Comment by mrshadowgoose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrshadowgoose | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not commenting on the claims of the article, just the points in your comment.

I think it's pretty clear that an entire human brain is not required for the operation of consciousness. Certain people have lost massive portions of their brain and still maintained regular consciousness functioning. On top of that, the typical human brain only consumes about 20 watts of power to do its thing. So that's just a safe upper bound for the power required.

Over the last decade we've seen the rise of ML systems that have replicated or surpassed capabilities long thought to be the exclusive domain of the human brain. Think facial recognition, AlphaGo or the very recent DALL-E 2.

This had led me to the personal belief that we (in aggregate) likely already have the computing power to achieve not only artificial consciousness, but also AGI and beyond. We simply haven't figured out the correct model connectivity and parameters.

I think that you need more than just computing power, you need high levels of interconnection with low latency.

So while we undoubtedly have sufficient aggregate computing power, I don't think it is structured in a way that would allow it to emulate human cognition and problem sovling, not just pattern recognition.

That said, consciousness is an incredibly heterogeneously defined term but can probably be pretty widely applied (many people confuse consciousness with sentience or sapience.)

That's a very good point - a key feature of the brain is that it's a highly dynamical system with a huge number of variables.

Neurons are all giving each-other feedback in real time, which leads to emergent behavior. To really reproduce this, you would probably need a very different hardware paradigm.

Quantum algorithms analogous to convolutional neural networks are O(log N) instead of O(N), so I'd wager we really do need something like that, or at least some other sort of analog hardware, given how complicated it is to do calculations on a QC.

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