Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

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I'll take the other side of this and suggest that we're likely to build machines with a much greater depth of consciousness than ourselves. If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self, then we should be able to create machines with a far richer and deeper consciousness than anything we can even imagine.

Our conscious experience of the world is limited by our 5 senses, but a machine wouldn't have that limitation. Their conscious experience of the world could be expanded to include radio waves or super-human hearing, for example. They could also have a far greater reasoning capability which would perhaps enable them to appreciate their senses as a conscious observer in a deeper way than we could ever imagine.

Personally I think this is more likely to be the outcome of super-human intelligence. We like to think our of consciousness as special, but in the space of all consciousnesses I suspect we're on the lower end of the spectrum given our sensory and intellectual limitations.

But what does "greater depth of consciousness" really mean? What are the metrics one uses to compare counciousnesses? I think we're trying to discuss things we don't even have the language for. Whether or not we can replicate it is just guesswork at this point. Compared to nature our computers aren't very powerful-- we can't even stimulate all the computations going on in a single cell in real life. It's sort of like alchemists thinking gold will spring up when they mix their random concoctions together, because they didn't know how nuclear physics works.

>But what does "greater depth of consciousness" really mean? What are the metrics one uses to compare counciousnesses?

Completely agreed. The meta-question I’m asking is, how will we tell if we’ve built the right metrics? The answer used to be “if it passes the Turing Test,” but we’re rapidly superseding that answer and its replacements.

Maybe the answer will become obvious as our knowledge of the brain advances. Or, maybe we’ll be satisfied with a simplified model of consciousness that mostly works but is wrong in subtle yet critical ways, like Newtonian physics without theories of relativity. I suppose we’ll just have to keep asking questions, and aggressively pushing the limits of what machine intelligence can achieve relative to humans.

> If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self

It's possible that you are missing some number between 1 and 10^12 components of consciousness. You can experience for yourself that your own consciousness is not simply composed of your senses, self, and reason through meditation. The initial realization is that the majority of your thoughts are not produced by any of those faculties and seem to arise on their own. So right there you have something not in your list which is pushing fully formed thoughts into your awareness. Pay close attention to your internal state and you soon find that thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening concurrently and often compete with each other for attention. So this seems to indicate that there are a multitude of processes driving these. Thoughts can even compete with each other for attention so there is seemingly not a single origin for them. Finally, beyond all of that there is definitely something else that I can only describe as a sense of being or what it feels like to simply exist that undergirds all of that mental activity. It's the thing that remains when you take away or look past the other activity and it's always there since with practice you can switch to attending to that sensation at any point. I often wonder if that feeling is what it feels like to be a much simpler organism.

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