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The idea of a thinking machine is an amazing one. It would be like humans creating artificial life, only more impressive because we would be creating consciousness. Or would we ? It's tempting to think that a machine that could think would think like us. But a bit of reflection shows that's not an inevitable conclusion.
To begin with, we'd better be clear about what we mean by "think". A comparison with human thinking might be intuitive, but what about animal thinking? Does a chimpanzee think? Does a crow? Does an octopus ?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there was "something that it is like" to have conscious experiences. There's something that it is like to see the colour red, or to go water skiing. We are more than just our brain states.
Could there ever be "something that it's like" to be a thinking machine? In an imagined conversation with the first intelligent machine, a human might ask "Are you conscious?", to which it might reply, "How would I know?".
http://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-think-and-could-a-machine-ever-do-it-51316
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(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 08 2016, @03:38PM
My hypothesis (that consciousness might be an emerging feature of complex systems) was the exact opposite of dualism, because it ties the consciousness to the existing complex structure. I agree that the question is quite old, but that was actually my poing: Neither philosophy nor other sciences were showing any progress in answering it, but progress in artificial intelligence makes it IMO far more practically relevant to finally get an answer.
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(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Friday January 08 2016, @07:34PM
Even once we have non-human examples of consciousness that we can converse with, I'm not sure that we will be any less confused. I could say that "emergent phenomenon of complex systems" is just dualism with extra steps.
The AI answer may be further off anyway. We don't know what fidelity of reproduction is needed for artificial neurons to reconstitute the whole brain. We know that the brain is robust against perturbations of individual neurons, but if all of the neurons are slightly out of tune, the AI may effectively be drunk. Look how much work has had to go into micro-tuning for VR. Small issues with the visual input being out of tune with the brain's current expectations cause dysfunction. To simulate the brain, you may need to overshoot its computational complexity and use the slack for tweaks to get the simulation consistent with the reference.
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