Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
Post Reply
Gertie
Posts: 2181
Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Gertie »

Jan Sand wrote: March 16th, 2018, 1:29 pm Aside from the radically different physical,structural difference between a living brain, human or otherwise, and a computer with a static data structure and a very limited way that the "thinking" process is utilized and structured, A human brain develops its data base out of predefined necessities for survival and other functional necessities inherited from a very complex inter-relationship with its environment which takes years to develop in order to function properly in an environment that has a limited predictability. The environment that a computer is designed and programed in is limited far below that of even a single celled organism. The "environments it is designed to function within is not only pitifully lacking in any real complexity but it is fed by a user or programmer for a highly limited interaction with its potentials but also, to a large extent, it is temporary, and erased to begin again in a new exercise. It is as if a human awoke each morning with the same knowledge as a newborn baby to deal with the problems for that day alone, with almost no accumulation of random data that fills each of our lives each moment as a possibility to build some sort of cohesive totality that can be used somehow for a new way to handle a new problem. Only recently, with deep learning where millions of experiences are accumulated as a data base source with only vague indications requested by a programmer giving some direction to the search processes. This is what makes it seem more alive.
So this suggests to you that experiential states are a result of these unimaginably complex interactions, a novel emergent property of these types of material interactions? Rather than for example something inherent in the substrate of a carbon based brain?

So if one day a computer (or a set of water pipes and valves for that matter) could exactly mimic the patterns of interactions of your brain right now, would you expect that computer to experience what it's like to be you right now?
Wayne92587
Posts: 1780
Joined: January 27th, 2012, 9:32 pm
Favorite Philosopher: Hermese Trismegistus

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Wayne92587 »

Jan Sand
consciousness seems to me to be an instrument of the brain to navigate life through simulating reality
Eve as in Adam and Eve, Woman used as metaphor for Consciousness, Eve being Adam's Helpmate.
Jan Sand
Posts: 658
Joined: September 10th, 2017, 11:57 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Jan Sand »

For instance, Think pf the color red. If a computer is instructed to perform a reaction when it encounters the electromagnet frequency we humans attribute to the color red that is not what we might call thinking any more than when a baseball gains huge velocity when it is hit by a bat. But a human can associate the color red with meat, with blood, with a traffic light, with a sunset, with danger, with a species of butterfly etc. And each of these associations has further links which can be very personal. So, unlike a computer which is keyed by a program to respond with a specific reaction, a living brain has a profusion of possibilities to choose from and a profusion of reactions for each link. Which link pathways it follows can be very individual and this is called thinking. I don't know if this can be called experience but if a thinking being includes itself in its considerations, perhaps that can be thought of as consciousness, even if it is just a set of water pipes.
User avatar
JamesOfSeattle
Premium Member
Posts: 509
Joined: October 16th, 2015, 11:20 pm

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

But Jan, do you have any reason to believe a computer cannot be programmed to “associate the color red with meat, with blood, with a traffic light, with a sunset, with danger, with a species of butterfly etc. ”?

Do have any reason to believe that a computer cannot start with the capabilities of an infant and teach itself about the world by interacting with it?

*
Jan Sand
Posts: 658
Joined: September 10th, 2017, 11:57 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Jan Sand »

Of course it can. That's what deep thinking with computers is all about. They don't program a computer to recognize faces, they show it a million faces and the computer programs itself to decide what makes faces different and eventually it gets better at recognizing facial patterns than humans and that's what scares the hell out of people like Musk and Hawking since even the programmers are mystified as to what methods the computer has used. Call it whatever you want but it looks like thinking to me.
Gertie
Posts: 2181
Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Gertie »

Jan
For instance, Think pf the color red. If a computer is instructed to perform a reaction when it encounters the electromagnet frequency we humans attribute to the color red that is not what we might call thinking any more than when a baseball gains huge velocity when it is hit by a bat. But a human can associate the color red with meat, with blood, with a traffic light, with a sunset, with danger, with a species of butterfly etc. And each of these associations has further links which can be very personal.
Right, and all of our experienced thoughts, emotions, sights and so on with their myriad associations appear to correlate to specific physical neural interactions. And as you say, seeing a red rose for example might have very different specific associations for you and me, again mirrored in how each of our own neural networks have been molded by our own past life experiences.

