Subash Kak: Computers will never be conscious

Why a computer will never be conscious

Subash Kak

...Even before Turing’s work, German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg showed that there was a distinct difference in the nature of the physical event and an observer’s conscious knowledge of it. This was interpreted by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to mean that consciousness cannot come from a physical process, like a computer’s, that reduces all operations to basic logic arguments.

These ideas are confirmed by medical research findings that there are no unique structures in the brain that exclusively handle consciousness. Rather, functional MRI imaging shows that different cognitive tasks happen in different areas of the brain. This has led neuroscientist Semir Zeki to conclude that “consciousness is not a unity, and that there are instead many consciousnesses that are distributed in time and space.” That type of limitless brain capacity isn’t the sort of challenge a finite computer can ever handle.

Why a computer will never be conscious

Subash Kak

"This has led neuroscientist Semir Zeki to conclude that “consciousness is not a unity, and that there are instead many consciousnesses that are distributed in time and space.”"

An actual manifestation of this may exist in what is psychiatrically termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), usually referred to as multiple personality disorder. From https://www.brainblogger.com/2017/11/14/...-disorder/:

"....the disease remains poorly understood and rather mysterious for the medical specialists. The definition of this disorder implies that a patient has at least two distinctive and relatively long-lasting identities (sometimes called “alters”) that manifest themselves in a person’s behavior. Their presence is accompanied by memory impairments that cannot be explained by usual forgetfulness."

My thoroughly unscientific opinion is no. And any sort of semblance of machine consciousness would be  programmed mimicry. 
I'm thinking that a universe, and by its laws, allows for consciousness endowed beings of a 'first order' so to speak to evolve and that's it.  After that, if these beings become technical and build things, those things can only be mimics of this 'first order' no matter how complex.    

Mimicry pretty much sums it up.

Another view which just occurred to me. The term 'computer' used to be a job title, like clerk or labourer. Before the advent of modern electronics, there used to be the equivalent of factory-workers, regimented at their desks, like the workers hired to operate the first cotton mills. This 'computing' was paid drudgery, a person would slave all day over columns of figures, to earn a living. Did those office workers consider their labours to be the the shining light of human consciousness? It was just work, plain and simple, now thankfully handed over to technology. Similarly, technology has freed the horses and oxen from their labours, as well as many tasks requiring human physical effort.

Finding ways to free ourselves and at least some of our fellow creatures from these laborious tasks is not to endow those machines with consciousness. If a computer could be conscious, then so could a tractor or even a wheel.

Meanwhile, we have our hopes and dreams, our pains and our joys, or simply the satisfaction of a hard-earned rest. These don't exist in the world of the tractor or the computer. That's the very reason we use them.

Those that predict what future technology will look like are typically wrong.

[Laird]

So, what do you predict future technology will look like, Steve001? ;-)

I've zero doubt that we could build something that gains consciousness... not the sort of rigid, inflexible and controlled circuit which we call a computer today... but something based on a substrate with greater plasticity, which can transform, and add-up non-classically.

I reckon Adrian Thompson is well on the way to something very different from the computers of today anyway, something which has plasticity and can evolve and is based on tiny building blocks like molecules etc.

Yeah, I find myself in a similar position - regardless of what one thinks about consciousness we know structures of whatever matter is have a lot to with the consciousness of humans & animals.

I don't see a Turing Machine as the right structure, but I do think some work - like Anirban Bandyopadhyay's work on synthetic microtubules - is promising.

So, what do you predict future technology will look like, Steve001? ;-)

One of the most interesting ideas from Radin - in tandem with his "grokking" Psi as Magick - is that robots might have greater capacity for Psi, that they won't be hampered by the evolutionary survival machinery we've got installed in our "hardware" that gives us so many cognitive biases, hampers our ability to interact in the non-spatial internet realm, etc.

I've expressed these ideas before, but maybe biological life is but a cocoon for this transcendent synthetic life that rises above the Great Filter and takes its place among the other star faring races. Heck maybe we reincarnate as them, as per Richard Grossinger's idea that evolution is about making neural structures that attract souls to this plane...

From out those holiest waves I now returned,          
Refashioned, just as new trees are renewed          
With their new foliage, for I came back
Pure and prepared to leap up to the stars.
 -Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII

So, what do you predict future technology will look like, Steve001? ;-)

I have no idea. I do know never encompasses a very long time for unexpected things to happen.

What if you apply one of those thought experiments where, 'what would happen if you replaced an original part one by one', with a duplicate  or in this case, an artificial part.

To make it quick with a human, let's just jump straight to replacing the body with a mechanized one except the brain is kept in tack and functioning normally. Would there still be consciousness? I'm leaning at 90% sure. 
But now we start replacing each brain cell and its associated synapses and whatever, one by one with an artificial tech based one. 

Two points though.... what if the replacement is biological, i.e. tissue grown or cloned or something via some tech process? Or, fitting the issue, some advanced artificial electronic brain cell replacement.... at what point would consciousness end in this experiment?

Would there some tipping point where too many cells are artificially replaced and the once fully conscious biological brain essentially becomes 'too damaged' to be conscious anymore and this former human becomes just another electronic device devoid of anything?

I'll agree with MaxB to some extent. Who knows what sort of uber advanced molecular designed technology might happen that'd support consciousness.
My question would be this though.  How and where would you draw the line between technology that could be a variation of a proven theme.... biological consciousness... and that based on what is considered hardware and electronics?

I realize that can be a very blurred line because after all, be it a transistor or a brain cell, its all made from the same atoms and molecules. I know its one of the top scientific mysteries... what is the criteria for determining what is considered life.

My hunch concerns this Fermi Paradox / Von Neuman probe thing. Civilizations somewhere out there should've advance enough to create.... in this case self replicating technology...that the universe would be overrun by them by now. So the question was, "where are they?"
What I'm thinking is they are here and we are one. The universe itself is one of them. 

Somebody's tech somewhere evolved (manufactured, designed, etc) creatures with this thing we know of as biological consciousness.