[LINK] AI, consciousness & perception (was Machine Learning)

[David Lochrin]

On 2016-08-02 10:11 Jim Birch wrote:

> On 28 July 2016 at 16:52, David Lochrin <dlochrin at key.net.au> wrote:

>> Until quite recently people would have commonly said it arises from your immortal soul, and animals are mere machines because they don't have one. But I'm not going there.
> >
> 
> Yes, you are.  You are still thinking in the same confused way.  There is absolutely no good empirical basis for believing that your sensations are other that brain activity - there is ample evidence for this and no evidence to the contrary. The fact that we don't understand the brain fully is a science problem.  The reason you are claiming otherwise is on the basis of some old ideas and some built-in delusions.

Right...  I'm not confused in the least, so let me begin by making it quite clear that I'm not religious (despite my upbringing as a good Catholic boy :-) and I am _absolutely not_ suggesting that perception arises from an immortal soul or any other construct of medieval or new-age religious belief.  OK?


>> I'm simply saying we have no idea how perception arises.
> 
> No, perception is highly studied and a massive amount is known about it.

Perception has been highly studied by the behaviourist school of psychology since the early 1930's, when it put down roots and led to the rather infamous time-&-motion study of industrial processes.  However perception was studied in a black-box, stimulus-and-response fashion which did not address the origin of perception at all.  More recently, functional MRI has given us insights into which areas of the brain are involved or, to be accurate, which areas have increased blood-flow, but that doesn't really help the question at issue here either.


> Advanced consciousness is a higher level process of the brain that we only understand in a rudimentary way, but that does not mean it is totally unintelligible or that it belongs to a different weird category.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that it does.

> You brain does a lot of processing that "you" [sic] that is obscured from conscious interference [...]

Quite so.


>> The thought experiment I described invites us to build a machine (presumably a neural network) which is the logical analogue of the brain so there can be no doubt as to the applicable rules, they're the rules of physics.  Now how would that device acquire (a) consciousness and (b) conscious perceptions, given they have no direct physical existence per se?
>>
> 
> Why not make the same claim about other people?  After all, they are just physical stuff - wet logic circuits - they couldn't possibly have conscious sensation.  I mean, how could it work?

A "thought experiment" is _not_ an excercise in advocacy.  The purpose of a thought experiment is to set up a mental model with familiar, well understood, behaviour which appears to model some problem in the hope that it will lead to insights.

In this case we propose to construct an analogue of the brain (a neural network) using familiar electronic components, and of course ignoring actual feasibility. Then what do you suppose would happen?  There would certainly be lots of electrical activity, the network would go from one state to another, but would it become conscious?  If so, how?  You tell me...  And no appeal to "magic happens here" is allowed, we're looking for an explanation.

David L.