But that leaves open the question of how these complex neural interactions somehow give rise to the experience of 'what it's like' to see a red rose. Which is the central question of philosophy of mind, what Chambers calls The Hard Problem.

One hypothesis is that it's the vast complexity of the physical neural interactions which result in emergent mental states like 'what it's like' to see a red rose, in which case there's no in principle problem for a sufficiently complex computer to one day have such mental states. Where-as another hypothesis suggests mental states aren't an emergent property of matter, they're a fundamental property of the universe, part of the fabric of everything, which would imply that your computer already has some kind of mental states (as do toasters and rocks) but we just don't recognise it. Another hypothesis suggests that there's a particular feature of neurons, their protein microtubules, which are key to mental states, so silicon based computers can't have mental states. And so on. There's no settled theory on the relationship between the physical and mental, mind and body, and all our current ones could be way off track. So I don't see how we can know if a computer can have mental states.

The relationship between mental states and 'a sense of self' is slightly different I think. Certainly humans have a sense of self, but does a dog? If so, I'd imagine it would be very different. A dog presumably has a unified field of consciousness like we do, some awareness of itself as a discrete entity located in time and space, sniffing this and tasting that, feeling pain and excitement. But it doesn't have a brain like ours, it doesn't have language, that inner narrative voice which creates a coherent model of the world and the self. So if a computer has mental states, I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be like ours, or have what we'd call a sense of self.
Belindi
Moderator
Posts: 6105
Joined: September 11th, 2016, 2:11 pm

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Belindi »

James of Seattle , you have demolished my argument regarding accuracy as how computers are unoriginal or alternatively are synthesisers. Your claim that software is as original as the programmer makes it means to me that I can't claim that accuracy defines computers' information.

Your point about chickens as inefficient guard dogs, and my point about a bit of cheese rind as an inefficient bookmark, go to show that a tool is only as good as its user. If a chicken is all you have then it's better than no guard dog at all.
With regard to my qualia criterion number 2. that if a computer can feel pain then the more it can conceptualise and remember that pain which correlates with a permanent change in its hardware, but still functions after a fashion, the more it's conscious. Or, to put it another way, if a man gets a bash on the head which does permanent damage he may still live and function albeit in some altered way . If I bash a computer and do permanent damage to its hardware will it either be off or on after the trauma?



Gertie, I have sort of forgotten what I was saying. When I said 'information' in that post I meant it within that context. I'll try to get back to you.

Gertie, found it! This is what I wrote: "Insofar as reality is information reality is open-ended information." I might alternatively have written "Insofar as reality is concepts reality is open-ended number of concepts". I do believe that reality (all that is the case) is open-ended. I suppose that this belief implies that when this universe dies there will be something else happening so that absolute nothingness is impossible. If I were interested in theories of God I'd believe that God did not make stuff ex nihilo.
Gertie
Posts: 2181
Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Gertie »

Gertie, found it! This is what I wrote: "Insofar as reality is information reality is open-ended information." I might alternatively have written "Insofar as reality is concepts reality is open-ended number of concepts". I do believe that reality (all that is the case) is open-ended. I suppose that this belief implies that when this universe dies there will be something else happening so that absolute nothingness is impossible. If I were interested in theories of God I'd believe that God did not make stuff ex nihilo.
Thanks Belindi. It's just that the term ''information'' is a bit of a bugbear of mine, so when I see it used in a way that implies it's more than a codified description of something else, that it's a 'real' thing itself, I get curious. I'm not sure if there's more to ''information'' than I believe or not, but people use it all of sorts of ways I don't get.

