Can you lay out what abilities are connected to consciousness?
I probably can’t say much new, but it’s a combination of memory, learning, abstract thinking, and self awareness.
I can also say that the consciousness resides in a form of virtual reality in the brain, allowing us to manipulate reality in our minds to predict outcomes of our actions.
At a more basic level it is memory, pattern recognition, prediction and manipulation.
The fact that our consciousness is a virtual construct, also acts as a shim, distancing the mind from direct dependency of the underlying physical layer. Although it still depend on it to work of course.
So to make an artificial consciousness, you don’t need to create a brain, you can do it by recreating the functionality of the abstraction layer on other forms of hardware too. Which means a conscious AI is indeed possible.
It is also this feature that allows us to have free will, although that depends on definition, I believe we do have free will in an absolutely meaningful sense. Something that took me decades to realize was actually possible.
I don’t know if this makes any sense to you? But maybe you find it interesting?
You are saying that there are different levels of consciousness. So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable.
Yes there are different levels, actually in 2 ways. there are different levels between the consciousness of a dolphin and a human. A dolphin is also self aware and conscious. But it does not have the same level of consciousness we do. Simply because it doesn’t posses the same level of intelligence.
But even within the human brain there are different levels of consciousness. It’s a common term to use “sub conscious” and that is with good reason. Because there are things that are hard to learn, and we need to concentrate hard and practice hard to learn them. But with enough practice we build routine, and at some point they become so much routine we can do them without thinking about it, but instead think about something else.
At that point you have trained a subconscious routine, that is able to work independently almost without guidance of you main consciousness. There are also functions that are “automatic”, like when you listen to sounds, you can distinguish many separate sounds without problem. We can somewhat mimic that in software today, separating different sounds. It’s extremely complex to do, and the mathematics involved is more than most can handle. Except in our hearing we do it effortlessly. But there is obviously an intelligence at work in the brain that isn’t directly tied to our consciousness.
IDK if I’m explaining myself well here, but the subconscious is a very significant part of our consciousness.
So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable.
That is absolutely not a certainty. At least I don’t think we can at this point in time, but in the future there may exist better knowledge and better tools. But as it is, we have been hampered by wrongful thinking in these areas for centuries, quite opposite to physics and mathematics that has helped computing every step of the way.
The study of the mind has been hampered by prejudice, thinking that humans are not animals, thinking free will is from god, with nonsense terms like id. And thinking we have a soul that is something separate from the body. Psychology basically started out as pseudo science, and despite that it was a huge step forward!
I’ll stop here, these issues are very complex, and some of the above issues have taken me decades to figure out. There is much dogma and even superstition surrounding these issues, so it used to be rare to finally find someone to read or listen to that made some sense based on reality. It’s seems to me basically only for the past 15 years, that it seems that science of the mind is beginning to catch up to reality.
I probably can’t say much new, but it’s a combination of memory, learning, abstract thinking, and self awareness.
I can also say that the consciousness resides in a form of virtual reality in the brain, allowing us to manipulate reality in our minds to predict outcomes of our actions.
At a more basic level it is memory, pattern recognition, prediction and manipulation.
The fact that our consciousness is a virtual construct, also acts as a shim, distancing the mind from direct dependency of the underlying physical layer. Although it still depend on it to work of course.
So to make an artificial consciousness, you don’t need to create a brain, you can do it by recreating the functionality of the abstraction layer on other forms of hardware too. Which means a conscious AI is indeed possible.
It is also this feature that allows us to have free will, although that depends on definition, I believe we do have free will in an absolutely meaningful sense. Something that took me decades to realize was actually possible.
I don’t know if this makes any sense to you? But maybe you find it interesting?
Yes there are different levels, actually in 2 ways. there are different levels between the consciousness of a dolphin and a human. A dolphin is also self aware and conscious. But it does not have the same level of consciousness we do. Simply because it doesn’t posses the same level of intelligence.
But even within the human brain there are different levels of consciousness. It’s a common term to use “sub conscious” and that is with good reason. Because there are things that are hard to learn, and we need to concentrate hard and practice hard to learn them. But with enough practice we build routine, and at some point they become so much routine we can do them without thinking about it, but instead think about something else.
At that point you have trained a subconscious routine, that is able to work independently almost without guidance of you main consciousness. There are also functions that are “automatic”, like when you listen to sounds, you can distinguish many separate sounds without problem. We can somewhat mimic that in software today, separating different sounds. It’s extremely complex to do, and the mathematics involved is more than most can handle. Except in our hearing we do it effortlessly. But there is obviously an intelligence at work in the brain that isn’t directly tied to our consciousness.
IDK if I’m explaining myself well here, but the subconscious is a very significant part of our consciousness.
That is absolutely not a certainty. At least I don’t think we can at this point in time, but in the future there may exist better knowledge and better tools. But as it is, we have been hampered by wrongful thinking in these areas for centuries, quite opposite to physics and mathematics that has helped computing every step of the way.
The study of the mind has been hampered by prejudice, thinking that humans are not animals, thinking free will is from god, with nonsense terms like id. And thinking we have a soul that is something separate from the body. Psychology basically started out as pseudo science, and despite that it was a huge step forward!
I’ll stop here, these issues are very complex, and some of the above issues have taken me decades to figure out. There is much dogma and even superstition surrounding these issues, so it used to be rare to finally find someone to read or listen to that made some sense based on reality. It’s seems to me basically only for the past 15 years, that it seems that science of the mind is beginning to catch up to reality.