I may be mistaken, but tell me again how intelligently designing and creating an autonomous entity furthers the atheist world-view (which I am guessing you agree with, given your careful choice of phrasing ala god delusion)? If I was one of the masses -- who are evidently far less enlightened than yourself -- I would argue that this project demonstrates that an intelligent being is clearly involved in the production of a conscious entity.
Apropos dualism: Did you thought about how artificial intelligence might end the dualism in economic theory: I.e. that one has to account for labour and capital as completely separate factors of production? (I am ignoring land etc here for the sake of simplicity.)
Clearly, building a functioning artificial brain by copying the physical characteristics of a human brain should settle this one.
You state this as if replicating a human brain would be like buying a new Lego set and following the instructions. I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?
The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.
The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group of toddlers would never 100% figure out the full technology and complete mechanical blueprints if they were handed a Ferrari.
I don't think that's clear at all. I might agree with your first point, that we don't understand the internal mechanisms very well, but in some cases it's a lot easier to model a system than to understand how it functions. This is particularly true of emergent behavior, which pretty much anyone in the field acknowledges the brain is largely driven by.
Even in fields as concrete as physics, there are plenty of emergent results which can be verified to arise from the small-scale behaviors that we can observe, whereas a full "understanding" of how that emergence happens is beyond our grasp.
Regardless of the question of sleep, the lack of a human known answer does not mean something else must exist that knows the answer. Perhaps the answer is unknown in the universe.
If you believe otherwise, where did the intelligent being who knows this information come from?
However, in your same vein of logic, the incapability to prove the existence of a designer does not invalidate the existence of a designer in the equation.
This same flimsy logic is applied within scientific naturalism, where we assume that because the existence of a designer is not capable of being proven, that the only way we can conclude something "coming about" is by inferring from only what is empirically given.
Surely you would not try to argue with me that because a child is not present (and thus logically unprovable to exist) that the existence of a sand castle on the beach could only be explained by the waves and functions of the ocean.
Obviously in that example we have external information to invalidate our faulty logic (i.e. seeing prior children build sand-castles), but it serves to highlight the absurdity that comes about when trying to infer from what is only empirically given. Now take that simple sand castle example and apply it to the insane complexity of trying to explain the creation of the universe. Not to mention remove the external information that enables us to validate/invalidate our claims.
I hope you can see why I choose to merge my intuition for recognizing intelligent design with empirical science.
To create a neural net, a framework is created that sets up layers of neurons and sets their weightings (often randomly). The framework runs the net against batches of data, measures the level of success, and changes the weightings. Eventually this process produces a "brain" that can, for example, recognize letters.
The framework's creator can't explain how the generated neural net functions because no one designed it. To someone not familiar with the process, the neural net would trigger their intuition for recognizing intelligent design.
You just went in a big circle to tell me that my intuition about the neural network was correct -- that there was a designer (the framework's creator) outside of the neural network who set the boundaries and then let that unique neural network run its course.
It doesn't matter if we know how the neural network works (and so forth), because this argument becomes logically invalid the moment you inject a designer (The framework's creator) into an argument to prove the lack of one.
Edit: Even if your comment was trying to show how an intuition for recognizing design can be "fooled", it still fails out because the intuition was correct.
>> I think we should first nail down the theory on why we sleep. You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime?
>> The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime
The other item I was addressing with the example is your implication that we can't create something until we understand every aspect of it.
And finally, adding an intelligent designer can't do more than push the argument back a step and leave you saying "who created him?"
That said, surely there will be those that argue that conscious machines have no rights because they are missing their chunk of soul-cloth.
And no, you can't side step this question. You can't say "well, it's god" because that's special pleading. I just don't understand how people can assume that evidence of complexity requires a designer, but never seem to have a problem inventing said designer out of thin-air as a magically preexisting entity.
What's more likely: that a natural process of change followed by selection essentially navigated through an infinite search space of possible configurations, some of which would create things like intelligent life, or that there was, magically, a pre-existent eternal intelligent being that decided to create other intelligent beings?
It seems like the answer to this question MUST be that the simulation cannot tell the difference between itself and a normal human. Otherwise, your argument is moot, because the religious folk will simply be able to point at this thing and say "clearly this thing is different from us -- it even knows that it's different, so obviously this is not the way our 'souls' work."
To have the artificial brain not be aware it is not a regular person, or to have the brain buy into religious ideas, would actually make the point (that the artificial brain is just like a human's, and thus consciousness is not mystical or non-physical) stronger.
Edit: khafra, ericb, and alexandros made the point I was trying to make better and in less words in replies to this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=574258
Fear not. Even if the thing achieves consciousness, writes poetry, falls in love, critiques literature, etc., people will still claim that it's just faking it. "Neat trick, but it still doesn't have a soul, so it can't be conscious!"
If I had to guess, I'd say that it would take a fresh generation, growing up with this sort of thing all around it, to accept (en masse) that the computers had whatever that special "something" is that we have.
Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise - what happens when a computer, aided and guided by nobody in particular, does something illegal? Creates a piece of art and wants copyright protection? Who do you sue when a computer sets up its own Pirate Bay? Do you let it get its own bank account? What about when it figures out how to beat the stock market by hacking e-mail accounts of executives and returning trades based on insider information to clueless traders that just follow its black-box suggestions - is that insider trading if the system wasn't explicitly told to do that and no human ever sees the information? And so on...our legal system is neither equipped for this stuff, nor agile enough to adapt to it in a timely fashion, and these issues will remain unresolved far past the point of no return.
Good point. Academics seem to have accepted that consciousness isn't magic for a while now, so building an artificial brain might not be so convincing for the rest of the world.
> Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise...
Yeah. I wouldn't even know where to start with figuring out some of those questions. I'm sure someone has written about this already, so if anyone knows who and where this has been written about I'd be interested in reading about it.
Similarly (and in opposition to many of the opinions in the other responses), if faced with artificial consciousnesses, why do you expect them not to ascribe to them the same "soul" substance that they allow themselves (ultimately, anyway--early resistance is likely to be universal)? After all, it is immediately evident that people can perform an action that creates an entity with an independent consciousness; if humanity develops another such creation method, how would that contradict their theology?