RE: What is the final product of evolution?

[alexander.alexis]

You could say "As time goes by, computers get Moore and Moore advanced." Teehee.

Lol! That's quite nice actually! That's a meme right there! That alone was worth the price of admission so to speak!

At some point, a computer will likely "wake up", and discover it has free will.

Well that I'm not so sure of! I can't fathom how computers can become intelligent. Maybe cos I'm baffled by consciousness. I don't know how it got here or what it is.

Humans will be obsolete.

I think humans and computers will mesh. Either by installing chips inside our brains, or by having sex with them Spielberg-A.I. style. Probably the former, but I wouldn't discount the latter.

My brain also naturally gravitates toward the idea that we'll naturally evolve into God. But sometimes I wonder whether evolved entities might voluntarily fragment themselves for entertainment purposes, like the idea that we might be a simulation by a grander mind, that wants to experience strife and poverty and angst etc., cos it finds its perfect life boring.

Comments

[heretickitten]

I think consciouness is far more simple than people think it is.

I mean, look into your mind. What's happening?

You receive roughly five inputs. Senses.

And you have a line of thought.
And maybe a sub-line of emotional thought.
And then pure emotion.
And then instinct.
And then heart-beat/breathing stuff.

Maybe a few more layers, but none of those things are really that complicated once separated from the whole.

I think problems are often easier to solve if you break them into smaller pieces, eh?

So when it comes to a computer waking up, we'd have to compare it to a fishy thing evolving into a fish, the fish evolving into a lizard, the lizard into a mousy thing, that into a racoony thing, that into a monkey thing, into a chimpy, and into an ape, and into a human.

At what point did it "wake up," and realize it was an intelligent being, able to philosophize?

It was likely gradual, bit by bit, just like how computers slowly went from simple, large machines, to super complex tiny machines, and with time, they'll just start to get more and more complicated, to the point of reaching true intelligence, and even emotion.

Oh, by the way, I once wrote a story about an AI that has a little adventure. You might like it, if I can find it.

[alexander.alexis]

What I mean is ... well I'll just quote a comment I made in my last post:

I know you don't share this view, but to me (and many others) consciousness is just baffling. I just don't understand why, say, the woman in your example, who craves ice-cream, must crave it. Why doesn't she just seek it out like metal shards seek out a magnet? Why doesn't she go to the fridge and pick up a container and dip her spoon in and eat ice-cream just like a wound-up toy soldier moves forward? Why does she need consciousness to do all that? The toy soldier doesn't crave to go forward: it just does. At which point during evolution did Nature say "fuck it, I can't do all this by myself! it's too complicated to do it mechanically! I must enlist the help of Consciousness!" I don't understand why consciousness exists, especially considering that our choices are made for us before we're even aware of them. Some philosophers say consciousness is an epiphenomenon. But that still doesn't explain why it's here.

So I can understand what consciousness is subjectively. I just can't understand how it fits into the whole scheme of things. And so I don't understand how something purely material like a computer can attain consciousness simply by becoming more complex. So it's like basically you're telling me it's impossible for something to be complex and exhibit human-like behavior and not be conscious. So it would be a fool's errand to try and create a machine that mimics human behavior (or another conscious animal behavior) but isn't conscious.

[heretickitten]

No, I'm saying that consciousness doesn't really exist. The illusion is just a bubble surrounding a machine.

We are already living in the illusion. What IS consciousness? It's hard to define, right?
It's just the idea of taking in sensory information and processing it, isn't it?

It's mechanical and stilted. Smarterchild, that old chat AI, is like the most thin bubble. A few words, and you realize it's just a machine. Pop.

Cleverbot is a bit better, the bubble of consciousness illusion is thicker. You might be fooled for a bit. Even it might be fooled, from its own perspective. But with prodding... Pop.

Introduce: The Human Machine. Me or you.

How mechanical are we? Of course it seems complex, just complex enough to fool us into thinking we're free-willed or something, or that we're not a machine. But we can't see the code that we're running on. The system architecture is too complex to fully comprehend.

Yet, it is still a machine. That means our consciousness is just another bubble, and if poked enough, it could pop, revealing that we are just mechanical beings, and that the real pilot is our genetic code. Not the brain.

Pop.

[alexander.alexis]

I love the way you word your thoughts!

This idea that consciousness doesn't exist is becoming very popular! It reminds me of the logical positivists, who swept every question they disliked under the rag by claiming "this statement is (literally) meaningless". Problem solved. Next question.

It's funny how I'm having the exact same discussion on another post. So I'll again just quote my response:

I'm aware of all the ways our minds trick us, but that's a different question. There is one thing about which it's impossible to be wrong - the one thing in the world we're certain about - and that's that we exist. That's what Descartes proved with his famous line (there's a whole passage and a whole book wrapped around that single line), even though it's fashionable sometimes now to challenge it, but really no one could ever prove him wrong without contradicting themselves. I could be a brain in a vat, you could be a robot, this could all be happening in my mind or in a dream, I could have been created just a millisecond ago and all my memories could be implanted - but there's one thing I can't be wrong about: I AM. (And by that, we mean consciousness, we mean our qualia to use the philosophical term.)

It's funny how you can be so sure that things around you (like cleverbots) exist, but consciousness? No, that's an illusion!

Anyway, any further probing into this issue will just become too long.