I wouldn’t be surprised if someday when we’ve fully figured out how our own brains work we go “oh, is that all? I guess we just seem a lot more complicated than we actually are.”
If anything I think the development of actual AGI will come first and give us insight on why some organic mass can do what it does. I’ve seen many AI experts say that one reason they got into the field was to try and figure out the human brain indirectly. I’ve also seen one person (I can’t recall the name) say we already have a form of rudimentary AGI existing now - corporations.
Something of the sort has already been claimed for language/linguistics, i.e. that LLMs can be used to understand human language production. One linguist wrote a pretty good reply to such claims, which can be summed up as “this is like inventing an airplane and using it to figure out how birds fly”. I mean, who knows, maybe that even could work, but it should be admitted that the approach appears extremely roundabout and very well might be utterly fruitless.
This had an interesting part in Westworld, where at one point they go to a big database of minds that have been “backed up” in a sense, and they’re fairly simple “code books” that define basically all of the behaviors of a person. The first couple seasons have some really cool ideas on how consciousness is formed, even if the later seasons kind of fell apart IMO
True.
That’s why consciousness is “magical,” still. If neurons ultra-basically do IF logic, how does that become consciousness?
And the same with memory. It can seem to boil down to one memory cell reacting to a specific input. So the idea is called “the grandmother cell.” Is there just 1 cell that holds the memory of your grandmother? If that one cell gets damaged/dies, do you lose memory of your grandmother?
And ultimately, if thinking is just IF logic, does that mean every decision and thought is predetermined and can be computed, given a big enough computer and the all the exact starting values?
You’re implying that physical characteristics are inherently deterministic while we know they’re not.
Your neurons are analog and noisy and sensitive to the tiny fluctuations of random atomic noise.
Beyond that: they don’t do “if” logic, it’s more like complex combinatorial arithmetics that simultaneously modify future outputs with every input.
Physics and more to the point, QM, appears probabilistic but wether or not it is deterministic is still up for debate. Until such a time that we develop a full understanding of QM we can not say for sure. Personally I am inclined to think we will find deterministic explanations in QM, it feels like nonsense to say that things could have happened differently. Things happen the way they happen and if you would rewind time before an event, it should resolve the same way.
Individual cells do not encode any memory. Thinking and memory stem from the great variety and combinational complexity of synaptic interlinks between neurons. Certain “circuit” paths are reinforced over time as they are used. The computation itself (thinking, recalling) then is “just” incredibly complex statistics over millions of synapses. And the most awesome thing is that all this happens through chemical reaction chains catalysed by an enormous variety of enzymes and other proteins, and through electrostatic interactions that primarily involve sodium ions!
Seth Anil has interesting lectures on consciousness, specifically on the predictive processing theory. Under this view the brain essentially simulates reality as a sort of prediction, this simulated model is what we, subjectively, then perceive as consciousness.
“Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system“. In other words consciousness might exist because to regulate our bodies and execute different actions we must have an internal model of ourselves as well as ourselves in the world.
As for determinism - the idea of libertarian free will is not really seriously entertained by philosophy these days. The main question is if there is any inkling of free will to cling to (compatibilism), but, generally, it is more likely than not that our consciousness is deterministic.
Interesting about moving towards consciousness being deterministic.
(I haven’t been keeping up with that)