I've no idea if reality is 'open-ended', infinite past/future is a concept I struggle with, I'm not sure our brains are really equipped to understand it, except perhaps in symbolic mathematics. The idea of 'something from nothing' seems to go against our normal intuitions of how things work causally too, but then if causation is a feature within this universe, that doesn't mean it's the way 'nothingness' works... maybe nothingness lacks the quality of stability to keep it from becoming something. Ummm nah, still can't get my head round it!
Jan Sand
Posts: 658
Joined: September 10th, 2017, 11:57 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Jan Sand »

It might be worthwhile to return to to eternal puzzle of reality. Humans and other living things and the things we create such as technology and language and knowledge have been designed by the necessities of survival to separate reality into useful aspects. It is a great simplification and we see the universe as sound and light and flavor and texture in a separable bundle that is like a banana where we peel away the skin and eat the center because the skin is of no use to us. But a banana was not created to be used by us, it was created by a certain form of life as an instrument to maintain its life systems. Humans especially are adept at pulling apart reality and discarding what they do not find useful as the mind discards what it does not find useful. And the rest is called garbage and the planet is being destroyed under mountains of what humans consider useless fragments of what had been integrated reality. There are no such things as dogs and seagulls and elephants and palm trees. Humans have defined them as separate but they are integrated parts of a huge natural structure which is planetary life and if we pull it apart completely to just use bits of it and destroy the rest the entire system collapses. We are designed to perceive reality as a collection of abstracts since there is simply to much going on in the totality to fit into the human mind, Tiny bits like the gears in a clock or the elements in a computer program can be fitted together to function in a minor way but the bits that integrate in a human or other animal mind are far more sophisticated so far to duplicate at present. We seem to be getting there but it will take a while. But there is a consistent inherent integration of totality that much of human understanding is missing, especially amongst those now in control of human civilization at present and this powerful ignorance coupled with brutal power drives looks to destroy everything rather quickly.
Belindi
Moderator
Posts: 6105
Joined: September 11th, 2016, 2:11 pm

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Belindi »

Gertie, you mentioned intuition. I just want to say that my favourite theory of reality is my choice probably largely due to my intuition. Does anybody know whether or not nature, or reality, is ex nihilo? I think I remember Stephen Hawking saying that reality is not ex nihilo; that according to laws of physics ex nihilo is impossible.

As for 'information', it puzzles me too how to define it, apart from literally signalling propositions such as 'Danger Falling Rocks' or 'London is the capital of the UK'. When I wrote "insofar as reality is information reality is open-ended information" I may as well have written "Whatever happens necessarily happened and is relative to changing times and seasons at any specific moment in time".The key is reality isn't finite.

Maybe if a computer could relate to changing times and seasons with no input from programme or programmer then it would be a conscious entity. The corollary of that would be that the less a man's mind is free of compulsion by other men the more he is conscious.

A robot used as a tool of oppression would be an extension of that oppressor's will, in the way that unfree men with unfree minds are at this present time and throughout history used by oppressors.
Jan Sand
Posts: 658
Joined: September 10th, 2017, 11:57 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Jan Sand »

The concept of freedom is so vague that it is difficult to give it any relation to function and doubtful if it can make sense. Whether human or otherwise we are all subject to multitudes of compulsions merely to remain alive.
Tamminen
Posts: 1347
Joined: April 19th, 2016, 2:53 pm

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Tamminen »

If it were possible for an AI to be conscious there should be a theoretical possibility that we are all AI's made by some conscious being, maybe the one we call God. And perhaps God is also an AI. But there must be someone who is not an AI. I think it is me, and all of us who make and think of "thinking" machines, and all the inhabitants of our living nature. And it is precisely because we are not AI's that we are conscious. This is what my intuition tells me.
User avatar
Atreyu
Posts: 1737
Joined: June 17th, 2014, 3:11 am
Favorite Philosopher: P.D. Ouspensky
Location: Orlando, FL

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Atreyu »

Agreed, Jan, but really it's quite simple. Of course a machine can perhaps mimic consciousness quite well. But a machine, by definition, cannot ever act independently, and the ability to act independently is a necessary attribute of consciousness...
Jan Sand
Posts: 658
Joined: September 10th, 2017, 11:57 am

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Jan Sand »

Independent of what? Intelligence and consciousness all formulate understandings out of perceptual input and how and what a conscious intellect does is only sensible as it reacts to sense input patterns. To be totally independent is to be chaotic and is not a good thing for survival.
Belindi
Moderator
Posts: 6105
Joined: September 11th, 2016, 2:11 pm

Re: Can a man-made computer become conscious?

Post by Belindi »

Regarding creation ex nihilo Stephen Hawing explained how creation is according to physicists ex nihilo. If I may explain as an ignorant layman, creation is ex nihilo because gravity and the other force cancel each other out. So there was a beginning. The beginning of our universe and its subsequent development necessitated sentient and tool- making life forms.

