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Comment by starchild_3001 | Hacker News Reader

What's the big deal with consciousness? Isn't it an obvious trait of any human like, animal like, robot like semi-intelligent being? I'd expect it to emerge automatically, once correct base instincts & abilities are programmed.

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The big deal is that there's no observable difference between the world where your robot is conscious of itself and has subjective experience of its surroundings, and between the world where your robot merely behaves as such, speaks to you trying to convince you that it indeed has subjective experience, but in fact it has none, its experiences are just a movie screened in an empty cinema where nobody is watching.

This unobservable difference goes the most basic axiom of science -- if there's no observable difference, then there's no difference. Yet, somehow I have subjective experience. You might also have it, though there's currently no way you can convince me that you do.

Why do you think those worlds are different in a meaningful sense? You can distinguish them in your imagination only. If you were the God, I would believe you.

The meaningful sense is that I have subjective experience, yet I can imagine a world where there's no subjective experience of being me -- it is exactly the world _you_ are living in.

Why is the philosophical zombie a useful thought experiment? What reason is there to believe such a thing could actually exist in our universe, any more than 2+2 could ever equal 5?

To me, it seems immensely unlikely.

Here's my obvious explanation of consciousness: You have an ego/intelligent being inside of you. Call that a Turing machine that observes your sensory world, takes notes, makes deductions, takes action (consciously---excuse the word). Your conscious self is the Turing machine (or intelligent person) that talks to yourself. So, consciousness is yourself, consciousness is your ego, consciousness is the Turing machine that does the thinking and self talking. It's the higher level of intelligence, the observed part of intelligence (i.e. your memory and your notes about the world) vs your neural network's weights or lower layer's representations (which are unobservable). So consciousness is the last layer of neural net. It's the attention mechanism. It's your explicit memory. It's you.

If consciousness is the machine itself (the most higher level representation), once you build an AGI with this self-talk, self-decide, self-observe mechanism, it'll be there by design.

Voila, there's nothing to explain here :) Move on?

(Move on as in let's engineer the machine itself, rather than discuss the philosophy of it).

Well that is like saying gravity is an emergent property of space-time. Perhaps it is, but that doesn't finish explaining what it is or why it is an emergent property.

Very well posed

What's the big deal with programming? Isn't it an obvious trait sure to emerge after tapping those square boxes on the computer board enough times?

Actually it is. The key part is "enough times".

Yet, it exists and can be explained

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