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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting article but I feel a bit bait-and-switched by the title; this is a definition of consciousness so weak that it's not really very interesting. I don't think I accept a definition of consciousness that appears to boil down to "shows similar perceptual illusions as the human perceptual system".

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I think you can be pretty sure all such titles are bait-and-switch. As soon as one isn't, I'm sure we will have noticed the Singularity in some other way before seeing articles describing it.

say it will post an article about itself. Or a bunch of trolling comments. Lets hope for the former.

AI doesn't imply Singularity. Self-improving AI implies Singularity. It's totally possible to have e.g. a neuromorphic AI of roughly human intelligence that doesn't cause an intelligence explosion.

Technically, AI used as a tool by humans to develop better AI may not be considered self-improving AI, but would have possibly the same effect, would it not? Self-improving AI might be an implied step after AI as tool, though.

I don't see how. The only thing that prevents human intelligence explosion is limited intake rate of data (and possibly hardware, of which an AI's would presumably be more reliable).

A neuromorphic AI could be constructed without understanding how the brain actually works. You could run that faster, but even with a billion years subjective you still might not be able to come up with ways to improve your own mind if you aren't smart enough in the first place. Of course, the intelligence threshold for self-improvement is lower if your mind is simpler...but the clearest (and fastest?) route to something you could reasonably call AGI may be dumbly reimplementing a human brain.

The idea of parallel unconscious processes selectively passing important info to a "broadcast" network of neurons was new to me, and if that's the way consciousness works in the brain I think that's absolutely fascinating.

That the first half of the article never talks about a bot actually was a pleasant surprise. The human brain is way more interesting than a bot.

The phrasing is new to me too. But it seemed to boil down to a circuitous way of saying "subconscious filter".

Something I'd imagine many married couples are all-too-familiar with.

Why not something more easily understood by everyone:

"You are now aware that you are breathing".

I think the implementation here is quite interesting; pigeonholing it into the idea of a "filter" is probably missing the point.

That's kinda like the old AI canard: once it's obvious how it works, it's no longer considered AI.

If you believe in the physicalism of the human brain and mind, then any definition of consciousness boils down to "a bunch of chemo-electrical impulses."

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