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Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

> It appears to me that the entire field of AI research is utterly confused about this elementary distinction.

That is because consciousness isn't a scientific concept but a philosophical, and sometimes religious one.

>What we're really looking for is a machine that, like a human, decides on its own which problems to solve, and solves them without needing to be specifically directed to do so.

We already have AI based agents that do this but no matter how sophisticated they are people can always claim they are hardwired and deterministic, while not realizing we can always claim the same thing about humans. Again these are distinctions of philosophy word games and therefore don't find get much traction in the research world.

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> We already have AI based agents that do this

Example?

> but no matter how sophisticated they are people can always claim they are hardwired and deterministic, while not realizing we can always claim the same thing about humans.

Humans are certainly not "hardwired" to prove mathematical statements, yet they do. That's not comparable to self-driving cars that are able to navigate in situations that they haven't encountered before.

Regardless of whether you consider consciousness a philosophical concept, it's clear that the human mind has a property that the current generation of AI agents does not emulate at all. This is not a "word game" but an observable distinction between humans and every existing artificial system.

> Example?

Take just about anything from the reinforcement learning for ai agents domain - I'm particular to neuroevolution examples. Here's a simple one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4LAT3cJfM

No behaviors preprogrammed just a simple simulation environment with environmental constraints.

> Humans are certainly not "hardwired" to prove mathematical statements, yet they do.

Umm... yeah we are? We're just chemical reactions and physics, there is no escaping that. Are we extremely sophisticated and complex, absolutely but that doesn't make us nondeterministic in any meaningful or special way.

> it's clear that the human mind has a property that the current generation of AI agents does not emulate at all

Certainly but it is a matter of degree, not a matter of possessing an ill-defined concept like "consciousness" which is what I was responding to (Unless we want to call "consciousness" an emergent phenomena arising from complexity -I'm fine with that - but the word is loaded with plenty of other connotations so I find its use counterproductive personally).

> Umm... yeah we are? We're just chemical reactions and physics, there is no escaping that. Are we extremely sophisticated and complex, absolutely but that doesn't make us nondeterministic in any meaningful or special way.

Every day we are confronted with rather obvious nondeterminism that seems to originate in consciousness and has no scientific explanation that I'm aware of. It is undeniable that physical reality is affected by decisions made by conscious agents. Here's a simple example: say that we are trying to predict the position of a cell in a human body. It's motion is surely governed by a host of physical and chemical reactions, that can be described microscopically, but where that cell is in five minutes cannot possibly be described solely by those microscopic laws. The human may decide to get up and walk to the other side of the room. I am not personally convinced that the decisions to get up and move are the deterministic result of physical laws that follow directly from the initial conditions at the big bang. If there were some compelling scientific theory that could actually explain a theory of consciousness that was consistent with subjective experience and didn't hand wave it away as an emergent phenomenon, I'd be open to it. You are making a very bold claim when you state we are "just" physical and chemical reactions that I don't think is fully justified in light of the limitations of existing scientific theories.

> I am not personally convinced that the decisions to get up and move are the deterministic result of physical laws that follow directly from the initial conditions at the Big Bang

Then that is a religious or philosophical conviction… not a scientific one. Believe whatever you want just don’t confuse the two.

The behaviors are in fact pre-programmed. The distinction between environment and agent is in my opinion an un-necessary and misleading one. The agent is at is and the agent "acts" as it acts as a union with its environment.

> can always claim they are hardwired and deterministic

Correct, AI is based on computer mechanics, a model, a model that can go south when even a single input medium provides sufficiently nonsensical input.

Again, this also happens to humans all the time too with degrading robustness the lower down on the intelligence chain you get (we are hardwired and deterministic too after all, same physics apply to everyone)

I've watched this happen to human minds. there are entire industries predicated on making it happen. Advertising comes to mind.

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