There is reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions require a biological base.
Or
There is no reason to believe that consciousness, sentience, or emotions do not require a biological base.
The first is simple, if there is a reason you can ask for it and evaluate it's merits. Quantum stuff is often pointed to here, but the reasoning is unconvincing.
The second form
There is no reason to believe P does not require Q.
There are no proven reasons but there are suspected reasons. For instance if the operation that nerons perform is what makes consciousness work, and that operation can be reproduced non-biologicLly it would follow that non biological consciousness would be possible.
For any observable phenomenon in the brain the same thing can be asked. So far it seems reasonable to expect most of the observable processes could be replicated.
None of it acts as proof, but they probably rise to the bar of reasons.
What is the "irreplaceable" part of human biology that leads to consciousness? Microtubules? Whatever it is, we could presumably build something artificial that has it.
We “could presumably build” it, maybe we can do that once we figure out how to get a language prediction model to comprehend what the current date is or how to spell strawberry.
All right, same question: Is there more reason to believe that it is one breakthrough away, or to believe that it is not? What evidence do you see to lean one way or the other?
It’s clearly possible, because we exist. Just a matter of time. And as we’ve seen in the past, breakthroughs can produce incredible leaps in capabilities (outside of AI as well). We might not get that breakthrough(s) for a thousand years, but I’m definitely leaning towards it being inevitable.
Interestingly the people doing the actual envelope pushing in this domain, such as Ilya Sutskever, think that there it’s a scaling problem, and neural nets do result in AGIs eventually, but I haven’t heard them substantiate it.
> This is not much different than saying that it’s possible to fly a spacecraft to another galaxy because spacecrafts exist and other galaxies exist.
It is very different. We have never seen a spacecraft reach another galaxy so we don't know it is possible.
We have an example of what we call intelligence arising in matter. We don't know what hurdles there are between current AI and an AGI, but we know that AGI is possible.
You didn't answer the question. Zero breakthroughs away, one, or more than one? How strongly do you think whichever you think, and why?
(I'm asking because of your statement, "Don’t fool yourself into believing artificial intelligence is not one breakthrough away", which I'm not sure I understand, but if I am parsing it correctly, I question your basis for saying it.)
Douglas Hofstadter wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach in the late 1970s. He used the short-hand “strange loops”, but dedicates a good bit of time considering this very thing. It’s like the Ship of Theseus, or the famous debate over Star Trek transporters—at what point do we stop being an inanimate clump of chemical compounds, and become “alive”. Further, at what point do our sensory organs transition from the basics of “life”, and form “consciousness”.
I find anyone with confident answers to questions like these immediately suspect.
