Hawking: A.I. 'worst event in the history of civilization'

Hawking: A.I. 'worst event in the history of civilization' Nov 17, 2017 18:08:26 GMT

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Post by faustus5 on Nov 17, 2017 18:08:26 GMT

Nov 17, 2017 1:09:09 GMT general313 said:

So you think there is something special that happens at a higher level in the brain that is beyond the reach of machine learning designers?

Nope. I don't think there is anything that is beyond the reach of machine learning designers, in principle. I just share a concern with folks like Patricia Churchland that it is foolish to think you can truly understand or model human consciousness without concentrating on the human brain.

Some kind of emergent property? As I said before, given the history of observers imaging some fundamental and special difference between the biological and non-biological, I won't bet on it.

"Emergent property" is a loaded term in philosophy of mind, so I'm not willing to enthusiastically hook my cart up to that particular horse. What I was getting at is that while everything that happens in the brain is mechanical, it isn't as easy to see this at higher levels than it is when you are looking at the most simple of processes.

If we can create artificial neural networks that exhibit the same behavior as brain structures it takes away some of the mystery of how the brain works.

But we can't. And that is in part because too many theorists dismiss out of hand some of the brain structures and processes that contribute to human consciousness.

That the behavior can be replicated with inorganic machinery suggests that there's nothing special about biological brain cells.

We can do this with only a tiny fraction of the things human brains can do, and not that well in many cases. It's too early to get excited about these kinds of results.

Individual neurons functionally are not very different from neural network nodes.

Actually, they are very, very different. Neurotransmitters released in the brain are vital for changing and modulating the processes underlying consciousness. Where are they in a mechanical neural network?

Would you have links to these models with "considerable information processing happening within a neuron"? It seems to me that the interior of a neuron is mostly the cellular machinery typical of other cells for metabolism (managing energy to operate).

Well, the one model that gets the most press (Stuart Hammeroff's) only gets the press it does because he's fooled a famous physicist into endorsing his idiotic New Age quantum consciousness bullshit. He might be right that microtubules in neurons perform computations, even computations that utilize quantum physics, but the rest of his theory is just rubbish. Here's something more defensible:

www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1310/28102013-Smart-neurons-Single-neuronal-dendrites-can-perform-computations-Hausser