Re:Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
by epgui on Saturday July 31, 2021 @08:25PM
(#28022631)
I believe we do understand, broadly speaking, thinking and consciousness. There remains a lot more to learn, as in anything in science...
IMO the main difficulty is that humans have terrible self-awareness or self-insight. We want to believe we're special, we want to believe we're intelligent, we want to believe we're different than machines. We're in denial about that.
Our brains aren't any more special than computers, other than that it's really quite formidable that we evolved them by chance in this universe of chemical soup we find ourselves in. At the end of the day, however, a computer is a computer, and "thinking" and "consciousness" simply do emerge from low-level computations given some special structures.
Re:Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
by rapferreira on Sunday August 01, 2021 @02:02AM
(#28024157)
Are you kidding? Go read Hegel's phenomonology of mind and get back to me on that
Re:Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)
by epgui on Sunday August 01, 2021 @09:50AM
(#28026229)
A philosophical treatise from 1807, no matter how interesting or insightful, could hardly represent the current state of understanding of the topic.
My comment is loosely based on a general appreciation of textbook-level neuroanatomy and recent advances in AI/comp sci.
The author seems to have missed or excluded reinforcement learning and planning algorithms in this definition.
My criticism of AI criticism in general is that no one admits that at the root of it, we do not understand thinking (or "consciousness"). We are merely the "recipient" or enjoyer of the process, which is opaque. Just as AlphaGo, even if it just a facsimile of a Go player, could beat a human at Go, it is probable that an AI could produce a passable facsimile of thinking at one point. Its mechanisms would be as opaque as human thinking (, even to itself), but the results would be undeniable. AGI is a possibility.