Is AI conscious?

@mike69 said
I just wanted to understand your comment and what determines having consciousness and what determines not having any in your eyes. I also recently watched a man that’s supposed to be the smartest person in the world say the wooden table next to him had consciousness and many biblical explanations that were just his minds way of understanding the different subjects to give meaning, opinion.

I do find it hard to fathom that a table could have consciousness and I have posted previously that I don't think AI will ever have consciousness; simply the ability to make more and more calculations, (read decisions), based on the data available.

A previous poster mentioned the chemical component of the brain; whether that gives us human the 'gut' feelings or 'instinct' that we feel I do not know.

What really got me thinking was the comment about the table; at what point does something 'have' consciousness?

For example; let us just say for this exercise that a table cannot have consciousness; does a prawn/shrimp have consciousness? does a fish have consciousness?.

At what point does a living thing have conciousness.

Fascinating if you think about it; thanks for the post Mike.

@moonbus said
The dystopian scenario was formulated by Huxley in Brave New World, where humans are cultured, like hot-house tomatoes, and drugged to keep them docile and 'happy'. The AI version of Brave New World envisions infants implanted with chips wh/ are remote controlled by data centers; the data centers would continuously monitor each 'subject's' subjective sense of w ...[text shortened]... itched off.'

Musk is already experimenting with chips implanted in monkey's brains. Be concerned.

The Matrix.

@Suzianne said
The Matrix.

Human Consciousness

• The Simulated Mind: Humans inside the Matrix possess real biological consciousness, even though their physical bodies are comatose in pods and their perceived reality is fed to them as electrical impulses.

• The Need for Agency: The machines discovered that human consciousness requires psychological tension and a sense of free will to stay engaged; purely utopian simulations were rejected by human minds.

• Mind Over Matter: Awakened humans can manipulate the physics of the simulated world (bending spoons, stopping bullets, or flying) because the Matrix is a mental projection. Neo even extends this influence into the "real world" (Zion) by sensing and shutting down Sentinels.

Scary stuff


A machine will only be able to make a decision on millions of inputs as does the human brain; however, a machine (AI) will never be able to make a 'humane' decision (it does not possess "gut instinct nor compassion nor feelings"😉

@mike69 said
I just wanted to understand your comment and what determines having consciousness and what determines not having any in your eyes. I also recently watched a man that’s supposed to be the smartest person in the world say the wooden table next to him had consciousness and many biblical explanations that were just his minds way of understanding the different subjects to give meaning, opinion.

I expect to see complex electric reactions occurring like what happens in our nervous system. Computers already work on electricity. I don't see any reason why it couldn't happen in computers.

@Martin said
I do find it hard to fathom that a table could have consciousness and I have posted previously that I don't think AI will ever have consciousness; simply the ability to make more and more calculations, (read decisions), based on the data available.

A previous poster mentioned the chemical component of the brain; whether that gives us human the 'gut' feelings or 'instinct' t ...[text shortened]... es a living thing have conciousness.

Fascinating if you think about it; thanks for the post Mike.

It’s such a big subject when even trying to rationalize it completely to come up with one answer. Just the word consciousness has more than one direction of thought, individual, shared/connected, mutually accepted and how much, individual ability to understand…. I agree about the ai, maybe in the future some kind of integration with us giving the ability to enhance ourselves, senses, understand more and grow.

As far as a chemical in the brain being released I think that would be a small chance in my opinion. I feel it is connected to our senses with small details we are picking up on not realizing it. An example we have all experienced to some level I had was a few years back. I was walking into the edge of my pasture to water the goats and mini horses. I had forgotten to do it in the day and it was pitch black around midnight. All of a sudden my whole body instantly started tingling like electricity and I completely stopped for around 20 to 30 seconds of silence and around 10 yards in front of me something pretty large jumped up and ran away through the tall grass and over the fence. At that point I kicked off my flip flops and backed up all the way to my house😂. I don’t see how a chemical can do that.

I know people call animals consciousness something different I can’t remember. I feel it’s the same to a point just limited to survival.

Have a good night.

@AThousandYoung said
I expect to see complex electric reactions occurring like what happens in our nervous system. Computers already work on electricity. I don't see any reason why it couldn't happen in computers.

I agree; but robots / AI will never have the 'gut' instinct or conciousness to have a belief to 'do the right thing' or 'take a punt on intuition" it will be all driven by the old original code; on / off, as in DOSS.

Of course todays computers can make billions of more on/off calculations but it all comes back to one thing; no mechanism can ever have conciousness.

As computing power evolves the basic principle of on / off simply develops further; no computer / machine can ever have conciosness.

@moonbus said
kmax nailed it: humans did not evolve as individuals. We evolved in groups. But just putting a group of computers together in a room doesn't lead to consciousness, because there is no evolutionary pressure for computers to cooperate. There was, for humans: that's how we prevailed over large-toothed predators and other hominids. Language is the key to cooperation; without lang ...[text shortened]... very generation had to learn from scratch what snakes and plants are poisonous, we wouldn't be here.

