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marvinthedog t1_iw1qs77 wrote

Reply to comment by turnip_burrito in Nick Bostrom on the ethics of Digital Minds: "With recent advances in AI... it is remarkable how neglected this issue still is" by Smoke-away

It seems you might have missunderstood me when you said you agree to what I proposed in my thought experiment, because what I proposed was actually that your replica provides a lot stronger evidence for consciousness than the other human. You know you are conscious and the one who has the most functionally similar physical neural architecture to you is your replica.

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When all the three of you describes consciousness in your own words the neural processes in your head is a lot more similar to your replicas neural processes than the other humans neural processes. For instance you and your replica might be thinking mainly in pictures and be wizards in abstract math while the other human might be thinking mainly in words and be exceptionally good at remembering facts or whatnot. Also your written down description of consciousness will be a lot closer to you replicas than the other human. So the fact that you seem to think that the human provides stronger evidence than the replica is very perplexing to me.

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And you seem to think even some animals provide stronger evidence than your replica which is even way more perplexing. Animals cannot even communicate what conscousness is (atleast not in a language we can understand) and their neural architecture is way way more different than your replicas.

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turnip_burrito t1_iw1s07i wrote

Yes, I misunderstood when I said I agreed. I just updated (apologies). I disagree actually. I just edited my post to reflect that.

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turnip_burrito t1_iw1scim wrote

No, the other humans and animals have more similarity to me than my silicon replica on a molecular level. They are made of organic compounds, neurons, glial cells, etc. Their internal chemistry is the same as mine. So I'm more confident in their consciousness. Other humans mostly only differ from me in concentration of compounds and specific network connections, but are otherwise the same.

The replica could run on GPUs and be made of silicon. It could also be a series of gears and pulleys. Or some absurd series of jello cups and iron marbles dropped and retrieved over and over to perform computations, which are then read out to a screen as English. That's not a similar molecular makeup to me at all. I don't know if quantum correlations or temporal correlations or whatever is necessary for consciousness are preserved in this new substrate.

Just because we look at the replica and say "it's computing using primarily visial information like me" isn't helpful to show consciousness, because we have no evidence of silicon, pulleys, or planet sized warehouses of jello being conscious. It's like comparing a bat and a bee and saying they both share the same diet because they both fly. A robot me and real me don't necessrily share the same conscious experience just because our behavior is the same. We could, but how would we know? At least humans are made of basically the same stuff.

As I said, I don't believe consciousness affects behavior. I don't believe consciousness affects a robot's ability to mimic me. I am considering what it is, not what it appears to be. I think physics probably is the only thing that determines behavior, and it leaves no room for any unphysical thing to determine behavior. In other words, a mimic robot could act like me and still be unconscious because it is simply just built to do that and is following physics. It does what it is constructed to do, conscious or not, because the particles that make it up obey physics.

I also think humans do only what their physics makes them do, by the way. But we (probably we) also happen to be conscious. So we experience as we move and think, but in a more passive passenger type way than we perceive or want to admit.

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marvinthedog t1_iw8b0sv wrote

I have read your previous response which you updated and your last response which you also updated. At this point I don´t think we are going to get a lot further. This discussion really helped me clarify my own mental models about consciousness so that was very usefull. Thanks for an interesting discussion!

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