
Computers Determine States of Consciousness - rbanffy
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/computers-determine-states-of-consciousness/
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jchw
>How comfortable are we with turning over this kind of life-or-death diagnosis
to a machine, especially since our handle on consciousness, as an idea, is so
minimal?

Frankly, probably more than humans that apparently get it wrong 40% of the
time.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
That's not necessarily a good metric. For example, maybe the machine is
getting it right 50% of the time out of pure chance, whereas the humans use a
process that, although flawed, can be improved over time to get better results
than chance.

In this particular case, as the article notes, there's also the fact to
consider that the machine learning system is trained on cases identified by
humans. It's very unlikely that it will manage to do better than (the best)
humans.

Performance on its own can often be misleading (e.g., see overfitting). Very
often, if not always, you need to understand why a system is performing as it
does.

~~~
hopler
Everything computers do better than people was taught to them by humans in
some way. There's no reason to assume that human level performance is a cap.

There's always theoretical exceptions, but doing a known worse thing is
irrational.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Everything computers do better than people was taught to them by humans in
some way.

I find this a false dichotomy. Computers don't "do" things: they have no
capacity for choosing their own actions- we do things, using computers to
perform whatever task we choose better than we could without a computer.

By analogy, I can't hammer a nail with my bare hands as well as I can with a
hammer. Does that mean that the hammer is better at hammering down nails than
me, or humans, in general? Isn't that a completely absurd thing to say? And if
I say that I'm better at hammering nails than a hammer is, because a hammer
can't just get up and hammer a nail, isn't that completely nonsensical, also?

Rather, we can see myself holding a hammer as a system of a human using a tool
to perform a task to a higher degree of quality than possible without the
tool. That goes for computers, also, as well as for any other kind of tool
that doesn't have its own free will (i.e. tools not of a kind we don't know
how to create yet).

So, if you wish to argue that humans with computers can do some things better
than humans without computers, then I agree with you, fully. But, if you want
to argue that computers can do things on their own, right now, as opposed to
the distant future when they will probably be able to choose their own
actions, then I have to cough politely and change subject. Nice weather today,
don't you think?

