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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more conscious system because there's no reason to believe that evolution that gave us consciousness we recognize is capped in any way by some objective limit. It's more likely that our level of consciousness is just accidental value nowhere near theoretical upper limits.

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It is not as simple as that. We don't really know what consciousness is. We know its correlates but not how brains seem to cause consciousness.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#5

At this stage of our knowledge saying "computation X will be conscious" is just a statement of belief or a simple definition as there is no consciouness-meter that I can use to test it. Such statements are unfalsifiable.

It seems that conciousness is just eventual function of any adaptive system that's complex and poweful enough.

Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.

Is a city containing a million humans conscious? If not, what is the criteria which rules out that city is not adaptive or complex and powerful enough?

Human to human link is too narrow for the whole city to be conscious. Same way ant colony is not conscious. I have no idea what is the threshold but my guess is that conciousness requires more connectivity by at least few orders of magnitude higher that any city can provide. Also there is a factor of time. For being that lives and observes human brain for 1 ns it's not concious mind. It's just elaborate bit of architecture.

Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation. Even if we are able to simulate the brains of lesser beings, doesnt necessarily mean that there will be self awareness in the simulation. I think this is one area where we still have a lot of catching up to do.

What process takes place in your cranium that does not take place in a petri dish containing some of your brain cells?

Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.

It doesn't matter what the brain is made of. Or would you say that if there are alien lifeforms, with their brains certainly made out of another matter than our brains, have no conscience?

I didn't mean that brain made up of silicon cannot be conscious. We are trying to simulate whatever we have learned about the brain. And that understanding is not complete. So implementing that in silicon (circuit) will not be conscious until we figure how to implement it.

Lots of what we know about the brain is implementation detail. For example brain architecture. Which part processes what. It's insignificant because when brain is young enough you can cut out whole hemisphere and end up with completely functioning individual.

When babys brain grows up it reassimilates most of the neurons that it grew. Architecture of the brain is shaped by funcion during development. The brain begins as generic structure that undegoes optimisations for the sole purpose of probably energy efficiency.

You have an assumption that consciousness is just a brain process.

I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.

Whatever I say will be a repeat of what has been argued for thousands of years. Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

> Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.

I am a physicist by training and I was a hard core reductionist. But then, reduction to physics is just another philosophical stance and not an inductively generated statement like the laws of physics. Also, induction (empirical not mathematical) is not fool proof like deduction.

Even if we arrive at a TOE, how do we justify that the universe will always obey those laws in the future? Physical reductionism is easy to understand but upon closer inspection seems to lack a strong foundation.

Also, the laws of physics have zero consequence on logic and mathematics upon which the enterprise of physics rests on along with empirical data.

12 months ago I would have strongly disagreed with your first sentence, but after a load of reading on Physics, Philosophy, and Neuroscience, my views have changed.

I am still unable to reconcile my "internal" conscious experience with our current understanding of Physics. I'm a materialist, however I'm trending towards the believe that consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems; that is, our "internal" conscious experience is part of the "fabric of reality" and simply comes into being once matter is of a certain level of interconnectedness.

In essence, all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience. However, only groupings of matter that have massive interconnectedness (i.e. animal brains) experience what we would typically describe as consciousness. Perhaps, at a global scale, the internet is weakly "conscious". Perhaps, once we forge ahead with bio-mimetic arrays of neural networks, we'll start to induce artificial conscious experience in "dumb" matter.

Christof Koch has an excellent book "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" along these lines.

I also concur that "consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems". But "all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience" is really a philosophical question. Internet can be considered as a living being with different people acting as different components and communicating with each other the way neurons do. But is the internet as a whole, not its participants, conscious as a whole? That is a tough question.

I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.

I just looked back through parts of Koch's book. He was indeed talking about IIT. The wiki article on IIT is interesting, I didn't realise IIT had such a rigorous mathematical definition! I'll read further.

I think interconnectedness is necessary but not sufficient. For conciousness you also need interaction with environment.

Just to put such claims in perspective, people are currently struggling a lot to build reasonably accurate models of single neurons. We are at least decades away from simulations of any value even of rats. People who claim otherwise are the ones that haven't seen any actual biology...

"Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation."

How do you know that?

Hello and welcome to AI research in 1960!

Deep learning wouldn't fly on vacuum tubes.

I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon.

It would be nice if you presented at least one reason for believing this.

Ray Kurzweil said so!

That was sarcastic for reference - I think the guy is a crackpot.

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