Comment by ddj231 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ddj231 | Hacker News Reader

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My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general. Though we can create things and name them “will” and “desire”.

Software deals with metaphors. Your Amazon shopping cart is a metaphor of a real shopping cart. You your desktop and your file system, etc. are metaphors of real items. But we don’t mistake the metaphor for its object, even from inanimate objects to their software counterparts (shopping cart to Amazon cart).

Now the metaphors are dealing with humanness, things like intelligence etc. And rather than seeing it as software doing what it always does, taking things and creating software metaphors of them, we are starting to say these are actually what they are named. Saying the artificial intelligence is actually an intelligence.

We’d either have to reduce the definition of intelligence such that calculators are intelligent. Or admit that these tools are not intelligent and are rather ways of exploring the work of actual intelligent beings, work that is found in their training data.

> My view is that these sorts of things are not possible for AI in general.

I wonder what it would take build an artificial system that has these qualities.

> Software deals with metaphors.

This is me wondering again: what's fundamentally different between software running on a machine compared to what's happening in our brains? In both cases you have energy flow following a pattern.

It's conceivable to create a system where energy flows in a particular way.

BTW, we navigate the world of an uncountable number of particles by creating models in our heads of what we think are large things out there. Approximations are made by both artificial and biological systems.

> what's fundamentally different between software running on a machine compared to what's happening in our brains? In both cases you have energy flow following a pattern.

Assuming we’ve scratched the surface of the complexity of the brain. I’d say in one case a human with a will is steering that flow of energy. In the other case it is a probabilistic algorithm steering the flow of energy. The AI is not interacting with world with its own will. I see that as a big difference.

There are presuppositions that go beyond the realm of software engineering that guide one’s views of these things. One is whether you believe the material world is all that is, and that human consciousness is a product of the brain—or that there is such a thing as the soul or spirit of man. From the material perspective you may posit that if you emulate the brain then a sort of AI consciousness could arise. Or that emulating the patterns of the brain equates to emulating personhood. (Though what is material consciousness? I’d say consciousness is by nature immaterial.) I’m not a materialist, and I don’t believe the conclusions that arise from it’s perspectives are accurate.

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