Philosopher reacts to "OpenAI expert Scott Aaronson on consciousness, quantum physics and AI safety"

[@harukostein]

you Richard and that person individually are much smarter than me but :D on the one hand, respect to him for pointing out some important points from the other side of the argument like consciousness and other things, on the other hand, he sounds to me like he is saying very confidently, "look, there is this area/map, we figured and mapped it all out", he talks about this for 10 minutes, then he says "there is this mysterious part of the map, we have no idea about it" he talks about this for 10 seconds. so it seems to me that this mysterious part of the map is actually vast but that is not reflected in his telling of the story. from my perspective there is also the other obvious problem and difference, compared to AI, we need a ridiculously tiny amount of energy and data to learn and understand new things. other than that, thanks Richard for all your videos in the past and hopefully many in the future. if someone asked me, who is the person that can genuinely juggle the most amount competing ideas in their mind and teach them to others without them being able to pick out what his bias is? i couldnt come up with someone except you.

[@GrantCastillou]

The theory and experimental method that the Darwin automata are based on is the way to a conscious machine.

[@harukostein]

what's the difference between that and me saying "this path into that forest is the way to a unicorn?" even though unicorns are much less magical than "conscious machines"

[@GrantCastillou]

@@harukostein It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461