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As I've said before, I believe that we will be building conscious machines in the future (perhaps even the fairly near future - maybe even within the 2030 timeframe suggested by those who speculate about the "Singularity"), but if my proposal about the nature of consciousness is correct, it will not be possible to "give" consciousness to machine - consciousness is not the sort of thing that can be programmed into a machine; it is not the sort of thing that can be saved on a disk or downloaded from the internet. If I am right, consciousness is the sort of thing that needs to evolve and/or be "grown" from some appropriate physical "seeds". In other words, to build a conscious machine will mean designing an appropriate system that is capable of self-organizing into an embodied, goal-oriented system that behaves in accordance with values that depend on the goals that are inherent within the system.
This does not mean that we could not also design bigger, faster, fancier computers that give intelligent responses to inputs - but these fancy computers (basically just super-fancy input/output machines) will not be conscious, and they will probably never exhibit the sort of intellectual width, depth, and creativity that can be achieved by conscious machines. Of course this will remain to be seen. It is possible that simulated intelligence will be able to match the power conscious intelligence, but I suspect that it won't. But, in any case, I suspect that someday there will be a blending of incredible non-conscious and conscious machines - probably in a transhuman future where the line between "human" and "machine" becomes so blurred that it becomes irrelevant, except that the human/machine hybrids will, presumably, be of the conscious variety.
just like I said so many post ago ... a 'good borge".
As I've said before, I believe that we will be building conscious machines in the future (perhaps even the fairly near future - maybe even within the 2030 timeframe suggested by those who speculate about the "Singularity"), but if my proposal about the nature of consciousness is correct, it will not be possible to "give" consciousness to machine - consciousness is not the sort of thing that can be programmed into a machine; it is not the sort of thing that can be saved on a disk or downloaded from the internet. If I am right, consciousness is the sort of thing that needs to evolve and/or be "grown" from some appropriate physical "seeds". In other words, to build a conscious machine will mean designing an appropriate system that is capable of self-organizing into an embodied, goal-oriented system that behaves in accordance with values that depend on the goals that are inherent within the system.
This does not mean that we could not also design bigger, faster, fancier computers that give intelligent responses to inputs - but these fancy computers (basically just super-fancy input/output machines) will not be conscious, and they will probably never exhibit the sort of intellectual width, depth, and creativity that can be achieved by conscious machines. Of course this will remain to be seen. It is possible that simulated intelligence will be able to match the power conscious intelligence, but I suspect that it won't. But, in any case, I suspect that someday there will be a blending of incredible non-conscious and conscious machines - probably in a transhuman future where the line between "human" and "machine" becomes so blurred that it becomes irrelevant, except that the human/machine hybrids will, presumably, be of the conscious variety.
That's probably as good a summing up as we could get. The distinction between what is real consciousness and what is a mere imitation in a robot could become very blurred indeed. It is already blurred in the case of higher animals. They are conscious, in a way, but we probably believe that they are not self awarein the way humans are. Yet their actions suggests that the idea of the individual critter, its needs, self -preservation and position in the group are all there. The consciousness is different in how it is used, just as human tool - using is far different from a bird using a twig to get insects out of a tree.
In practice, it may never be done, but in principle, there seems no reason why not.
What ever it is, or however observed or slightly blurred has nothing to do with -what it is. The robot can be fully assessed by definition of origin ( mechanical ) A random individual cannot be absolutely assessed. An objective observation, in the objective or object manner has nothing to do with some things supposed subjective reality. The goal is also connected to mans understanding of random. You need to liberate the robot from the device's mechanical set up so its impossible with a set up and wires etc.
Last edited by Sophronius; 11-29-2014 at 12:03 PM..
Well in reading Arach's observations I seem to agree with most of the thinking. The other thing which makes good sense is the idea to label and find a label for whatever the approximating thinks would be a close and accurate estimation, doesn't seem to do anything. ( materialist and all the many labels) Anyway its always a good topic.
