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Unless you actually believe there is something magical about the human spirit - someday we are going to make sentient machines. What exactly is wrong with prep
by qarl2 11d ago
Unless you actually believe there is something magical about the human spirit - someday we are going to make sentient machines.
What exactly is wrong with preparing for that ahead of time? Just in case we pass that threshold before we realize it? Why does it make you uncomfortable?
- applicative 11d agoNo machine is an animal.
- GPerson 10d agoThere is a distinction between two important concepts here. There is access consciousness and there is phenomenal consciousness. The actual paper published alongside the j-space blog post discusses the idea of access consciousness if you are interested. Phenomenal consciousness is what the hard problem of consciousness is about. I personally believe there is a good reason to think the reducibility of this concept to some substrate independent description is equivalent to having a proper definition, and also believe it is not reducible to such a description. Hence the only definition one can give is akin to pointing at the moon and hoping you don’t look at the hand. I.e., phenomenal consciousness is first person experience, the existence of qualia, and that the “lights are on”. We are biased as educated people to believe all concepts are reducible to substrate independent description but there is no reason to believe this a priori. The substrate non-independence of consciousness, if correct, could mean we won’t just build one no matter how intelligent and human-like they become. I agree with you that there is nothing “magical” about our intelligence. However we have as a species effectively believed in magic since Newton decided gravity is a black box that cannot be reduced to the mechanical philosophy, and went on with describing its properties formally. We don’t call it magic, but physics. We call quantum mechanics unintuitive because it disagrees with the Boolean logic that is appear at the every day level. For some reason we keep making this mistake over and over. (There is one weakness to my view that I aware of. I think there must have at least at some point and maybe still been a role in which the process that results in phenomenal conscious plays in a correlated intelligence, because it seems unlikely to persist through evolution if not. I.e. certain physical processes encode information better than others, and we happen to live in a universe where such process is aligned with consciousness. Substrate independence doesn’t have to contend with this, but it does have worse problems in my view.)
- qarl 10d agoYikes. You're going to have to be more succinct. From my perspective, many of these arguments have the same structure as the arguments against evolution. Long, complex, and unintelligible.
- GPerson 10d agoCan we agree your reply is rude given than I have made a fair effort to explain my view to you already? This is not a simple topic and one should not expect the whole thing to come down to a tweet; neither is an accurate understanding of evolution I’ll add. Which part can I express better? Do you know what I am referring to by phenomenal consciousness?
- qarl 10d agoI apologize if I've caused offense - I knew it would be contentious but I thought it was more important that you understood my perspective from the outset. I have looked up "phenomenal consciousness" and I understand it to be roughly the qualia of being conscious. I do not understand then what you meant by "reduce to a substrate independent description". I hope you can understand why I was so dismissive - your large block of text became unintelligible to me only 5% of the way in.
- GPerson 10d agoI’m not more offended than by the army of people here informing me that my IQ is low, so no worries. I don’t have the skill to express these ideas more succinctly, and I apologize for this. I’ve tangled a lot, so I can try to express some parts in more organized manner if you’ll bear with me. (1) An important topic in consciousness studies is Chalmers’ hard problem; the original essay is very readable and I recommend it. He sets it aside from the “easy” problems of explaining how various human functions correspond to neural mechanisms, since he supposes these are clearly achievable by science with time. Many find this name contentious or the framing misguided. The hard problem is to explain how and why phenomenal consciousness exists, i.e., that there is an experience that goes along with some of those neural mechanisms. This is perplexing because if the functional aspects can all be explained mechanically, there is no a priori reason there must be an experience. (2) Substrate independence is the quality of the essential features of a process to depend only on their information content, not on the underlying medium expressing the information. For instance, the working of an operating system is substrate independent in the sense that it can run on different hardware. It is a commonly held belief that consciousness is like this, and I suspected this was your view. My own belief is that fundamental physical processes are substrate dependent. Each assumption has different explanatory power and issues. I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.