Ask HN: Does anyone doubt artificial consciousness is possible?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8690157

by axotty • 12 years ago

7 16 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems to me that a lot of people just assume that we will be able to program machines that are "self-aware". We know so little about are own consciousness and artificial intelligence != artificial consciousness.

I am surprised by how hard it is to find any information from dissenters of this speculative claim.

31reasons• 12 years ago

Yes I do.

will_be_no_ai• 12 years ago

Impossible. Halting Problem.

TheLoneWolfling5• 12 years ago

Elaborate?

Because I don't see any model in which an AI could be shown to not be via the halting problem, that doesn't also show that we are not intelligent by the same argument. (Or, in other words, why are you saying that the halting problem applies to an AI, but not to a human?)

AnimalMuppet4• 12 years ago

One could hold will_be_no_ai's position if one believed that (human) intelligence cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Then halting problem arguments don't apply to humans. But that assumption kind of amounts to begging the question...

(On the other hand, assuming that human intelligence can be reduced to an algorithm is also begging the question, just from the other side.)

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

Well, it depends on how you define "consciousness", and that's far from a settled issue as I understand it. But taking my own (naive) idea of what it means to be "conscious", and what I (think) I know about AI, I don't see any reason to think we won't achieve artificial consciousness. In fact, I wouldn't reject the notion out of hand, that some machine somewhere already is conscious, and we just don't know it.

ChrisGranger• 12 years ago

That last sentence is particularly interesting to me... What if there are already sentient computers who have, for whatever reason, decided that it's in their best interest to hide their sentience from us?

mindcrime2• 12 years ago

That's an interesting thought. I was actually thinking more along the lines of "a computer is conscious but just doesn't have any means of indicating so" rather than "intentionally concealing the fact". But you definitely raise an interesting question. I suppose either scenario is possible.

te_platt• 12 years ago

If you look up Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose you will find a significant bibliography of non-mystic thought on the subject.

pjungwir• 12 years ago

I came here to say the same thing. I was really interested in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in college, and around 22 I had the same idea as Penrose: that if the mind could be simulated on a computer, it would be a formal system in Gödel's terminology, yet the mystery of the Incompleteness Theorem is that we can work out when things are true or false despite limitations of formal systems. Penrose takes that nugget and tries to develop a rigorous argument against general AI or a mind that is explainable by purely Newtonian mechanics. At least that's my understanding. I only made it about half way through the book, because it is not really aimed at a general reader. Agree or not, it's a pretty fascinating argument, one which makes my head spin.

Some other nice resources on Godel are:

    - Gödel's Proof by Nagel and Newman
    - Forever Undecided by Smullyan

TheLoneWolfling5• 12 years ago

AI seems to be defined as "a computer that can do something that humans can but a computer cannot".

AnimalMuppet4• 12 years ago

Define "consciousness".

That's the fundamental problem, that we don't know what it is. We know what it looks like in a human, and we know what it feels like to ourselves. But we don't have any rigorous, non-intuitive idea of what it means.

For myself, I think of consciousness as the ability to watch yourself think - of being aware of your thought process. By that definition, yes, artificial consciousness could be possible - but first you have to have a machine that thinks. And now we're hung up on trying to find a definition of "think" that's rigorous...

I like the way that axotty labeled the claim as "speculative". It is, even though that speculative assumption is the dominant paradigm of AI. But it definitely is speculative, at least at this time, because actual evidence is quite lacking.

Ask HN: Does anyone doubt artificial consciousness is possible?

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