This is a consciousness version of putting an infinite number of monkeys in a room all tapping away at typewriters could you by chance end up with Shakespearian prose?

All I know is I was a fan of Asimov back in the early 70s and after The Caves of Steel, and the Foundation Trilogy it seemed with the positronic laws of Robotics in place plus Foundations Edge and the notions of Gaia that anything was possible.

It’s that old story that if you time travelled back to the 15th century, and showed people a video that you shot on your iPhone they would perceive something beyond magic and probably try you for witchcraft.

While AI may never display human consciousness, they may be able to develop a form of instinct beyond mere probabilistic sequence. Give it another 300 years!

@kmax87 said
This is a consciousness version of putting an infinite number of monkeys in a room all tapping away at typewriters could you by chance end up with Shakespearian prose?

Yes, it is theoretically possible, but that would not be conclusive evidence that the monkeys were conscious. Randomly shuffling Scrabble letters for 14 billion years must also, eventually, produce a complete Scrabble board which makes sense.

This is the point I have long since given up trying to argue w/ @KellyJay about how life got started: there are only about 100 naturally occurring chemical elements in the universe, and only 20 of those constitute what we call "life." Given 14 billion years, the 'royal flush' of chemistry is bound to happen, somewhere, in all the billions and billions and billions of galaxies. It happened here.

@AThousandYoung said
Nobody has come to the conclusion that biology is needed for consciousness don't be ridiculous

Not sure if you're joking.

Consciousness is a fundamentally biological mechanism. The cognitive process is cellular and evolved over billions of years. If you develop machines that replicate the mechanisms fully, then you need to develop that with biological tools. If you're not using biological tools to "create" a type of consciousness mimic, then your creation is not conscious. The information profile is completely different.

@wildgrass said
Not sure if you're joking.

Consciousness is a fundamentally biological mechanism. The cognitive process is cellular and evolved over billions of years. If you develop machines that replicate the mechanisms fully, then you need to develop that with biological tools. If you're not using biological tools to "create" a type of consciousness mimic, then your creation is not conscious. The information profile is completely different.

I'm not joking. I have no idea where you got this idea from. You have just decided that sentient robots cannot exist because...why?

You sound like KellyJay.

@AThousandYoung said
I'm not joking. I have no idea where you got this idea from. You have just decided that sentient robots cannot exist because...why?

You sound like KellyJay.

🙄

@AThousandYoung said
I'm not joking. I have no idea where you got this idea from. You have just decided that sentient robots cannot exist because...why?

You sound like KellyJay.

I think you have it backwards. Pinocchio can never be a real boy. It's religion or magical that such things are possible.

Its like if you were to look at one of those cell phone towers that they dressed up to look like a pine tree so it wouldn't ruin the landscape and you think that someday it will be a real tree? Seems insane.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. But speciation is also inherently biology. They have co-opted words like sentience, consciousness, feelings, sacrifice, thought, which are all terms that apply specifically to living things that have nervous systems.

@wildgrass said
I think you have it backwards. Pinocchio can never be a real boy. It's religion or magical that such things are possible.

Its like if you were to look at one of those cell phone towers that they dressed up to look like a pine tree so it wouldn't ruin the landscape and you think that someday it will be a real tree? Seems insane.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthies ...[text shortened]... ce, thought, which are all terms that apply specifically to living things that have nervous systems.

No, it's magic or religion to think there's "something" (a soul) about biology that is required for sentience.

EDIT Your argument is analogous to saying biology is required for powered flight because we'd only observed it in living organisms before we invented planes.

@AThousandYoung said
No, it's magic or religion to think there's "something" (a soul) about biology that is required for sentience.

Like you're going to create sentience. Doesn't that seem god-like? when Johnny 5 got struck by lightning or something? You speak of fairy tales.

There's no soul needed for consciousness, biology is just a mix of chemistry and electricity. The mechanisms are fundamentally different from how a computer might access, interpret and store information. It is folly to think the two completely unique processes could lead to the same feelings, like the tech bros think they're Frankenstein or God.

The tech bros want anthropomorphic computers because it then gives a justification for us to turn our lives over to them.

@wildgrass said
Like you're going to create sentience. Doesn't that seem god-like? when Johnny 5 got struck by lightning or something? You speak of fairy tales.

There's no soul needed for consciousness, biology is just a mix of chemistry and electricity. The mechanisms are fundamentally different from how a computer might access, interpret and store information. It is folly to think the ...[text shortened]... thropomorphic computers because it then gives a justification for us to turn our lives over to them.

As Alan Turing pointed out in the movie clip above just because a machine doesn’t have the same thoughts and feelings we do does that mean it didn’t have thoughts or feelings?

Let’s consider the Ship of Theseus. A person can have mechanical parts replacing their organs and not lose sentience. At what point do they lose sentience?

How about a computer replacing the brain? That would have access to chemicals and biology.