Why Machines Will Never be Conscious

Why Machines Will Never be Conscious

http://www.novaspivack.com/science/why-m...-conscious

I think we would have to separate a "machine" from a Turing Machine.

To me the idea of a conscious Turing Machine, that becomes conscious because it is running a particular program, is ridiculous. I think the very position is intellectually vacuous, though I do respect some of the people that hold this position...go figure. :-)

OTOH, I am largely convinced that whatever structure we ourselves possess in our grey matter (extending into other bodily systems) could be reproduced as an entity of silicone or some other materials.

Now whether this consciousness comes about by housing a soul (Dualism), fragmenting the One Dreamer into yet another "alter" (Idealism), or activating the proto-consciousness of base matter (Panpsychism)...or some other way I couldn't say. I still would contend my position is more worthwhile than the computationalist who is trying to get blood (Mind) from stone (Matter) through some arrangement of the latter to instantiate the former. Now I've heard the idea that our souls are Platonic Entities expressed through Pattern, and so any program could be such an expression of a Platonic Sentient...but then we aren't exactly computationalists as the term is usually used I think? 

All that said, I do think the linked piece is close to how I'm at least currently thinking about reality. In the words of Marcus Arvan, author of the Peer-To-Peer Simulation Hypothesis, I do think there is a lower frame (this seemingly physical world) that is derived from a higher frame. I do think there is something ineffable about Experience, or at least when we try to explain it in linguistic/mathematical terms...really it is the least ineffable thing at the same time given it is the medium through all language and mathematics is expressed between us. 

One interesting idea a friend & I were discussing was whether an AI would care as much about evidence over abstraction in the way humans often do and in the way atheism has advanced against religion. As entities in "meat space" to experience the Divine would be more convincing than any philosophical proof...but AIs, being divorced from experience (or at the least more easily capable of sensory deprivation), may not have the same feeling. And from there...they may not only conclude there is a God but that they themselves are not conscious entities based on the writings of Searle, Kastrup, and/or Chalmers...

Why Machines Will Never be Conscious

http://www.novaspivack.com/science/why-m...-conscious

By 2050 +/- we will be the UFOs of places like Barnard's Star. In order to "travel" [instantaneously leave and arrive at the same moment) that distance, we will have conscious spacecraft. So much for Mr. Spivak's argument.