Last edited by Sophronius; 11-30-2014 at 01:33 PM..
think of a person running.
Is the running "stored" in the legs? When the legs are stopped can you see the "running"? when you take the legs apart and find no "running", not a trace, does that mean "running" does not exists? was the running "transmitted into the body because we didn't find it?
Obviously you've found that physics is fundamentally lacking and needs the addition of running-ness to fill in the gaps inherently left in a materialist reductive view of the world. Sure, you can explain the physical processes going on but that doesn't address the hard problem of running. This is in no way linguistic trickery based on confusing a process with an object - it must be a fundamental inescapable limitation of the current reductive materialist scientific establishment mindset. You'll also find that it is missing any possible explanation of other processes, such as digestion, justice and so on.
Or at least it is if you buy the arguments we've heard from our resident dualists. But it looks like it isn't dualism it is N-ism, where N is the number of processes we can think of : respiration, politics, traffic, the list is endless and we need to solve the hard problem of all of them by adding magic for all of them. That is, if their approach isn't just some sort of special pleading that consciousness must be different because if feels like it has to be.
have I no idea why one would label themselves any of these philosophies. How about labeling oneself as deciding how things work based on what is known or works best under the conditions they are under. Or my personal favorite, one that picks a possible solution that fits most of the conditions possible based on real observations
Yeah, there's a tendency for some philosophy to try to be stamp collectors - that is, non-experts trying to pigeon-hole the views of various experts in the field into easily digestible bins. When those pre-concieved categories that people must fit into don't line up with reality, well, lets just say that if philosophy was an empirical investigation of reality it wouldn't be philosophy any more.
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I haven't seen one real tough philosophical agreement yet, in 30 years. I seen people make them convoluted to fit some warped world views, but none that aren't easily seen through. What freaks me out is how philosophers can root a belief some deep that they ignore what the real data is revealing. or make speculations based in or anchored with what they don't know.
Chalmers "reductive reasoning rooted in confusion" is a joke. Who would ever take a guy that far off serously?
The feeling that consciousness must be special because it really feels that way is a powerful notion to get past. Much easier to find some vaguely convincing double-speak that agrees with ones feelings than to confront our biases head on. See also : creationism.
Obviously you've found that physics is fundamentally lacking and needs the addition of running-ness to fill in the gaps inherently left in a materialist reductive view of the world. Sure, you can explain the physical processes going on but that doesn't address the hard problem of running. This is in no way linguistic trickery based on confusing a process with an object - it must be a fundamental inescapable limitation of the current reductive materialist scientific establishment mindset. You'll also find that it is missing any possible explanation of other processes, such as digestion, justice and so on.
Or at least it is if you buy the arguments we've heard from our resident dualists. But it looks like it isn't dualism it is N-ism, where N is the number of processes we can think of : respiration, politics, traffic, the list is endless and we need to solve the hard problem of all of them by adding magic for all of them. That is, if their approach isn't just some sort of special pleading that consciousness must be different because if feels like it has to be.
exactly!!! what I meant.
I was thinking ... hey heard that!!!.
If consciousness is its own field, which I do not agree with but, then let's look at what robots can do based on what we have seen machines do today. Every "field" I know of a "machine" has helped us to see the field or understand the field better. What that means is that these machines have interacted with the fields better, more completely, than we can alone. All these machines do not have is the processor today.
So ... if/then ... If we make a machine that has the same processors as we do along with the input devices we have today then this machine would interact with this "aware field" better than we do. And I set minimum requirements of input devices of today and a processor that matches the iq of the average person (105-ish). So I put forth these machines would be more "conscious" than human. I think the match between metal and flesh is the next step. I call them "TNB" "The Nice Borge". That's just faith/hope tho.
What I did was use what we do know to predict what might happen with something we don't know. Sure I can be wrong. But it is anchored in what we do know. No convoluted back story. And my personal rule: Never make it harder than your neighbor can understand.
