bread93096 t1_it9a9r9 wrote on October 21, 2022 at 9:37 PM

Reply to comment by wow_button in Artificial Suffering and the Hard Problem of Consciousness by owlthatissuperb

The counter argument would be that the human brain is also an amalgam of relatively simple sub-processors, and consciousness is the result of these many sub-processors interacting. It’s supported by the fact that the parts of the brain that are associated with consciousness and sentience develop relatively late in the evolutionary timeline of most intelligent species. However until we can say conclusively how consciousness works in the human brain, we can’t say whether it is possible in an artificial system, and we are not at all close to solving that problem.

wow_button t1_it9joo8 wrote on October 21, 2022 at 10:49 PM

Well said - my reasoning above is why I'm so drawn to Analytic Idealism. I can't get past my own experience with programming to draw the leap that there is some magic number of logic gates, memory and complex processing that emerges into consciousness. Materialism kind of dictates that that must be the case. Panpsychism also appealed (consciousness is fundamental to the material wold), but AI scratches that itch in a much more satisfying way. Ultimately I guess I'm skeptical that a pure materialist perspective will grant us the necessary insights into consciousness necessary to create a compelling AI. Thanks for the article and the convo!