Caravaggio: Your quote of my earlier post in 122 is a very partial selection of what I said. You are trying to set up a straw man so that you may knock it down.
M: I don't actually understand what a straw man is. I probably would see that such an use would not be logical if it is the name of some sort of flawed argument, but I can never keep the names of those kinds of flaws in my head.
C: The difference between a Hellfire missile and a human (whether or not you like or despise the latter's particular ideology) is glaringly obvious. My dog could distinguish them, you know that you can.
M: I am trying to point to the things I think are the same about a biological machine running a program and an artificially created machine doing the same thing. Our consciousness does not include an awareness carbon on which our program runs so maybe the same would be true if it were all running on silicon. Consciousness has no reality that we can see. It is a phenomenon. I believe it must be awareness of being. Why can't a machine know that it exists. We are just such a machine. Our awareness isn't our brains, but is produced by our brains. It would seem that the function of awareness is to preserve our machinery and keep it alive. Aside from stimulus response mechanisms that function at an unconscious level, we are aware of a self in an environment. The self is just the machine in which the awareness dwells. We are just made of dead chemicals, dead chemicals that have the illusion of life.
C: You ask if my 'self awareness has a sense of running on a bio net.' I have no idea what you mean. If you are asking whether I interact with others, then "yes" I am doing it now, and so are you.
M: I guess I just didn't know how to convey the idea I intended. I meant that my self awareness does not include any sense that I am a machine running a consciousness program of some kind. I am not aware that my awareness is being caused by brain activity, or any information of the nature of that brain activity, where in the brain it is happening, or as a result of this or that neural connections. I do seem to have some limited ability to chose what I want to think about, but I have no idea why. Is it a result of a program that is built in or because I am program free? I have no sense that can tell me that I am aware of.
C: You ask,
No, but they are, every second of my life. If I was aware of them all the time my attention mechanism would be crowded out by irrelevant stimuli. (See work of Broadbent). But if I tread on a plank with a nail upturned in it, you bet I know which neurons are firing and where. The subconscious becomes suddenly very conscious, and it directs my action..'take foot off nail'.
You ask why I doubt that a human mind can be duplicated by a computer;...
Because no such thing has happened yet.
If you can show me a human-sized robot which can change a duvet cover, convince its human mate that it is also human, compose a symphony, give birth to a baby robot which bonds with both its parent robot and the human parent, can hold down a job, go hunting for grouse, cross the Antarctic and write a popular book about it, ....Fix a shelf then go for a beer with its pals and enjoy it, and know when the next beer is stale and complain, and get another one free. Change a wheel on the way back, tie a clove-hitch, castrate a piglet, cook dinner and enjoy a fine wine, then beat me at chess ( that's the easy bit)....
Then, and only then, will I accept that humans are indistinguishable from computerised robots.
M: What I am saying is that I don't have your doubts because I see no reason to have them. In my opinion I am just such a robot. No reason, it seems to me, that Kangaroos might not one day be equally as capable as me. The human brain, I have heard is the most complex machine known to exist. We evolved as a result of billions of years of chance mutations on carbon based chemicals. In a few short years we have made computers that are at least as intelligent as spiders. How many millions of years do you suppose there was anything alive from the birth of life on the planet before that intelligence was reached?
Can we build self evolving software that writes random changes in its own code, sorts for increased capacity for rapidity of change, and implements that change virtually? We are already, also, learning how to reprogram our own DNA. Maybe we will build Humanity 2 on carbon.
M: I don't actually understand what a straw man is. I probably would see that such an use would not be logical if it is the name of some sort of flawed argument, but I can never keep the names of those kinds of flaws in my head.
C: The difference between a Hellfire missile and a human (whether or not you like or despise the latter's particular ideology) is glaringly obvious. My dog could distinguish them, you know that you can.
M: I am trying to point to the things I think are the same about a biological machine running a program and an artificially created machine doing the same thing. Our consciousness does not include an awareness carbon on which our program runs so maybe the same would be true if it were all running on silicon. Consciousness has no reality that we can see. It is a phenomenon. I believe it must be awareness of being. Why can't a machine know that it exists. We are just such a machine. Our awareness isn't our brains, but is produced by our brains. It would seem that the function of awareness is to preserve our machinery and keep it alive. Aside from stimulus response mechanisms that function at an unconscious level, we are aware of a self in an environment. The self is just the machine in which the awareness dwells. We are just made of dead chemicals, dead chemicals that have the illusion of life.
C: You ask if my 'self awareness has a sense of running on a bio net.' I have no idea what you mean. If you are asking whether I interact with others, then "yes" I am doing it now, and so are you.
M: I guess I just didn't know how to convey the idea I intended. I meant that my self awareness does not include any sense that I am a machine running a consciousness program of some kind. I am not aware that my awareness is being caused by brain activity, or any information of the nature of that brain activity, where in the brain it is happening, or as a result of this or that neural connections. I do seem to have some limited ability to chose what I want to think about, but I have no idea why. Is it a result of a program that is built in or because I am program free? I have no sense that can tell me that I am aware of.
C: You ask,
No, but they are, every second of my life. If I was aware of them all the time my attention mechanism would be crowded out by irrelevant stimuli. (See work of Broadbent). But if I tread on a plank with a nail upturned in it, you bet I know which neurons are firing and where. The subconscious becomes suddenly very conscious, and it directs my action..'take foot off nail'.
You ask why I doubt that a human mind can be duplicated by a computer;...
Because no such thing has happened yet.
If you can show me a human-sized robot which can change a duvet cover, convince its human mate that it is also human, compose a symphony, give birth to a baby robot which bonds with both its parent robot and the human parent, can hold down a job, go hunting for grouse, cross the Antarctic and write a popular book about it, ....Fix a shelf then go for a beer with its pals and enjoy it, and know when the next beer is stale and complain, and get another one free. Change a wheel on the way back, tie a clove-hitch, castrate a piglet, cook dinner and enjoy a fine wine, then beat me at chess ( that's the easy bit)....
Then, and only then, will I accept that humans are indistinguishable from computerised robots.
M: What I am saying is that I don't have your doubts because I see no reason to have them. In my opinion I am just such a robot. No reason, it seems to me, that Kangaroos might not one day be equally as capable as me. The human brain, I have heard is the most complex machine known to exist. We evolved as a result of billions of years of chance mutations on carbon based chemicals. In a few short years we have made computers that are at least as intelligent as spiders. How many millions of years do you suppose there was anything alive from the birth of life on the planet before that intelligence was reached?
Can we build self evolving software that writes random changes in its own code, sorts for increased capacity for rapidity of change, and implements that change virtually? We are already, also, learning how to reprogram our own DNA. Maybe we will build Humanity 2 on carbon.