Humans made tools which can, like that Uber car which has just killed a person in California, be dangerous. At this time there is no tool which is capable of interacting with its environment as flexibly as the human brain. It has been the case for a long time that individuals however poor or obscure must not be indiscriminately killed yet the stupidity of the Uber car meant that it failed to cope with a human who was acting unexpectedly.
A human driver might have killed somebody but this would not usually be directly because of the driver's stupidity.

The human-driven car could have aids such as feedback warnings which could be useful but stupid, however final actions have to be supervised by humans. My point is that consciousness is synonymous with conscience.
Post Reply

Return to “Epistemology and Metaphysics”

2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise

Entanglement - Quantum and Otherwise
by John K Danenbarger
January 2023

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul

Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness

Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023

The Unfakeable Code®

The Unfakeable Code®
by Tony Jeton Selimi
April 2023

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts
May 2023

Killing Abel

Killing Abel
by Michael Tieman
June 2023

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead

Reconfigurement: Reconfiguring Your Life at Any Stage and Planning Ahead
by E. Alan Fleischauer
July 2023

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough

First Survivor: The Impossible Childhood Cancer Breakthrough
by Mark Unger
August 2023

Predictably Irrational

Predictably Irrational
by Dan Ariely
September 2023

Artwords

Artwords
by Beatriz M. Robles
November 2023

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope

Fireproof Happiness: Extinguishing Anxiety & Igniting Hope
by Dr. Randy Ross
December 2023

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes

Beyond the Golden Door: Seeing the American Dream Through an Immigrant's Eyes
by Ali Master
February 2024

2022 Philosophy Books of the Month

Emotional Intelligence At Work

Emotional Intelligence At Work
by Richard M Contino & Penelope J Holt
January 2022

Free Will, Do You Have It?

Free Will, Do You Have It?
by Albertus Kral
February 2022

My Enemy in Vietnam

My Enemy in Vietnam
by Billy Springer
March 2022

2X2 on the Ark

2X2 on the Ark
by Mary J Giuffra, PhD
April 2022

The Maestro Monologue

The Maestro Monologue
by Rob White
May 2022

What Makes America Great

What Makes America Great
by Bob Dowell
June 2022

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!

The Truth Is Beyond Belief!
by Jerry Durr
July 2022

Living in Color

Living in Color
by Mike Murphy
August 2022 (tentative)

The Not So Great American Novel

The Not So Great American Novel
by James E Doucette
September 2022

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches

Mary Jane Whiteley Coggeshall, Hicksite Quaker, Iowa/National Suffragette And Her Speeches
by John N. (Jake) Ferris
October 2022

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All
by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
November 2022

The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity

The Smartest Person in the Room
by Christian Espinosa
December 2022

2021 Philosophy Books of the Month

The Biblical Clock: The Untold Secrets Linking the Universe and Humanity with God's Plan

The Biblical Clock
by Daniel Friedmann
March 2021

Wilderness Cry: A Scientific and Philosophical Approach to Understanding God and the Universe

Wilderness Cry
by Dr. Hilary L Hunt M.D.
April 2021

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute: Tools To Spark Your Dream And Ignite Your Follow-Through

Fear Not, Dream Big, & Execute
by Jeff Meyer
May 2021

Surviving the Business of Healthcare: Knowledge is Power

Surviving the Business of Healthcare
by Barbara Galutia Regis M.S. PA-C
June 2021

Winning the War on Cancer: The Epic Journey Towards a Natural Cure

Winning the War on Cancer
by Sylvie Beljanski
July 2021

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream

Defining Moments of a Free Man from a Black Stream
by Dr Frank L Douglas
August 2021

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts

If Life Stinks, Get Your Head Outta Your Buts
by Mark L. Wdowiak
September 2021

The Preppers Medical Handbook

The Preppers Medical Handbook
by Dr. William W Forgey M.D.
October 2021

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress: A Practical Guide

Natural Relief for Anxiety and Stress
by Dr. Gustavo Kinrys, MD
November 2021

Dream For Peace: An Ambassador Memoir

Dream For Peace
by Dr. Ghoulem Berrah
December 2021