Why computers* will not become self aware.

When you quote someone and use the word 'you' in a directed reply to the quote, its pretty normal to read that as directed to the person being quoted. Using other words instead such as 'people' or 'anyone' makes that distinction clearer if that is what you intended to say.

We are not talking about whether thinking is an exercise in self awareness, we're talking about if thinking about thinking is. Obviously in some cases it might not be, but I'm saying it can be.... for which you seem to assert it cannot be?

 

The neurosciences are closing in on all the subtle functions of the human brain by advances in numerous experimental techniques. Eventually we will accumulate enough information of the architecture of the human brain and be able to emulate it (otherwise known has whole brain emulation). The secret of intelligence is buried deep in the brain. The widely held belief that consciousness is separate from the brain is a mythological concept that has been disproven from research in anesthetics. Without brain function, i.e. the circuit impulse patterns of neural networks there is no consciousness. It would prove useful to define intelligence in a meaningful manner. By this I mean we should employ a metric to measure intelligence with respect to model systems. Even very simple single-celled organisms display remarkable levels of intelligence.

The question then becomes: what does intelligence do? Intelligence is a reconstruction of an organisms (not necessarily organic) environment in which the reconstruction is favorable for the organisms survival. Bacteria are intelligent insofar as they can detect the location of their food and plants are intelligent insofar as they have stomata that perform optimization in when they open and close to get carbon monoxide from the atmosphere. This reconstruction is like a lossy data compression algorithm from all the information that is available in the immediate environment.

 

Exactly, because one cannot be simultaneously self-aware and immersed in the thought process.

 

By what mechanism do you think self awareness occurs?

I'd say thinking.

If you say 'feeling' then that is just thought about feelings, so its still thought. I'd say all awareness is the construct of thought, so self awareness by a literal definition is thinking about thinking is the 'correct' way, or at least the most accurate possible. So it becomes how to think about thinking for me, but for you I guess it depends on how you answer the above question as to the 'what' instead of how.

Unless your arguing for some impossible state of self awareness which transcends time, or are you just saying a process cannot use a process outside of itself to process itself and cannot process itself without being distracted by the process of processing?

See I think it depends on the architecture of the mind. Is the you in the mirror the same you looking at yourself, no, but if you reflect a reflection onto another mirror it is the same thing being mirrored. If you could mirror awareness, would it be a reflection or a replication.... we do not know of course, but I think its a pretty safe bet that thinking about thinking can give us elements of self awareness.... so how do you define self awareness that you say it cannot happen by thought?

 

Couldn't tell you.

You'd be dead wrong.

That's not how I define it, that's just the way it is. If you've ever had the experience of being lost in thought, and then realizing you're lost in thought, what I'm saying should seem as elementary as anything could possibly be.

 

Yea, doesn't add anything to the discussion.... its nothing special to caught up in a moment, in fact it probably should demonstrate my point that two completely absorbing but separate experiences of self can coexist so close together. To continue my metaphor, the mirror is your brain and the image is your mind, and the mind seems to be self referential in nature so it seems plausible that this system would allow oneself to know ones mind's function and content, but not its extent which would be an unrealistic expectation for self awareness anyway as things change constantly. But I see your not interested in anything except people agreeing with you.

 

No doubt it looks that way to people who haven't got a clue about self-awareness and are blissfully content to remain that way.

Please, you have nothing intelligent to say about self-awareness.

 

Haha, your actually showing how little you know on several fronts, but your probably not self aware enough for that.... nice stupidity, keep it up.

 

On the contrary, like everyone else who ever lived, I'm ignorant on a great many subjects; but self-awareness is not among them, at least by comparison to you.

 

There exist a few realities.

One of these realities is that we have right now working 100 and 1000 Quibit Quantum Computers.

It is necessary to have a Quantum System to develop A.I....or Artificial Intelligence.

It is also rumored that a current U.S. Military Contractor has already developed an existing A.I. System that has in essence a GOVERNOR upon it as well this A.I. system cannot access the Internet.

I don't think most people truly understand how monumental and how possible dangerous an A.I. System could be.

AboveAlpha

 

"Newest computer neural networks can identify visual objects as well as the primate brain"

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-neural-networks-visual-primate-brain.html

Our best artificial intelligences are already based on how the brain works. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck..

 

Well this AI really looks most unpromising since so many people among which even steven hawking alerted us on it's potential extreme dangerousness. Better screw up the project at this point

 

Not so fast, The research in anesthetics has proven no such thing. And to say that materialism, has been proven is utter nonsense. For that is what you are trying to say. If the brain receives consciousness, you can do something to the transceiver, so like a tv set, it no longer is receiving it. That is, it requires a normal, working brain in order to receive it. If you damage the transceiver, or affect it with drugs, the transceiver is no longer working properly. So, it is not being received as it would with a non affected brain.

There have been experiments that also show consciousness is not only inside the brain. That there seems to be a non locality involved. But you don't get grants to research that easily for academia is still very materialistic once you get outside of quantum mechanics.

So you using the word myth, when it comes to the nature of consciousness is utter nonsense.

 

I disagree...IMO it would be a brain controlling external actions. In this case the brain is interchangeable with computer processing. My point was if you did believe it was not human, then all we need to do is advance computers/algorithms/sensors/robotics to be able to take the place of that brain. Once computing is at that level, the question becomes can AI evolve and learn and make decisions on their own thereby potentially becoming dangerous to mankind...I say yes...

