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Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by thfuran on Monday July 22, 2019 @11:39AM (#20499007)
>It comes down to whether you believe AGI is achievable

How could it possibly not be achievable? We know for certain general intelligence is physically realizable - we exist.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by adrianmonk on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:25PM (#20499549)
I'm not advocating for the opposing view (or any view) here, and this is just informational, but since you did specifically ask how...

If you want to talk about philosophy (including philosophy of mind but also more basic stuff like materialism vs. dualism), then it's not for certain.

I'd hazard a guess most engineers are materialists and reductionists, and from that point of view, yes, it seems like a slam dunk that it's possible. But some people believe the mind or consciousness is not a purely physical phenomenon. You can make philosophical arguments both directions, but the point is just that there isn't exactly universal consensus about it.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by tim333 on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:44PM (#20499754)
There's quite a lot of experimental evidence in the "purely physical phenomenon" direction. Things like brain surgery, neural implants and mind altering drugs probably wouldn't work as well if they were trying to interact with your non physical spirit.
Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by adrianmonk on Monday July 22, 2019 @02:21PM (#20500719)
I definitely see that. It's pretty compelling. You can't deny that certain drugs, for example, are a lever you can pull that makes consciousness go away (or come back). There seems to be a cause-effect relationship there.

But at the same time, I do not understand how it's possible that the consciousness that I subjectively experience can arise from physical processes. Therefore, I have difficulty completely accepting it. I write software. It processes information. I don't believe that the CPU has this same subjective consciousness experience (not even a little) while it's running my for loops and if statements. Suppose I were a genius and figured out an algorithm so that the CPU can process information in a way equivalent to the human brain. Would it have consciousness then? What changed? Does whether it has consciousness depend which algorithm it's executing? Quicksort no, but brain-emulator algorithm yes? They're both just algorithms, so why should the answer be different?

One explanation I've heard is it could be a matter of scale: simple information processing doesn't create consciousness, but sufficiently complex processing does. I can't say that's not true, but it seems hand-wavy and too convenient. Over here we have something that is neither conscious nor complex, and over there we have both conscious and complex, so we'll just say that complexity is the variable that determines consciousness without any further explanation. I realize at some point science works that way: we observe that when this thing happens, this other thing follows, according to this pattern we can characterize (with equations), and we can't get too deep into the why of it, and it's just opaque, and we describe it and call it a "law". Which is fine, but are we saying that this is a law? I'm not necessarily rejecting this idea, but the main argument in favor of it seems to be that it needs to be this way to make the other stuff work out.

Another possible way to reconcile things is the idea that everything is conscious. It certainly gets you out of the problem of explaining how certain groups of atoms banging around in one pattern (like in your brain) "attract" consciousness but other groups of atoms banging around in other patterns don't. You just say they all do, and you no longer need to explain a difference because there isn't one. Nice and simple, but it has some jarring (to me) implications that things around me are conscious that I normally assume aren't. It also has some questions about how it's organized, like why consciousness seems to be separated into entities.

Anyway, there are also other ways of looking at it. My main point here is that it's certainly something I don't understand well, and possibly it is something that nobody has a truly satisfying answer for.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by the8472 on Monday July 22, 2019 @03:55PM (#20501688)
If you do not understand what you mean yourself by the word "consciousness" then it is futile to ask whether an object has that property.

For example the purpose of anesthesia the goal can be broken down into several sub-components that you need to turn off without ever invoking the concept of consciousness: wakefulness, memory-formation, sensory input (pain).

Similarly consciousness seems to be a grab-bag of fuzzy properties that we ascribe to humans and then by letting five be even we also allow a few other species to roughly match (some) of those properties if we squint. And since humans and other, clearly somewhat simpler, species are clearly conscious then we go on and declare it's a really difficult thing to understand how ever-simpler things can't be conscious. It's just the paradox of the heap.

This doesn't mean consciousness is magical. It's just a very poorly defined and overloaded concept almost bordering on useless in the general case. It may feel like magic because we built this thought-edifice that twists to escape our grasp. But to me that seems more like a philosophical mirror cabinet that distracts from looking at the actual problem.

If you want to ask whether something is conscious you first need to come up with a rigorous testable definition or break it down into smaller components which you can detach from the overloaded concept of consciousness.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by shawnz on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:57PM (#20499897)
It doesn't matter if the place where the phenomenon of consciousness takes place is "physical" or not. If the brain can interface with it, why shouldn't machines be able to?
Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by reroute1 on Monday July 22, 2019 @11:54AM (#20499203)
Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible (or possible for US to reproduce). Why should we assume that it is? Because we have reproduced other things? That doesn't necessitate our ability to create everything conceivable.
Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by thfuran on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:13PM (#20499412)
>Perhaps it is naturally occurring and not artificially reproducible

What does that even mean? Nature doesn't operate on special nature-physics distinct from the physics of artificial systems.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by reroute1 on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:31PM (#20499628)
"Nature doesn't operate on special nature-physics distinct from the physics of artificial systems."

Who said that is does?. You asked how could it not be possible to recreate, and pointed to our own general intelligence as evidence of existence. But the existence of a thing does not necessitate our ability to create that thing.

What if the conditions of nature and the universe over billions of years led to natural intelligence occurring in humans and that is the only way? This scenario is entirely possible, and answers your question of how could it not be possible. Along with an infinite other amount of explanations. Just because something has a chance at being possible doesn't mean that it HAS to be, or that we will ever achieve it.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by adrianmonk on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:27PM (#20499583)
One way of looking at it: it means there's a DAG of causation and you don't have access to the entire root set.

(I'm not advocating for that idea being true, but I don't think it can be dismissed on the grounds of not having a clear meaning.)

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by erikpukinskis on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:35PM (#20499672)
It has very advanced production tooling, several orders of magnitude more complex than we have.

We WILL get to there. But we are not close.

3D nanometer-scale lithography of arbitrary materials is pretty wild.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by woopwoop on Monday July 22, 2019 @01:16PM (#20500112)
The means to recreating human level intelligence could be out of reach of human beings for the same reason that the means of recreating cat level intelligence is out of reach of cats.
Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by mbesto on Monday July 22, 2019 @11:57AM (#20499258)
By purely organic means of which we only have one current way of creating (e.g. via birth). The question is whether we can create AGI through other artificial means.
Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by misterman0 on Monday July 22, 2019 @12:17PM (#20499473)
The distinction you make between organic and artificial life is understandable but perhaps not important, at least not philosophically.

Something created us. God, Mother Nature, The Universe (or Aliens) created us. So we can be pretty sure it can be done. Can _we_ do it? At this point in time nothing says we can.

Re:Microsoft is investing $1B in OpenAI by lstodd on Monday July 22, 2019 @01:06PM (#20500006)
> At this point in time nothing says we can.

What is more important is that nothing say we can't.