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Comment by dvanduzer | Hacker News Reader

The author lays out a case that consciousness can't emerge from mere matter. The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe (like Spinoza's God), and humans obtain a portion of it... somehow.

Characterizing Turing's argument this way misses the mark: "We can test whether a machine is intelligent or not purely by observing its behavior in the environment."

Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

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>Turing (and Ex Machina) argue that this is the only possible test, largely because arguments about consciousness dissolve into circular meaninglessness. Daniel Dennett dispenses with this best in his essay Quining Qualia: http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

True but for the same reason, models of consciousness dissolve into circular ontologies of subject and object. I agree with you on Spinoza. Seeing consciousness as a qualitative property of the universe avoids this problem and ties up alot of loose ends. That doesn't imply artificial consciousness is impossible. It implies on some level artificial consciousness will always be a blackbox system to us. One we can maybe replicate and improve on but still beyond full logical comprehension.

> The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe...

What is love? How can an uncaring chunk of bones and flesh feel love? But we do fall in love, so it must exist in some form. Hence, love is the universe itself. Checkmate

Baby don't hurt me, Don't hurt me, No more.

Just say the safe word

If you're intending to show how the previous argument is fallacious by constructing an obviously silly equivalent but substituting x for 'consciousness' then I don't think you've achieved what you think you've achieved.

'Love' or 'justice' or any other x that would work in this context depend themselves on consciousness and therefore the only silly part of the resulting argument is that "x is the universe itself" only works if x is the broadest aspect of the concept under discussion - i.e. consciousness itself.

I'm not saying the argument isn't flawed. It's possibly a hand-waving, question-begging, non-explanation. But it's a natural place to reach if, like me, you think a Descartian "I have qualia therefore I am" can't be hand-waved away as easily as some claim.

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