Consciousness is a recurrent neural network

Re:Consciousness is a recurrent neural network by wbhart on Thursday November 24, 2016 @10:32AM (#13030795)

Can't the same argument be used to show that consciousness is a whole bunch of things that it clearly is not. Just arguing that consciousness has certain attributes and it shares those attributes with something else, doesn't make consciousness an example of that something else.

I think there is a general trend towards thinking of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon which exists when a system is complex enough and has certain attributes, such as memory, information processing capability, etc.

But none of these definitions enlighten me as to when or why such a system might become self-aware.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Consciousness is a recurrent neural network by hacker_9 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @12:20PM (#13031408)

Well we know the brain is incredibly advanced, as evolution has had a lot of time to work on it. It could be that to make something conscious just requires a very complex physical procedure or set of interconnected components. Once humans became conscious, it then worked out to be evolutionary beneficial to remain conscious in future generations.

To me, to be 'conscious' is to be able to make decisions. Presented with all our sensory data, memories, knowledge etc the brain creates possible models of the future every millisecond, and passes them to the conscious component which is where we choose how to proceed.

After a time, it doesn't even have to ask us anymore as it just replays past decisions. For example walking, driving a car, reading words etc

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Consciousness is a recurrent neural network by wbhart on Thursday November 24, 2016 @01:47PM (#13032023)

It seems to me that a meteorological expert system is conscious by that definition. I find that dubious.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Consciousness is a recurrent neural network by hacker_9 on Thursday November 24, 2016 @02:48PM (#13032352)

An expert system doesn't actually make decisions; the programmers made the decisions and then hard coded them in. Something along the lines of 'if (wind_pressure > 0 && rain_density < 0.5) do_something() else etc'. It's probably a bit more dynamic than that, but however you do it, it is always the programmers that make the decisions and then write them in, to be replayed by the software later with different variables.

[ Parent | on HN ]