
Can we make consciousness into an engineering problem? - petra
https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-make-consciousness-into-an-engineering-problem
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brudgers
_Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having
beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem
solving performance._ \-- John McCarthy

A claim that a machine has consciousness seems like it would be similar to a
claim that a machine has beliefs, and the correctness of such a claim probably
has more to do with what the criteria are for something having beliefs or
consciousness than the complexity of implementation details.

A related essay: [http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-
mccarthy...](http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-mccarthy-
papers-in-7-weeks-1/)

McCarthy's paper: [http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing/ascribing.html](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing/ascribing.html)

~~~
empath75
Ants have consciousness and beliefs, of a kind. Maybe even plants do. Anytime
you have some internal state which can somehow be interpreted as a
representation of something else, you have a kind of awareness or
consciousness of it.

The hard problem is self-consciousness. Having an awareness of yourself as an
individual being with consciousness, and of your relationship to the things
you are conscious of.

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visarga
I agree very much with your first statement. With regard to self
consciousness, I think it emerges naturally from cooperative problem solving
with multiple agents. When cooperation is necessary, both language and the
modeling of other's internal state become advantageous. The notion of self
follows from that of others. Self consciousness is the result of model based
reinforcement learning with multiple agents.

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peterclary
And should we even try? There are surely moral/ethical implications in
creating and terminating consciousnesses.

~~~
kazinator
What if we are already doing it? How do you know that some operating system
image isn't conscious to some level.

Cows are obviously conscious, yet we consume beef like anything.

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mtrimpe
Not really; but we can make it into a definition problem.

If we go there then consciousness is suddenly just our subjective experience
of change/time/increasing entropy.

If you want a definition that's _helpful_ you're going to have to be more
specific than that of course.

~~~
bbctol
Saying consciousness is "just our subjective experience" of anything isn't a
definition, it's tautology. The question is whether a reductionist definition
of consciousness exists, or whether it's fundamentally irreducible.

~~~
mtrimpe
Whether that's a tautology or not really depends on your definition of
consciousness which is sort of my point: that consciousness, as the broad and
poorly defined concept it currently is, is not all that useful.

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meira
Yes, but in a few centuries a lot of kids will laugh about our first
assumptions.

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wrexsoule
I hope we don't, I played enough SOMA to know where this is going ;)

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qsymmachus
"People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique
ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles,
without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success
in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous
confidence."

[http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm)

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I think its even bigger than that. Lots of kids into STEM and the sciences
seem to grow into adults with some really dismissive views of anything that
isn't STEM and follow a fairly simplistic and reductionist approach to
explaining the world. Often making grand and sweeping generalizations that
sound "sciency" and pretending there's no mystery in the world and that human
knowledge in 2016 is near perfect.

Its bizarre and makes me wonder what about education created people with this
mindset. Is it how we teach the sciences perhaps? It seems science is taught
in a way that's just long tirades of endless hero worship, instead from a
philosophical perspective of what it can and can't do for us. I also find
academics don't often like to discuss failed scientific policies and beliefs
of the past nor how science really is its infancy considering out modern
system can only track itself back to the Royal Society. There's no unbroken
line of progress to Ancient Greece for example. We're really only talking 350
years of effort here, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things,
especially when the grand scheme of things is nothing short of 'explaining
everything.' I imagine we are due for many more scientific revolutions that
will make a lot of modern beliefs seem antiquated. Its arrogant to think
otherwise and having a more agnostic view seems like the wisest course here
instead of angry know-it-all-ism.

~~~
bbctol
It blows my mind how many science/STEM students dismiss the whole field of
philosophy as meaningless navel-gazing, separate from the real work of data-
gathering. And then we wonder why there's a reproducibility crisis...you have
to be taught philosophy of science!

