Will machines become conscious someday?

So can Google´s computers. That (even with intelligent adaptive behavior) do not demonstrate the existence of "consciousness" which is much more than mere awareness and beneficial adaptive response.* As your Wiki link states: "subjectivity, awareness, sentience, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood" are required for being conscious (and impossible to know if they exist in any organism other than yourself).

* For example the sunflower plant has both awareness (of where the sun is) and adaptive beneficial response (turns to make flower intercept max possible sunlight) but falls far short of meeting Wiki´s requirements for being conscious.

I try to answer direct questions, so I answer: Aware and adaptive, but much slower than the sunflower plant.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I try to keep it simple.

Aware and adaptive is conscious in my book. It may not be self-aware and I am not saying that the mold thinks abstractly. But where is that line?
IMO, man is not the only self-aware animal. We may not be able to experience their experience but there are remarkable examples of motivated and selfless behavior. To me that is sentience.

Actually it has been argued that the fundamental substructure of the universe is sentient, i.e. God. How can we arrive at that conclusion if we are unable to experience the universe. Oh wait, according to theists we are able to experience the sentience of God.

Which is it?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Too simple. As you are claiming my furnace thermostat system is conscious. I.e. it is aware of what room temperature I want and adaptive to supply it.

Do you also think the sunflower plant (See post 141´s * footnote telling how sunflower is aware and adaptive.) is conscious too?

The best part and only valid part of your post is your question, which I would like YOU to answer:

BTW I have piece of glass from old broken sunglasses that is aware of sunlight intensity upon it and adaptively turns darker when sunlight is strong. - It is conscious too according to your silly definition. Are it, the sunflower & my furnace system all on the "conscious side" of the line? If so, what is an example of something not conscious? Most things I can think of are aware of high temperatures and adapt to them by melting or boiling or oxidizing.

E.g. water senses temperatures >100C and adapts by becoming a vapor - avoids more stove heating. Again: Where do you draw a well defined line?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Absolutely.

I would not draw the line at a sentient computer.

 

OK, but not responsive to my two part question

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

, which was: (1) Where do you draw the line? & (2) Give example of something not conscious.

For part (2) you may be tempted to say: "a non-sentient computer" but I then ask how do you tell which computer is sentient?

 

a) Non-reactive materials (if there are any) would lack awareness and sentience of any kind. But even a rock knows it is a rock, else it would fly apart and be a collection of atoms and molecules. But a rock knows it is a rock and proud of it!

b) When the computer tells you it is sentient.

IMO, you are lending entirely too much weight to the notion of sentience. I am not saying there is no difference between human sentience and non-human sentience.
But that does not seem to stop theists does it? If theist can claim a existing non-human sentience I can claim the same for every existing interactive thing.

 

Any computer with display (or voice generation) can claim to be sentient, but as you think rocks are too, I guess the question is moot.
We just have too great a difference about what is sentient or conscious to continue discussion.

 

There you go again. A computer with a display cannot claim sentience unless it has the experience of sentience.

You are right, but I am not comparing computer sentience to human sentience. I am comparing computer sentience to the concept of a cosmic sentience.

 

Now you have really gone off the deep end. Believe me, computers can tell lies. Hell, I can even help one say: 1 + 1 = 3.

 

the display is for human convenience, it serves no other purpose than to "display" the contents of the video buffer.
it would be easier and faster to get the data through a com port except humans can't understand it or they are too slow at decoding it.
it's not as easy as you might think to get the letter "A" from a CPU so a human can see it.

the thing about computers is that they can be programmed to emulate almost ANY reality, realized or imagined.

 

Yes you, can make the computer do that. But is that any different than help another human say God is sentient? The point is the computer cannot do this by itself unless and until it is self-aware.

 

But computers need numbers to do it, in a real world numbers do not exist, and this is why this universe is not some computer simulation, it may be some kind of simulation but it is not computer simulation. plus the last thing I read about artificial intelligence is that scientists basically gave up from this and admitted that human intelligence is much tougher to understand than previously thought, and focused on self-replicating robots.

 

But in the real world relative numbers do exists and is one of the reasons why we can recognize constants (mathematical certainties (+-).
IMO the universe very much functions in an (abstract) mathematical way and of course this is what has given rise to an assumed sentience (God).
But here is where the wholeness answers to the term Natural Emergent Adaptive Intelligence. The ultimate Self Causal Geometry.

 

Again where do numbers exist, can you actually program the universe using the real world numbers (not computer numbers)? You can't because numbers do not exist in a real world, from where did you get this, we invented numbers, not the nature. This hypothesis that you mentioned is based on abstract numbers, and universe is physical not abstract.

In order to prove the universe is computer simulation you would have to have physical numbers not abstract numbers like in the computer.
In the computer numbers are not physical but abstract.
As long as numbers are abstract, you cannot simulate physical universe, only abstract (computer) universe.
In a real world, words like numbers, distance, space and etc. do not actually exist, we created all of them.

