I suspect that a lot of the complexity is legacy code and/or incidental to the implementation. Cells have to do a lot of things just to continue living. Likewise, a lot of what the brain does is just control the very complex biochemical reactor that it lives in. ie: whales have big brains relative to humans (though they are a much smaller % of their body).
We don't need to know how to simulate consciousness. We only need to simulate atoms. The rest will fall out. Maybe there's a shortcut. Maybe we only need to simulate molecules. Maybe only cells. But one way or another, we can skip the understanding consciousness part.
In case of consciousness, we lack both types of knowledge: - What consciousness is - To use your example we don't know what bread is - How to create conciousness - To use your example we don't know a recipe for bread
To make this a bit more like a story, imagine we all got to a new place and tasted a thing called bread. We are not even sure we all tasted the same thing, nor can we agree on how to describe it, except we call it the same "bread." we don't have any recipe for it or know its ingredients. To make this even stranger we are not even sure bread is something that we are supposed to eat or it is something that we wear. Maybe it was some kind of cloth that as a strange experiment it was given for us to taste.
And now we are trying to create it. It could be that taking enough time and energy and people that are trying to create this thing called bread, we might, in the end, arrive at something that, when tasted by everyone, we can agree it is bread, but that seems less probable until we agree on a description of it.
I expect it may be the same for consciousness. We'll put the ingredients together (either simulate all the atoms of a brain, or all the molecules, or all the cells, or something higher level) and we'll get consciousness in the simulation.
Like gunpower, we won't know why these ingredients produce consciousness but we'll know they do and maybe later we'll figure out why.
Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible, it’s just not something we can feasibly do right now.
As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary. After all, any evidence that you have about the material world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See “brain in a vat” and related thought experiments for the legitimacy of this idea).
In this alternative model, the concept of replicating consciousness with material processes doesn’t make any sense because consciousness is primary.
To be clear I’m not making any assertions about which model is correct. Instead I’m suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence. And starting with the latter model means artificial replication of consciousness isn’t even a logical proposition.
The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain.
Stated a bit differently:
All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material, therefore consciousness is emergent from material.
What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness? Do you believe that events must have causes?
This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not necessarily fundamentally true.
How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this question, you’ll realize that the knowledge that you have a brain only manifests as appearances within consciousness.
It’s not necessary true that these appearances are giving you a window into an objective material universe. Instead it might be possible that your consciousness is a product of a simulation where your entire subjectivity - including the observation that you have a brain - is a manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of observability.
The point is that we simply don’t know what’s at rock bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an alien’s dream. Therefore the “arrow” of causality might flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to the other way around.
Ok, well in that simulation materialism is true and I can make an AI with emergent consciousness ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The arrow of causality flows from simulation to consciousness and there might be no mechanism to artificially create consciousness from within consciousness.
My point was that however the subjective reality I perceive came about, the laws of it still seem to allow for the creation of new non-biological conscious agents.
So, to make this so strange to say: while we can procreate organic agents, we cannot yet build them with our hands.
Thus I think we are a bit far away from creating consciousness. Whatever that is.
Ok. But that is equally true for any observation. For example, I don't really know that the computer I'm using to write this post actually exists under that proposition, as perhaps by brain is imagining it. So you are really rejecting observations in general here. My point is that given that observations in general are correct, then it is clear that the brain is the cause of consciousness.
However, I am rejecting the idea that observations necessarily imply the existence of a material universe.
Actually rather than “rejecting”, I’m suggesting that it’s logically possible to take the “reverse” position: that consciousness is primary and we are experiencing what appears to be a material universe within that conscious experience. In this model it doesn’t make logical sense to be able to replicate consciousness with materials because materials seem to exist within consciousness as opposed to the other way around.
My overarching point is that most people here seem to believe that we’ll obviously replicate consciousness with more understanding of biology and I think that’s a bold claim because it’s not obvious that materialism is the “correct” framework to describe existence.
In any case, these frameworks are in the realm of non-falsifiability (axiomatic) so you can’t really claim either is fundamentally correct.
Write a new book without understanding the language? No way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you're going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign language).
So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain, neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach. But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what intelligence/consciousness actually is).
(Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I doubt it's ever been tried.
Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from limited, fragmented sources is the closest natural experiment we have in practice to have tested it, but it's hardly the same as a full, substantial text in a consistent style.
The Chinese room thought experiment is flawed; this is exactly how we learn languages!
we don't understand what consciousness is or how it is achieved, so discussing how to recreate it isn't really a conversation we can have - we can only discuss how to create a simulacrum.
Do they mean memory? Attention? Awareness? Self awareness? The inner voice? Qualia? All of these can be explained somewhat, but they keep moving the goalpost