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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

I think you're both barking up the wrong tree. A person, and even an animal, possibly even a plant or members of other kingdoms and domains, sees. A computer does not see any more than a lens sees, or to the extreme, a computer can not see any more than an empty paper towel roll can see. The computer, lens and empty paper towel roll have no "I," no ego. In order to see, there must be something, or more accurately, someone, seeing. AI is just a complex program, which is ultimately an algorithm, and to be very simplistic, a recipe. A recipe can never be conscious, can never have a sense of self nor a sense of anything. Just because a photocopier can reproduce an image doesn't remotely mean that it or anything within it could ever see anything.

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I should have known my comment was doomed for downvoting. Many coders here. Many among them believe Strong AI is attainable. Everyone has self-bias, tends to believe their beliefs are correct and true. Anyone that believes Strong AI is attainable will evaluate that belief as correct, even with insurmountable evidence to the contrary. It is not a deficiency of programming that Strong AI will never be achieved, rather, it is an insurmountable problem of philosophy. No one takes philosophy seriously except philosophers. Coders, by and large a large percentage of them, because they are creators, often take themselves too seriously, and going right along with that is their beliefs, which they find near impossible to relinquish, even when it is shown beyond doubt their beliefs are not realistic. Strong AI can never be attained due to what computers are and the way computers work, and also what code is and how code works. This is not to say striving for Strong AI is a bad idea, because it isn't. Great things will come from that struggle, just not Strong AI.

No one knows why we are conscious. We have sliced the brain up a thousand ways and we will slice it up a million more and will never find consciousness because it is an emergent property of healthy brain, just like light is an emergent property of a working light bulb. No matter how you disassemble a light bulb, you will never find the light, though I grant you'll eventually figure out how light is produced, the assumption that a light bulb contains light is wrong headed. It's just a metaphor.

There is no worse slander than the truth: Strong AI can not be achieved, not with digital computers and programming and machine learning, and most likely by no other method either. Please, please grow up, and set aside your childish beliefs, because we need you now more than ever, here, in the real world.

I didn’t downvote you(tbh I don’t even know how to downvote). But I didn’t respond to you because I don’t understand the relevance of what you are saying. You said we’re both wrong and then went on to talk about how inanimate objects can’t see? It just doesn’t make sense to me what you’re trying to say.

The crux of it is that it is a false assumption, or more accurately a wrong headed assumption, to suggest that Stable Diffusion sees anything or to equate or compare what Stable Diffusion does do with biological sight. Only an individual, whether that be a person, animal, plant, etc., can see. A program, no matter how complex, no matter how advanced its hardware, will never be an individual, an ego, something that sees. It can only mimic and fool us into believing something there is seeing, but we should know better.

Now hold on a second. You seem very certain of "individual", what it is, and what it is not. I am not so sure that we're not actually creating an individual here or at least parts of an individual as snapshots of qualia and being able to recall or "hallucinate" them. Does no amount of mimicry bring a program closer to an individual? What if we made a really clever model that learns on the fly via constant streams of qualia and adapts as best as it can and it could do all of the things you could do, maybe not very well, or only to the same level as a service animal; is that any closer to an individual? I believe it is way more of a spectrum than the binary "will never be an individual".

Regardless of the details of how a brain is a conscious, it can be reduced to its constituent pieces or nuts and bolts, so to speak. Everything from the electrochemical potentials within neurons to the encoded chemical information in the form of DNA and RNA that spontaneously replicates and orchestrates a maddening array of complexities, we can partially explain. Even if our explanation is basically parts in a bucket, that's enough to paint a future where humanity understands enough of those processes to replicate consciousness without actually understanding why it works. Perhaps we don't need to understand the emergent properties, but merely discover them like the standard model in physics. We equally can't explain /why/ the fundamental physics constants are the way they are, but we can use them to do extraordinary things.

I sure hope you're wrong, because what you're describing is terrifying and horrendously cruel.

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