BTW: I cannot yet say exactly what the "new units of measurement" will need to be
Weird you'd post this just after a huge essay about the current lack of a complete monist theory of consciousness implying that monism is doomed to failure in the field. If the current gaps in a scientific approach mean they've failed as you've claimed, what are we to make of the lack of even an idea of an approach for dualism?
Not to mention the track records of science vs. philosophy in learning things about how reality works...
KC, I do agree that this is the bottom line ... consciousness feels unique, special, different, powerful and we don't entirely understand it ... therefore rather than resist what we know is a likely to be 99.9% if not 100% bias, we succumb instead to special pleading.
My intuition, on the other hand, is that what's missing from our knowledge has way more to do with missing an understanding of parts of material reality than a missing understanding of some separate realm of reality. Once we fill in the missing bits, the mystery goes away. This is my intuition because it is the way human knowledge has progressed 100% of the time so far and I see no reason for this to be any different -- however much some of us really really WANT it to be different.
My intuition, on the other hand, is that what's missing from our knowledge has way more to do with missing an understanding of parts of material reality than a missing understanding of some separate realm of reality. Once we fill in the missing bits, the mystery goes away.
This is precisely how I would describe my own intuitions, and it is exactly the approach I've been taking in this thread. But I've been taking one more step: I've been speculating on what, exactly, is missing in our "understanding of parts of [or aspects of] material reality." I've even been advocating a form of reductive physicalism, once we get a better handle on what physical reality is.
The history of science is a history of paradigm shifts. I've been trying to speculate on what sort of paradigm shift would be able to solve the hard problem of consciousness because, frankly, I strongly suspect that efforts to explain the nature of consciousness will provoke the next shift. Historically, paradigm shifts in science have never caused us to abandoned physicalism - they've just given us new conceptual tools for thinking about the physical world.
In my most recent posts, I've been trying to use the concept of "units of measure" to explain what I think is missing in the current paradigm. This is just an explanatory tool that I'm using to point to the need for a new concept. What's missing is not a unit of measure, per se, but a concept that, I suspect, will eventually imply the need for new units of measure in the realm of fundamental physics. Since we are tying to explain qualitative experience, I'm guess that the new units of measure will be essentially qualitative. But how do you measure qualia, given that they are experienced subjectively? This is a deep epistemological problem, but it does not logically imply that we need any new ontological types of stuff, and it does not imply that measurement is impossible. It might, however, force us to broaden our perspective on the concept of measurement.
As we've discussed earlier in this thread, psychology and neuroscience already have the core of the answer: Human reports of subjective experience, taken as data. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding the conceptual paths that link this data back to physics. If we cannot make this link, then we have an "explanatory gap" and, so long as we have this explanatory gap, all of our talk about the "emergence" of qualitative experience from the fundamental realm of physics amounts to magical thinking. I've proposed a ball-park idea of how to close the gap. The first thing we will need is a qualitative map built out of the physical correlates of conscious experience. This will be roughly analogous to assembling the Periodic Table of Elements based on experiments with chemical reactions. The next step will require a major leap in abstract thinking: We need to find some underlying principles that can explain why processes of type X correlate with subjective experiences of "seeing red" or "feeling a sharp pain" etc. (Something analogous to the way in which quantum mechanics implies electron shells, etc., giving rise to the Periodic Table.) My suggestion for this for this abstract leap is extremely vague, but here it is: All I can propose is that the observable effects of the abstract principles we are searching for should be found in the nervous systems of conscious creatures. Specifically: Deviations from what would be predicted by quantum theory in its current form.
Ideally, what I'm trying to do is formulate a theory that would predict precisely what sorts of deviations to look for. Then, if/when we can ever figure out how to measure quantum effects in conscious nervous systems, we could see if the theory's predictions are true. The key aspect of the "conceptual leap" needed for the new theory is that this is where the "qualitative" will seep into fundamental physics. The operational definitions of the new forces or principles or whatever is required will, in some way, derive from the qualitative map built up from the physical correlates of qualia.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 12-02-2014 at 07:43 AM..
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