If a computer was powerful enough would it generate consciousness?
- Thread starter NoEgo
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butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Nope.
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
maybe. what's consciousness?
jesus christ man....someone needs a woman
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
NoEgo said:
If i knew the answer to that do you think i would tell you?
Has it? No. Stop worrying then.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Don't get me wrong, i'd like to see robots and that take over but just where is the jump going to come from - making the engine more powerful doesn't make it go into time travel...it just makes it more powerful
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Didn't consciousness come from low level, not that advanced tech by definition anyway?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Where's your spark? Where is consciousness? Has the human brain been phscially replicated -and if so, what was the answer?
You don't need a spark, or need to know where/what consciousness is. If you exactly replicate a human brain using bits of wire and solder then it will work in exactly the same as a human brain. It's the same reasoning as if I heat water under the same conditions but at different time, what temp. will it boil at?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Has the human brain been phscially replicated -and if so, what was the answer?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
And there's a massive laughably bald assumption in claimnig
"If you exactly replicate a human brain using bits of wire and solder then it will work in exactly the same as a human brain."
Do it then.
"If you exactly replicate a human brain using bits of wire and solder then it will work in exactly the same as a human brain."
Do it then.
I have never boiled water in my bedroom. But I'm going to make the bold assumption that it will boil at 100 deg. C. Do you think this is a rash assumption?
My point about brains is that there is nothing magical about them, and if a human brain were replicated exactly I think it would be conscious.
A human brain has never been replicated, mainly because it is the most complex thing ever known in the universe (to us). But if I had enough time, solder, and wire I could replicate it (like several thousand years). Is there any fundamental reason why it can't be replicated like this? I don't think there is any fundamental reason why a human brain couldn't be replicated given enough time. Declares interests: I work in neuroscience.
My point about brains is that there is nothing magical about them, and if a human brain were replicated exactly I think it would be conscious.
A human brain has never been replicated, mainly because it is the most complex thing ever known in the universe (to us). But if I had enough time, solder, and wire I could replicate it (like several thousand years). Is there any fundamental reason why it can't be replicated like this? I don't think there is any fundamental reason why a human brain couldn't be replicated given enough time. Declares interests: I work in neuroscience.
Jonti
what the dormouse said
No, there's no reason to think so.axon said:
If one could replicate every molecule of gas in a vessel using a computer*, the computer model would not be real gas. The pretend gas in the computer would not actually be hot, it would have no heat energy.
If it did, that would violate the conservation of mass/energy.
* meaning the kind of machine I'm typing this on, just scaled up in computing power.
torres said:
That's not necessarily the issue though (this forum is more about theory than practice after all)
Surely the pertinent question is "is the human brain mechanistic or something else?"?
Personally I'd tend to think that it is and that what we call consciousness is a property that is emergent of enormous complexity considerably beyond our current technology. However, it could be that there are problems realted to mathemtical theory about systems being modelled (or understood) within those systems i.e. whether it is within the capacity of the human brain to fully understand the human brain.
I don't know enough about the current state of neuro-science, cognitive theory or philosophy of the mind to comment much further.
untethered
For industry & decency
I'm pretty sceptical about machine consciousness, but if you're interested, Raymond Kurzweil is a big proponent of it:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1
http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1
'Enough' power is a necessary but insufficient criterion.
Is the human brain a Universal Turing machine? Its difficult to conclude that its not. Its difficult to believe that it is. It worries me greatly that I can't decide.
What's consciousness anyway?
Maybe its the subconscious where the real puzzle lies? This last doesn't really help, but its a question I've never seen asked. If we look at 'creativity' (which is one of those things that we like to think we have and that machines do not have) then it is really arriving at a conclusion or an action without the sensation of having done anything. The process seems mysterious because we are not conscious of it, but is it really mysterious? Is consciousness a function of the subconscious?
Is the human brain a Universal Turing machine? Its difficult to conclude that its not. Its difficult to believe that it is. It worries me greatly that I can't decide.
What's consciousness anyway?
Maybe its the subconscious where the real puzzle lies? This last doesn't really help, but its a question I've never seen asked. If we look at 'creativity' (which is one of those things that we like to think we have and that machines do not have) then it is really arriving at a conclusion or an action without the sensation of having done anything. The process seems mysterious because we are not conscious of it, but is it really mysterious? Is consciousness a function of the subconscious?
untethered
For industry & decency
If u75 gets enough posters, will it acquire its own consciousness?
What would it do if you gave it a body?
What would it do if you gave it a body?
stdPikachu
Plughole in bathtub curve
NoEgo said:
If you train a dog to perform a heart bypass operation, is the dog then a doctor?
A computers' ability to fetishistically multiply powers of two is a bit of a far stretch from "I think, therefore I am". Making this magical multiplying machine multiply things fifty orders of magnitude faster does not somehow give it the ability to become aware of itself.
Yes, it's theoretically possible to create software programmed to mimic human responses, by taking every likely outcome into consideration - Deep Blue, the machine that beat Kasparov, worked in this fashion; it was programmed with millions of different chess games, and just calculated the statistically best move from the current position of the pieces.
However, creating a machine or sofware capable of creating it's own reponses (you might want to call them "ideas") for things it wasn't initially programmed for (i.e. programming the computer to be able to reprogram itself and hence alter the way it operates, much like the neural pathways in our brains) is currently beyond our abilities.
axon said:
If the brain was that magically simple, we'd have done alot of it already, and we'd probably have a computer that was functionally identical to the brain. The fact that people have been investigating this issue pretty much since medical science and, later, computers came about gives some indication of just how complex the brain is and how little we know about how it works. Heck, some recent research suggests that the brain may even work on quantum levels, meaning that even if we could replicate the brain in an atom-for-atom fashion, it still wouldn't work. It might even work on levels where we haven't even discovered the field of science needed to observe it. Fact of the matter is that understanding the brain is quite likely decades away, if not centuries.
P.S. watch Blade Runner if you haven't already.
untethered
For industry & decency
At what point does an accurate simulation start to be effectively the same thing as it's imitating?
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck... (Rubyists will like that one.)
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck... (Rubyists will like that one.)
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