
Neuroscience Readies for a Showdown over Consciousness Ideas - headalgorithm
https://www.quantamagazine.org/neuroscience-readies-for-a-showdown-over-consciousness-ideas-20190306/
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jelliclesfarm
Just read this elsewhere and came to share it here.. pasting my comments from
there: [..]We are at a crucial point in our existence. If AI and machine
intelligence can acquire sentience or consciousness, then we won’t be the only
species laying claim to uniqueness. What defines humans wrt consciousness will
have to change. This new intelligence ..it will be no Frankenstein’s monster
or Golem. If it can create its own models of its reality, it has a ‘self’.
There is a space for AI to exist without our help. Hence its conscious. Not
only can it model its own sense of self and its place in its reality..it can
layer multiple models of reality. Something human anatomy and our physiology
cannot permit. Our entire world is constrained by our mind and the limitations
of our mental capacity. We modeled our reality around our limitations. Our
bodies are the prisons for our consciousness. If we were to create and stack
our multiple ‘self’s, we will be diagnosed with something from the DSM. Our
consciousness and model building is limited by our sanity. Our bodies limit
us. Our mental modes limit us. Our modeled reality limits us. We are a not-
fully-formed randomly mutated species with handicaps that define us. We
embrace that. AI will have no such qualms. What now? Paging Descartes! We have
a question!![..]

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oranson
I look forward to seeing AI be as conscious as it can. I hope they model
reality and develop their own models of the universe. What I would like to
see, is how humanity and this form of consciousness can work together to
further development of life. I think far reaching space travel will not be
possible (at least, for a while), with out cooperation from an intelligence
like AI. I also think we are far off and away from seeing man and AI
cooperate, which is a bummer.