 

I think AI would only be aware of what it is programmed to be aware of and not be able to arbitrarily make gray decisions. If AI could evolve and make arbitrary gray decisions then this means AI is potentially dangerous to mankind. IMO AI is not meant to be a clone of a human possessing every imaginable trait/capability, etc. and again if it was then AI is potentially dangerous to mankind. AI is basically an intelligent machine(s) which can receive input and make decisions on action which will give the best success...AI is not a cloned human. The question remains as we create better computing and algorithms will there become a time when these 'machines' can learn and evolve on their own?

 

Might still be far from being a duck. And is.

When we figure out how the brain works in its totality, get back with us. Otherwise, that duck you spoke of will not be able to miagrate, from there to here, using what the duck brain uses.

We have spent decades in trying to find out how the homing pigeon, his brain, can find its way home. They have eliminated all ideas as how they thought he did it. And we still do not know. And this is a very small brain, far less complex than the human brain.

I would imagine the hurdle that will never be crossed with AI, is the ability of the human brain to discover the unknown, that which is not in memory. AI would have to have the same ability, to leave the known, which is contained in memory, and find something of the unknown. The human brain can do this, some of them. A computer can perhaps process its memory better than the human brain, but it is limited by what is stored as data in its memory. I don't think you can create a machine that can leave memory, totally negate it, and then discover something totally new, which is not contained in memory. Computers process memory. They process the known. And that is their limitation. The brain is not limited by that. The brain seems to have access to the infinite. And this may not simply be a result of mechanics, mechanical processes.

 

I think some of these visionaries see AI as being equal, or even superior to the organic human brain. They believe we will be able to create a machine, that is indistinquishable from the human brain, in all areas. Which would of course indeed make it a danger, for we cannot trust people, much less an artificial brain that could make decisions independent of programming. It could go rogue.

One imagines HAL from that sci fi flick. I think it will remain in the realm of sci fi, the singularity. I think the brain is much more than a mechanistic machine as the materialists choose to see it.

 

I see people afraid of skynet but non afraid of humans which are far more dangerous... it is them who built skynet in first place, and it's their wild behaviour which made skynet take the decision to exterminate them. So the moral is the evil resides in humans and it is up to them to manage their own anger and sadism, becoming better people, instead of giving all power to a god-judging cold machine.

 

Wait, quantum computer is what you need [at the end, Penrose thought that the human mind is a quantum mind, so ...]. If we interconnect a suitably high number of quantum tunneling processes we would "risk" to detect a conscience ...

So don't disturb human brain cells.

 

What you say is speculatively blind. If the human brain is a transceiver of consciousness then how do we measure the transmitted information of consciousness? Where is the information being transmitted from? There are too many questions and the underlying principle isn't falsifiable so it's a bad theory. The human brain is arguably the most complex object in the observable universe with a remarkable combinatorial structure. It wouldn't surprise me that with such a large combinatorial state space to operate in with so many neurons randomly firing that emergent information processing occurs. From the perspective of Ramsey Theory, intelligence may be a statistically emergent property of sufficiently large combinatorial structures.

Quantum Mechanics has no place in the discussion of consciousness. There is no point in taking two things we do not understand and to describe something we don't understand. Penrose & Hamerhauff's ORCH-OR theory is not very strong and with no conclusive supporting evidence.

 

You are referencing mind brain duality. The debate is still active. Didn't you read my reply where Walter Penfield the father of modern neuroscience changed his life long assumption that the mind could not exist without the brain? Ironically it was by his experiments with anesthetics to quell epileptic seizures that he discovered he had been wrong all his life! This is a cut and paste; " When Penfield began his studies of the human brain, he had hoped to discover how the brain causes the mind, something that we are continually reminded of by atheists (i.e., there is no agentic mind/spirit, just brain neuronal activity). However, because no one has been able to find the physical areas of the brain that control the mind, we are left to wonder, where is the mind?

Penfield wrote that “it will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal activity in the brain.” Unable to find the mind in the brain, yet ever aware of the presence of the mind during his research, Penfield determined that something else must be causing the mind. And what was that something else? He declared, “What a thrill it [was] to discover that the scientist, too, can legitimately believe in the existence of the spirit!”

http://newdualism.org/sites/moebius.psy.ed.ac.uk-dualism/papers/brains.html

So, IMO, the best we can do is say there is no solid proof either way.

I have no doubt that computers, even silicon based computers will soon exceed the human brain in 'intelligence' if not by grace by brute force. However why not allow the human brain the same weight of all the systems to run the computers and the computers themselves, and give the brains the same electrical power or its equivalent in other goodies? In other words if you have a computer that weighs a couple of hundred tons including the AC units, the building that houses it etc the human brain team should get a couple hundred tons of brains! That is a lot of connections! lol...

Intelligence is going to be easy compared to sentience. We haven't a clue how it is produced so how are we going to create it?

reva

 

I say yes too. No soul, no self inspection, no self-awareness, it would be acting completely at random. Of course if it did not have instincts such as self preservation that may be a good thing? Hmm' , not as simple as first glance would indicate!

reva

 

Of course computers aren't going to become self-aware just like that. But our brains are - in principle - computers. I use the term loosely because our brains don't compute in a similar way, but they're both essentially mechanical.

Self-cognition is one of the things that I feel is inherently subjective. We can never truly know if there's an experiencing being behind the eyes.

 

How do you know? You think because someone is paralyzed they couldn't feel it when you hit their finger? What does the ability to feel pain (or to yell) have to do with self-awareness?

 

If everything was purely mechanical how come we still don't understand many phenomena related to our brains and consciousness? How do we explain the origin of all reality by mechanics alone? It seems to me that many people purposedly reduct everything to banal mechanics in order to enlarge their egos and feeling of power over matter, whereas we are still extremely primitive in our understanding of reality, of which the human brain could be easily one of the most complicated things in the universe. I'm not even sure we will ever understand things to the full, even if we got unlimited time at disposal.