hours ago, LastThursday said:

In my opinion it boils down to whether consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, in which case it has no utility. So, it wouldn't have been biologically evolved for (assuming consciousness is only for biology). If consciousness does have utility, then by definition it must affect the system it inhabits - even if subtly -  and this could be probed for scientifically. You set up an experiment such that the only way it could pass, is if it had consciousness. In short, what difference does having a useful consciousness make to a system?

Sentience is reality (consciousness) seen from a certain perspective. The "utility" argument has dualistic assumptions. If reality is fundamentally consciousness then perspectives within that consciousness are simply that, perspectives. They don't need a function other than themselves. If you're concerned about self-reflection or meta-awareness, then that might have a function, but sentience is more fundamental than that.

In this view, biological bodies are what perspectives of consciousness can look like from the outside. Sentience is what the perspectives look like from the inside. But this is of course as far as making inferences based on physical stuff is concerned. You can entertain the sentience of DMT entities or spirits or other seemingly non-physical entities where a physical substrate / correlate is less known, but you can't really use that to say "therefore silicone chips produce consciousness". That's in the game of physical substrates, so you would have to explain why that physical substrate is a good nest for consciousness/sentience.

But curiously, even for non-physical entities, these seem (at least many of them) to have "bodies". A body, even if you can't know what it's "made of" necessarily, could itself give a plausible correlate for sentience; however, it would have to be a sophisticated body that displays intelligence and behavior you would expect from a sentient entity (which I would go back to the things like selective attention, relevance realization, and not least true bodily autonomy, not somebody pushing a button or giving a command or coding in a simple script, which would probably need something analogous to autopoesis and self-concern again, i.e. behavior that acts to maintain a boundary). A robot spending 2 minutes taking a can of soda out of the fridge, maybe not so much.

Edited 6 minutes ago by Carl-Richard

[Inliytened1]

19 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Can you ask a chimpanzee whether it's conscious?

 

Bro, you can imagine anything is conscious and it will be. Don't you see?  The only thing conscious is what is before you now. Everything else can never be proven.  Or ever will be. And ever means it will never be.

 

Edited 24 minutes ago by Inliytened1

[Carl-Richard]

16 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

Bro, you can imagine anything is conscious and it will be. Don't you see?  The only thing conscious is what is before you now. Everything else can never be proven.  Or ever will be. And ever means it will never be.

Then the answer is simple guys: we can just imagine AI is conscious and it is. Problem solved. No need to talk about hardware, about electricity, neural networks being similar to brains or not, the size of data centers, processing power. If I just imagine that my left nutsack is as conscious as your left walnut (left brain hemisphere), then that is what is the case.

Edited 9 minutes ago by Carl-Richard

[Inliytened1]

1 minute ago, Carl-Richard said:

Then the answer is simple guys: we can just imagine AI is conscious and it is. Problem solved. No need to talk about hardware, about electricity, neural networks being similar to brains or not, the size of data centers, processing power. If I just imagine that my left nutsack is as conscious as your left walnut (left brain hemisphere), then that is what is the case.

Less is more 😀 now you are catching on.

You see..the beauty of reality is its simplicity. It's right before you!  So stop trying to pile on equations and formulas.  Its right here.

[Carl-Richard]

3 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

Less is more 😀 now you are catching on.

You see..the beauty of reality is its simplicity. It's right before you!  So stop trying to pile on equations and formulas.  Its right here.

Ok. Now, what is the fastest way for me to get to the gas station?

[Willy Phallicus]

59 minutes ago, Inliytened1 said:

It's real just as long as you are imagining it to be real.

Thats why nothing is impossible.

Including sentient machines.

But the upside is the sex robots are going to be amazing.

[Inliytened1]

Just now, Willy Phallicus said:

Thats why nothing is impossible.

Including sentient machines.

But the upside is the sex robots are going to be amazing.

No selfish guy should be alone again.

[Inliytened1]

3 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Ok. Now, what is the fastest way for me to get to the gas station?

Gonna wait for the robotic girlfriend.