 

I am not talking about programming anything. There is no programmer. But the physical universe functions in accordance with strict formulas. We have recognized these formulas and functions and quantified (codified) them so that we can follow the natural function. The universe does not need numbers, we do.

In the universe numbers are not physical but abstract. There is no fundamental difference in the mathematical laws that govern the universe or a computer.

In the real world spoken words are nothing but fleeting wavelike disturbances of air molecues. All these things you cite are measurements that help us identify the mathematical nature of Universal functions. With the exception of Uncertainty, we might well live in a rigidly deterministic mathematical construct. Knowing the formulas and equations allows us to more or less predict the future and exercise a small measure of free will in our fledgeling SUB-programming efforts.

 

You're absolutely right there is no any kind of programmer, and the universe does not need numbers to exist, numbers do not exist.
Universe does not function in accordance with strict formulas, formulas work in accordance with the universe, because we're lucky that mathematics has helped us, there is no math and equations, and no numbers in the universe there are only laws that at least this visible part of the universe follows. Math is simply abstract tool that enables us to define those and we're very lucky that math actually works.

True, numbers are completely abstract and the universe is completely physical, only the way how we confirmed those physical laws of the universe is abstract (mathematical equations).

Agreed, you're correct here, however we're still limited by our knowledge of the universe so we cannot know what exactly is true and what is wrong and are our predictions of the universe correct or wrong, because after all our telescopes also have observational limits, our super-computer models of the universe and everything inside the universe are also very, very limited, so what is true and what isn't true and how much is true are still open questions.
In order to fully study the entire universe you should be able to observe entire universe and not be limited like we are with telescopes' observation abilities, we would need to have ability to observe entire universe with a microscope, just like we do this with atoms.
Cheers.

 

I maintain that all modern computing systems are conscious. It's a matter of degree. How much can you be conscious of?

 

You are confusing "conscious" with "awareness." One of the main differences is that creature that is conscious has feelings. Nader discussed this well in classic paper called "What is it like to be a bat?" It is like something to have feelings that no machine has even if 1000 times more aware of their enviroment than any human is. (For example, machines knows all the information in the 1000s of radio, TV & micro wave signals passing undetected thru your body.)

Another example: A perfect robot that behaves exactly like a human would does not really feel pain - if it touches hot stove, it quickly withdraws hand, screams, then curses, etc. but never actually felt any pain as it is just complex set of transducer sensors, switches (probably transistors) and motors.

BTW, answer to Nadar´s question is "We will never know as we are humans, not bats", so can only speculate what a bat feels when his sonar wave returns, and is processed by his tiny brain, to learn that small part of the reflection probably came from a very tasty bug flying in a swarm of different bugs. That tiny brain can in real time Dopper process signals, compenstaing for both its own and the bugs motion even though the chirps emitted earlier had different frequency and slew rates (must have been remembered and now recalled) and do this so well that it knows what type of bug is part of a large swam, where it is if less than 25 feet away, what is its direction of travel and how fast so bat can efficiently fly to an intercept point, not directly towards the tasty bug.

It takes a large room full of computers and hour or so to do what that tiny brain can do in real time if optimizing the current chirp frequency and slew rate for best detection and discrimination on a particular bug in a swam is included in the task. - That was case 20 years ago. Perhaps now one big computer can do the analsis in two minutes - but still much too slow to catch the tasty bug.

 

There are many things biological brains can do faster then computers, but computers have been catching up, weak AI has outdone humans in many task most resent and most famously The Jeopordy challange. where a computer answered cryptic trivia questions faster and with greater accuracy then the worlds best humans. Now yes that computer took up a whole wall and probably several kilowatts, but there are some tasks even a small pocket calculated can do faster and with greater accuracy in a small size package and less power usage then a human brain. This leads to the conclusion that Turing/Von Neumann digital computers are really REALLY good at "crunching numbers" but not so great at heuristic thinking. The solution would be to build a machine that not a Turing digital computer, one based off biology for example with analog circuits, neurons, synapses and spiking coding, etc, we KNOW that works to produced intelligence and consciousness. Of coursed if we did have a machine that replicated in artificial hardware the basic operations of the our brains yet could not get it to think as well as a human, we would have to conclude there some vital mechanism of the brain's biology that eludes us. Of coursed when to throw up our hands and say it must be a soul will all depend on how hard we work at it, clearly we are still many years, decades away at least from being able to answer that question.

 

It may be partly due to the complexity of human brain, which is not likely to be matched in silicon, especially 2D layout on substrates.

I forget the better comparisions of how complex human brain is but think one is that there are many more synaptic connections than the largest telescope can see stars! Building that on a 2D substrate with the best current smallest scale nano transistor technology probably would require more than the Earth´s total surface! - just my guess. You can check it. Thus I think that if a man wants to make such a computer, he should find a good looking woman an seduce her - that may be the only way for at least 100 years.