Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I had to check my initial impulses at the door, a kind of reflex towards skeptical nonsense, because you've taken the time and effort to think this through. It is not nonsense, you make interesting and excellent points. Nevertheless I respectfully disagree. First, you can't hold up an algebra program as an argument because it falls under the umbrella of consciousness. It is a form of idea that does not exist outside of human consciousness so of course it is capable of infinity. And while a hydrogen atom my have in infinite spectrum of states, they have no ability to self arrange. They are driven by outside forces which determine their state. Consciousness though, can self arrange and infinity is an outcome of this.
i disagree with this. a symbolic algebra program does not fall under umbrella of consciousness. it is nothing more than an algorithm (which can process infinities without understanding them, or understanding anything for that matter). i also submit to you that we do not know what is actually different between a quantum system "randomly" projecting down to a particular energy state from a superposition, and (ostendibly) conscious entity make some decision. QM projection outcomes are random and not determined by any forces. so there is no way to distinguish random from conscious choice. i don't like it, but i must admit that is unfortunately the situation. not that i have any idea of what a random process really is, since it is acausal by definition, and although that description is sufficient mathematically, ontologically it is embarassingly perplexing. the point is that i think the only things one can objectively use to discriminate a conscious process is non-computability. that's where AI has a huge problem, at least given where they are right now. because all they have at this point are algorithms. maybe very clever ones that can alter their own code and produce interesting behavior, but algorithms nonetheless.
If you don't look at consciousness this way, in my opinion, then you have no chance of realizing a conscious AI. I think that you have to create the conditions for consciousness to take hold, rather than trying to accomplish it through brute force computing. I think this can be done with a machine, but that it would look a a lot different than what we have now. We have to create a machine that allows consciousness to "move in." so to speak. Artificial neural networks combined with a method of sensory input seems to be the most promising answer at the moment. We will need a far different technology to make that workable though.
you may be right about that. i am not smart enough to propose how to do it. but we can discuss apriori what we can look for to consider if it was successful. unless the system can produce a godel-type result, what can one possibly use as an indicator that it is conscious and not a p-zombie? btw, i would put the subjective transcendent aspects of the mind (like qualia) into the non-computable category as well. the problem is their presence cannot be examined objectively, at all. anyway, we can just disagree.
As I see it, any physical system that can be described by a set of equations (augmented by a random number generator) isn't going to capture mental processes. I am not sure I can prove that, but it seems to me obvious - well Roger Penrose has at least attempted to prove something similar.
i agree with that. i am saying essentially the same thing as penrose. the implication is the same -- if we ever manufacture a conscious system, it probably cannot be what we currently understand to be a computer, i.e., an algorithm.
To me, this seems to rule out explaining mind by anything that looks anything like physics - except perhaps invoking physics to explain some kind of a TV analogy of consciousness (which I think should be renamed at the Mars-rover analogy, because we need bi-directional communication).
at least by what physics looks like now. our physics is probably incomplete. and we can at 1st consider less ambitious goals than describing it entirely (including qualia, etc). any lens- or filter-like model is still obliged to quantify the interface rules (obviously there
are rules) and explain the binding problem, etc. i suspect that something very important will be understood at the quantum scale. it may not necessarily be some variant of penrose's quantum gravity microtubule ideas, but i say that just because that is the most important area in physics where we have a glaring gap. all the unitary machinery of quantum mechanics is self-contained and self-consistently evolves forever without a collapse ever taking place. which is a discontinuous non-unitary and totally ad-hoc process imposed by hand to compute what we need. it is totally divorced from the rest of the theory. so something fundamental is probably missing...