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Comment by PhearTheCeal | Hacker News Reader

>The brain is a wet computer.

>Consciousness is what thinking feels like.

Do you think computers are conscious?

Sufficiently smart ones, certainly. I've seen no evidence that we've built one yet, but we will eventually, and when we do, I'd ascribe exactly as much consciousness to a computer as I do to a human.

I don't believe "p zombies" exist --- or, rather, I believe we're all p zombies.

I agree insofar as I think we will eventually be able to build a consciousness machine or at the very least I see no fundamental barrier to it. But that explains not at all why we have a subjective experience. You probably don't think a huge pile of memory chips has any subjective experience in the general case, experiencing what it is like to be a pile of memory chips.

Nonetheless you and I believe if we just wire the memory chips together in the right way and load some specific bit patterns into them, then the pile of memory chips will suddenly go »Holly shit, I am consciousness being inside of an enormous universe!« But the pile of memory chips will not just say this, no it will be truly aware of it.

What test could we perform to determine whether a computer is actually conscious, or just imitating consciousness?

All humans have very similar biology, so it's reasonable to assume that other humans are conscious. But even there we don't have any hard proof.

So you believe in things without evidence that they exist? That's very scientific of you.

If I believe that aliens exist somewhere in the universe, is that unscientific?

Yes belief in aliens is unscientific. There's nothing wrong with such a belief but no matter how you dress it up with Drake Equation calculations it's equivalent to a religious belief taken on faith.

So the vast majority of physicists which believed that the Higgs would be found were also acting like on a religious belief taken on faith.

That's not how it works. Most physicists didn't literally "believe" in the Higgs boson. Instead they expected it to be found based on the Standard Model theory of particle physics. That theory has been extensively validated over decades by thousands of physicists performing thousands of experiments. When a theory has been extensively validated then it has some predictive power.

On the other hand there is no theory about alien life, only a bunch of speculative hypotheses.

Of course.

p-zombie is a fantastic insult for people you disagree with, though

Computers don't think; they use math at the basis of their logic, unless they have bugs the outcome always should be the same; meanwhile human brain uses chemistry and biological tissue to process.

I agree with what OP says, but I can't help that majority of consciousness is based in fear. Put it other way: I don't believe consciousness can exist without fear [of being destructed] ever present. And that's the challenge of programming machine with built-in fear: if I fall, then I may die. I'm scared of dying, so how can I do my best not to fall?

> Computers don't think; they use math at the basis of their logic, unless they have bugs the outcome always should be the same;

Computers are quite capable of executing stochastic algorithms. And neurons can be considered as analog logic units too.

> meanwhile human brain uses chemistry and biological tissue to process.

Yes, and... ?

What about if you disable the machines video cameras for a while, as a punishment? Do you think it could learn to fear that?

You and I can understand death without actually having experienced it. Surely a machine could too.

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