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Comment by rabbits77 | Hacker News Reader

If you believe that current AI implementations are capable of this sort of “everything we can do but differently” then I would be curious as to why nobody has made any progress whatsoever in the understanding of consciousness?

Are we to believe that humans are now able to replicate many of their own conscious abilities but with no real understanding of the mechanisms? A grid search of TensorFlow functions mashed together in different combinations could have done the same thing?

I am starting to feel like I am playing a Gary Marcus role here in this thread, against a mob of overly optimistic connectionists. (that may be too generous, I imagine many in this thread have no implementation experience with AI, just a Reader’s Digest level of understanding)

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> If you believe that current AI implementations are capable of this sort of “everything we can do but differently”

Surely nobody believes that.

> progress whatsoever in the understanding of consciousness

How would we know if we’d made this progress? How do you know if any other person other than yourself is conscious? (I think this is called the “zombie problem”.)

How do I know I am conscious and my perception of my own consciousness isn’t an illusion itself?

We currently believe consciousness is an emerging phenomenon that happens to any sufficiently complex brain that posses the ability to gather and remember knowledge about itself and the organism that holds it.

I’m sure our first contact with alien intelligence will be extremely puzzling at first, then profoundly horrifying, and, finally, deeply enlightening.

> How do I know I am conscious and my perception of my own consciousness isn’t an illusion itself?

I can’t figure out what the difference would be between this “illusion” and “real” consciousness. Somewhere Sam Harris says something to the effect that our consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely sure is real, almost by definition. If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

> I can’t figure out what the difference would be between this “illusion” and “real” consciousness.

That's the point. We can't.

> If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

Or, at least something other than us would need to be conscious in order to experience what it'd be like being us.

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