Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

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Let's not again confuse natural intelligence with artificial intelligence. You do not have artificial consciousness, you have genuine consciousness. Further, the brain is not a machine. To explain why, I'm just going to quote this excellent piece from mindmatters:

A machine is an artifact. It is a human-built assembly of materials that have no natural inclination to work in unison. Silicon and copper, plastic and glass have no natural propensity to compute. We make artifacts, for example computers, out of these materials to serve our purposes. But they are not the materials’ natural purposes.

In the classical hylemorphic (Aristotelian) perspective, an artifact is an artificial composite of substances and thus it has an accidental, not substantial, form. Machines work as they do “accidentally”; that is, their function as machines is not inherent to the matter that comprises them. Rather their function is imposed on the disparate parts by human intelligence.

Unlike a machine, the brain is an organ, a functional part of a living organism. It (along with the body) has a substantial form; its activity is natural to it. One might say that the brain's activity is intrinsic to it, not imposed on it extrinsically, as is the activity of a machine.[1]

[1] https://mindmatters.ai/2018/10/yes-your-brain-is-a-machine-i...

The brain absolutely is a machine. Just like everything biological in general: life is nanotech. We know that, because we can literally look through our microscopes and see how it ticks, at the atomic level.

So we looked and saw that life is just molecular nanotech, but what we didn't see was any tags attached to carbon chains that would say, "this molecule's natural function is to think", or "that molecule's natural function is to be a part of an organ that pumps blood", etc. Because there is no such thing like a "natural function" in the sense used by your quote, the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" is itself artificial[0], and that whole quote represents a piece of magical thinking philosophy you'd think humanity abandoned at least a century ago.

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[0] - https://abstrusegoose.com/215

Words do have meanings, and "artificial" has a distinct meaning that is not the same meaning as that of "natural." Flavors natural and artificial are distinct from each other. There are natural functions. Pumping and circulating blood is a natural function of the heart. If you don't like "artificial," we can use "synthetic" or substitute "man-made." You have repeated assertions without any supporting argument. "The brain is absolutely a machine," is an assertion, but you have not remotely supported it. Proof by assertion[1] is fallacious argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion

You're talking about the origin of a mechanism when you make this natural/artificial distinction, not its function. And based on that distinction you postulate that one can never have traits of the other. Reading all your comments in this thread again it seems to me that "should it happen" and "can it happen" are highly overlapping concepts in your opinion, which underscores my impression that you're making a moral argument instead of a scientific one.

You could just let the discourse end there - it's a strongly held belief and that's the end of the discussion. What confuses me, and maybe you can clear this up in a reply, that you still want to have a discussion about facts and reasoning. For that to happen, you would need to show that "nature" does indeed have the privileged and unreplicable position you assert it does. Just using the term "nature" is rhetorically evocative but not rationally meaningful in this context. To start with, you'd also have to definitionally delineate nature from artifice, because we humans have really been blurring those lines for a long time now and no cosmic force has stopped us yet.

Your implication that "natural" processes can never be functionally replicated or continued upon by volitional development is not supported by evidence. There is, however, a lot of evidence for the other side of this debate. We are heavily altering "nature" to suit us, and wherever we looked so far we find machinery that can be rationally understood, manipulated, replicated, remixed, and used whole or in part in our own designs. If there is a supernatural component that somehow privileges "natural" life, we have not found it yet.

You're just _asserting_ that "the brain is not a machine" . if not a structured lump of matter that does stuff, then else could the brain be?

and the rest of your paragraph is about artificial vs natural, which isn't even relevant, even if it could be clearly defined. Asserting "Proof by assertion is fallacious argument" is a fallacious argument.

> You do not have artificial consciousness, you have genuine consciousness. Further, the brain is not a machine.

I don't think that you understand parent comment's very valid point.

If the question is "Can genuine (human-level) consciousness be constructed out of nothing but atoms and energy?" then the only possible answers are:

1 yes, and at human scale, since a human being is a worked example of such, made from nothing but atoms and energy.

2 no, a human being is not just made of matter and energy, there is some "extra" special part to a human, call it soul, spirit, divine spark, etc without which there is not "genuine consciousness". (a)

And the whole rational project of science, going back 100s years, dismisses option 2 as sheer useless mystical mumbo-jumbo with no explanatory power at all. Therefor, option 1 is valid.

a)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Wow, quoting Aristotle's theory of the "natural place" of substances has to be a new low in this type of argument. It's like quoting Pliny the Elder's cures as an alternative to neurosurgery.

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