Consciousness and Robots

[Strange]

Possibility 1

 

I'm a digital electronics person by profession, with "heavy for an engineer" math and science education, and I haven't yet gotten comfortable with this position. People have lots to say about it, but in the end it just comes down to transistors that are on or off and logical 1's and 0's in the software data representation - I've yet to figure out how a data pattern can have the self-awareness that I have (and presume you have as well).

 

 

 

I don't think that not being able to understand how it can happen is a good reason to reject an idea. I would recommend reading Godel, Escher and Bach (Hofstadter) if you haven't already; he gives some suggestions as to how this could be possible.

 

Possibility 3

Possibility 3 (see Donald Hoffman's "conscious agents") doesn't have to explain consciousness, since it takes it as a given, but before it can claim to be fully developed it has to be able to provide a reasonable program for how the perceived material world would match what we've actually observed.

 

This, like solipsism, seems to be unfalsifiable and isn't really worthy of consideration - other than as an idea to play with ("what if a tree falls etc").

[KipIngram]

Thank you - you're the first person that ever mentioned (to me) GEB in connection with emergent consciousness, and I've asked around about this a lot over the years in various places. Usually all I get is proposals of more layers of data structures and so on - nothing that really addresses my very fundamental misgivings about possibility 1. But that's food for thought. I did read GEB, but it was along time ago and I may now need to re-read it with this specific context in mind. Of course, I guess that would make emergent consciousness as unfalsifiable as conscious agents - the GEB point was that something can be true without being provable, and if it's true it's not falsifiable because it's not false.

 

I do suspect that possibility 3 is unfalsifiable. I wrote a long post here yesterday asking for new thoughts re: possibility 1 like the one you just gave me, but I put it in Speculations for that very reason.