Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

Two thoughts:

1) without definition of 'AI' or 'conscious', all answers are correct. They do go into a bit of depth on what 'conscious' means, but not what 'AI' means.

2) there are a lot of related words here: conscious, self-aware, sentient, sapient, 'narrow AI', etc.

> Let's imagine that we simulate the brain in all biological details on a supercomputer. Will that supercomputer be conscious?

They say no, but fail to explore the more interesting corollary that the supercomputer won't be conscious but the program is, by their definition. It's just one level of abstraction up from Matter -> Brain -> Mind to Matter -> Computer -> Simulated Brain -> Mind.

I do find this definition of consciousness interesting from an ethical perspective, given their final thought experiments. It reminds me of the Presger, an alien race from the Ancillary Justice trilogy. They have the concept of 'Significant' species that have rights and if you aren't, you're basically inanimate matter or bugs or whathaveyou.

Well said. Let me plug Wittgenstein here: “For a large class of cases–though not for all–in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1]:

“Knowing the meaning of a word can involve knowing many things: to what objects the word refers (if any), whether it is slang or not, what part of speech it is, whether it carries overtones, and if so what kind they are, and so on. To know all this, or to know enough to get by, is to know the use. And generally knowing the use means knowing the meaning. Philosophical questions about consciousness, for example, then, should be responded to by looking at the various uses we make of the word “consciousness.” Scientific investigations into the brain are not directly relevant to this inquiry (although they might be indirectly relevant if scientific discoveries led us to change our use of such words). The meaning of any word is a matter of what we do with our language, not something hidden inside anyone’s mind or brain. This is not an attack on neuroscience. It is merely distinguishing philosophy (which is properly concerned with linguistic or conceptual analysis) from science (which is concerned with discovering facts).”

[1] https://www.iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5

Thank you for posting this. I'm pained every time I hear a discussion of consciousness that does not consider layers of abstraction.

Thought provoking stuff! How can someone talk about conciousness existing then, without presupposing dualism?

On the contrary, they are explicitly saying that consciousness is a function of the substrate, making them indivisible. One is a property of the other, by their reckoning.

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