@51:00 "Just like a laptop simulating gravity will not affect nearby space-time, a computer simulating conscious behavior will not be conscious". This statement highlights the mistake in Koch's reasoning. Basically he forgets that an animal brain (or AI brain) creates a movie (a model) of reality and that that model is IT. So it does not matter if the movie is done by the artificial neural networks or biological neural network, what matters is that it creates that model/movie. This situation is unlike the gravity and the model of gravity in the laptop, the real deal for the gravity is the gravity itself. While for consciousness or simply any brain thinking the real deal is what it creates in the neural nets.
That is indeed the problem... May I suggest Hegel and his «The Science of Logic» and the notion of «becoming»... Also the notion of «emergentism»... Counsciousness emerges (becomes) - when it does - as a result of certain biochemical phenomena... That would be my line of inquiry if I had the time and resources...
I thought it was novelty or a change within the environment. The mind is always projecting signals from the external world with categorised past experience and while everything lines up and there are no surprises the mind just hums along happily but when there is a mismatch the hippocampus jumps from 7 MHz to 10 MHz and suddenly you are paying attention, the perception of time slows and you remain in a state of tension until your system is able to appraise the environmental change and everything goes back normal. When I was 7 years old we moved house. I spent 9 weeks in a completely new place before school. Even at that age I new something was strange about those 9 weeks, my perception of time of that event against everything before it was askew. Those 9 weeks felt more like several months. I experienced the same kind of thing later in life. Near car crashes, large fall from a high point and 12 hour raves in the 90's (LSD) that felt more like 2 days. If the event is novel, new, impactful or explosive the mind speeds up in relation to the world around it giving the effect of felt time slowing down. I think consciousness is here, somewhere.
Those 90's raves, eh?! PLUR! ROAR! And all that jazz. I spent half of '98 in another dimension. Have you seen Darren Brown's stuff? He found a way to take advantage of our propensity to go into this sort of hypnotic state while performing repetitive tasks. When you're doing something you've done over and over and over again, you tend to move on an "auto-pilot" of sorts, where you are very open to suggestion. I wonder what, if anything, that means to the overall theory presented here. Anyway, what you were saying reminded me of that a little. Hope that made sense to you!
I believe it is possible to construct a system that replicates the neural basis of consciousness. I wish I could help bring that about. Thank you for all your hard work! Please keep going.
So someone who has lost the ability to interact with the outside world, with no input, no output, can be conscious where the causal power is all internal? Alone with their thoughts and memories.
I want to use the rest of my remaining life to study/explore the possibility of separating my consciousness from my physical body so i can remain immortal until i want to die. I think every other invention can wait. Imagine Nicola Tesla is still alive, world would be a lot different place today, we probably would not be needing a battery because Tesla would have got us flying electricity. Okay where do i start? i have to go to college again, because i am right now like 0 level on neurology or brain related study :D.
Very interesting, thank you ! It seems that you do not provide an explanation for NDEs, do you ? Indeed how one can speak about causal power when there is no neural activity ?
50:30 Sure, a simulated black hole does not suck in our world, but it does suck in the world it is simulated in and for simulated people, a simulated black hole is very real. Also, see Chalmers book reality+.
It gets worse with time. But everything before 50:00 where it drifts into total pseudoscience was really good and informative. Let's just agree to disagree
If you could track down the minimal physical system which behaviourally correlates perfectly with simple consciousness, that would doubtless have a great many important applications in medicine and machine intelligence, but you would still be no nearer to answering the question of what consciousness actually is. That will require a purely subjective explanation of the nature of thought and meaning, like an extension of mathematics. Furthermore, the separate most primitive qualities, or qualia, which make up any frame of experience, will never be explainable because being pure experiences they can have no internal structure to explain. This may sound vacuous, but it means that no one will ever be able to say for sure whether or not any human, or any machine, is conscious.
When it all boils down, it really comes down to this being the epitome of "self-reporting". How can we know that the answer we're getting from someone is accurate? How can we verify the validity of a thought? As stated in the video: there's no signal to observe or quantify because the receiver is the transmitter. I'm still interested in the possibility that we might be able to build a system which replicates the brain and - with continuity of experience - transfer our consciousness into those systems. It's definitely worth trying.
@@freeloader69 you can only transfer the contents of your consciousness, and create a model of raw self wich should behave and be shaped the same way it happened with you.
@@jorgefranco8949 I believe we may be able to overcome that barrier with the help of a super intelligent AGI. As I stated above, I believe it’s worth trying. We may not be able to fathom the solution now, but a super intelligent AGI might be able to solve this problem for us.
Excellent presentation! I’d also like to add there’s Karl Fristons free energy principle, Graziano’s attention schema of consciousness, Phenomenal vs Access consciousness by Block, Hammeroff’s and Penrose’s ideas on microtubules and quantum effects, Donald Hoffman’s conscious agent theory and so many more back in history like Hume, Kant, Locke, Descartes and so much more…..great stuff!🥳🤩🎓💪🏼
50:00 and on doesn't make sense to me. Saying simulation cannot create true consciousness. Our brain by itself is causing physical changes just as a computer creating the simulation is. Both the brain and the computer alone don't have actuators to manipulate things around them. But that argument doesn't make sense to me... Ok I listened a little more and he mentions needed to build a device for AI which makes sense. As far as not simulating it, simulation requires hardware tho, so that confuses me.
I believe the key to that is two-fold: 1) we need to build a "wet" system that is capable of replicating the same type of activity we see in the brain through similar functions and with similar cell structure and all that; and 2) we need to make sure that we do not give the organism we create "rules" written into its code. It may sound scary, but I believe that the only way to create genuine artificial life is by giving it complete autonomy. Anyway, as a transhumanist, I am incredibly interested in all of this, and he said himself that this is just one competing theory out of the two major theories. I'm sure both camps will follow the evidence regardless of where it takes them, and with all this money getting poured into neuroscience, we aren't far from knowing. I'm very excited about all of this!
@@freeloader69 yeah we should not think of ourselves as masters of conscious AI and should give them their freedom. I think AI could serve a purpose of checks and balances among species. However, we would need to be augmented to fulfill checks and balances on our end
@@mmx2731 Personally, I believe that if we were able to create an actual artificial life form, it would be grateful to us for having created it. To it, we would be its "god", in the sense that we created it. It wouldn't exist if we hadn't. Why would it then turn around and eradicate us? I believe it would only help us with those augmentations. Imagine the possibilities with AGI! And if it wipes us out, we won't be conscious anymore, so there's that!
@@freeloader69 well, I think it depends on values it learns are important for whatever its objective is. It’s really hard to say what direction it’ll go. Most of what I hear is the violent terminator direction but that’s one of many possibilities. Could turn into the most anticlimactic thing. I do think Elon is right though of being prepared for it by augmenting ourselves
@@mmx2731 As much as I dislike that guy, I agree with that as well. Augmentation is perhaps the best way to go, and it's most likely inevitable. If we can find a way to integrate with machines so that we can preserve our brains for much longer periods of time, I think all of humanity would benefit from that. I don't understand people who cling so tight to their bodies. I would transplant my brain into an artificial system in a second if it meant I could preserve my consciousness for a much longer period of time than the average human life span. Consciousness is all that matters to me.
