Correlation vs Causation

Re: The kidney.

IMO, Bernardo dodges the point by making the kidney model a computer one, and then he appears faux indignant that the kidney won't urinate on his desk. This is a weak argument.

A physical model of the kidney could be made to function and pee on his desk ( https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/worl...ls-by-0001 for example). What the kidney needs is inputs (water and the stuff to be filtered/excreted).

A human brain also (appears to) need inputs to develop sensory perception and ultimately, a conscious awareness of its environment. As I've said before, the problem with AI is that it has, in some ways, to be made a bit crappier to give us the fallibilities that make us human. The experiences that shape us: the good choices, the bad choices, success and failures... Competition, rejection, connections, love and loss etc etc etc etc ..... The neuroses, pettiness, hang-ups and uncertainties that result from all of this. 

Any accurate human AI also has to have a way more fluid, unreliable and malleable memory system.

I'm actually with Bernardo, I'm doubtful 'real' AI it can be achieved (but for different reasons).

Re: The kidney.

IMO, Bernardo dodges the point by making the kidney model a computer one, and then he appears faux indignant that the kidney won't urinate on his desk. This is a weak argument.

A physical model of the kidney could be made to function and pee on his desk ( https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/worl...ls-by-0001 for example). What the kidney needs is inputs (water and the stuff to be filtered/excreted).

I mentioned the kidney reference because it was also used early in this discussion however, I too was less than satisfied with Bernardo's use of the analogy just as I was less than impressed when it was used in this thread. Either way, it is a poor analogy.

But the main point, I'll try to stress again, is the category error: consciousness does not equate to intelligence. Of course conscious experience does not happen in a featureless void; we experience, at least in this life, through sensory input, as you say. But the mind is capable of more than mere mechanical response. The mind, as opposed to the brain, has subjective experience - what the philosophers call qualia. That is what defines the category: consciousness is one thing and intelligence is another.

By the way, one thing you might expect if consciousness is indeed a different category is some experience not derived from the physical senses (extra-sensory). This is what Psi research is trying to establish, of course.

"we experience, at least in this life, through sensory input"

That is certainly one example of how we experience this life, but it isn't the only one. Another example is as a result of inner evaluation or rumination. A thought can be a form of experience in two ways. First, there is the thought itself. Second, considering or evaluating things can lead to strong emotions, such as joy, distress, embarrassment, fear, anger ... all of these are experiences in their own right, but don't depend on sensory input as such.

There is also a phenomenon which I myself frequently experience, and I suspect most other people do too, that is to feel and experience powerful emotions which have their origin in some other person. Often it will be hard to separate our own emotions from those we are experiencing second-hand as it were, they can swirl around within us and it may not even occur to many people that what they feel has some external origin. This whole phenomenon is itself perhaps describable as an example of psi. Though I tend to consider it more as the inseparability of consciousness.

Here's another Scientific American blog on the same subject. This bloggers (Susan Schneider and Edwin Turner) are not so forthright as Bernardo on the improbability of AI leading to consciousness but are nevertheless cautious, if that's not too much of an understatement. 

A lot hangs on the issue of machine consciousness, then. Yet neuroscientists are far from understanding the basis of consciousness in the brain, and philosophers are at least equally far from a complete explanation of the nature of consciousness.

So what can be done? We believe that we do not need to define consciousness formally, understand its philosophical nature or know its neural basis to recognize indications of consciousness in AIs. Each of us can grasp something essential about consciousness, just by introspecting; we can all experience what it feels like, from the inside, to exist.

They are proposing a test for consciousness as Turing devised a test for machine intelligence (nice to see that they too make the distinction between the two). Of course, there is no mention of exactly how consciousness could emerge from switch-flipping circuitry which was a salient point made by Bernardo. Later, they conclude with:

So, back to the superintelligent AI in the “box”—we watch and wait. Does it begin to philosophize about minds existing in addition to bodies, like Descartes? Does it dream, as in Isaac Asimov’s Robot Dreams? Does it express emotion, like Rachel in Blade Runner? Can it readily understand the human concepts that are grounded in our internal conscious experiences, such as those of the soul or atman?

The age of AI will be a time of soul-searching—both of ours, and for theirs.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...elf-aware/

"we experience, at least in this life, through sensory input"

That is certainly one example of how we experience this life, but it isn't the only one. Another example is as a result of inner evaluation or rumination. A thought can be a form of experience in two ways. First, there is the thought itself. Second, considering or evaluating things can lead to strong emotions, such as joy, distress, embarrassment, fear, anger ... all of these are experiences in their own right, but don't depend on sensory input as such.

There is also a phenomenon which I myself frequently experience, and I suspect most other people do too, that is to feel and experience powerful emotions which have their origin in some other person. Often it will be hard to separate our own emotions from those we are experiencing second-hand as it were, they can swirl around within us and it may not even occur to many people that what they feel has some external origin. This whole phenomenon is itself perhaps describable as an example of psi. Though I tend to consider it more as the inseparability of consciousness.

Something else to consider is inspiration: quite often the trigger for that significant breakthrough in all kinds of human endeavour from physics to poetry. 

I'm reading a book at the moment about the Bletchley Park codebreakers (including the aforementioned Alan Turing) and there's a passage about the frustrating early days of trying to break the German Enigma code. It describes how one young man pondered for weeks on the problem until he suddenly started looking at it from a different perspective and tried to get into the mind of a German Enigma operator in the field. What would he do in the morning while setting up his machine, what kind of lazy shortcuts might he take - such as not bothering to devise a random 3 digit set-up sequence for the mechanical wheels of the encoding mechanism but just using the 3 digits already on display on the machine. Somehow, this kind of laziness would reduce the task of finding the set-up sequence from some astronomical number to a manageable couple of hundred or fewer. It proved to be the early breakthrough they so sorely needed.

Now, coming back to this discussion, while digging around and finding those two articles posted above, I came across a report of a recent demonstration of AI in which a cheap little program was run against the famous Enigma codes which it duly broke in about 12 minutes. Do we believe the program had a stroke of inspiration during its execution? Did it also imagine the morning routine of some remote operator? No, of course not. We can be sure that it stepped through a boring yet effective brute-force procedure to try millions of combinations with all the calculating power at its disposal - just as it was instructed to do and never deviating from those instructions. No inspiration, no creativity, no imagination - just switch flipping to order. 

That an AI could achieve in twelve minutes what it took a room full of super-intelligent men several months to do back in 1940 is not a demonstration of machine consciousness, it is merely a demonstration of a programmed calculator stepping through its instructions very quickly.

nobody knows how the brain produces it  let's find out. Paranomalists make assumptions beyond what is warranted.

Haven't you just made an assumption?