[ExI] Trilemma of Consciousness

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 27, 2017 at 10:25 AM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:


> ​> ​
> it
> ​ ​
> started back in the Darwin days. As people realized that animals could be
> smart too,


​And after reading Darwin the obvious question to ask is "Evolution can't
directly detect consciousness any better than I can and yet I know for a
fact it managed to produce it at least once, how did it do that?". The only
answer is that consciousness is a unavoidable byproduct of intelligent
behavior. I think "consciousness is the way data feels like when it is
being processed" is a brute fact so it is pointless to ask how or why.


> ​> ​
> they started raising the bar from intelligence to consciousness
> ​ ​
> without really defining either
>

​But they had something far far better than definitions, examples. We all
have billions of examples of intelligence and one example of consciousness.
 ​


>
> The Turing Test has nothing to do with Turing Machines, the test is
>> ​ ​
>> agnostic as to how the subject manages to produce the observed behavior,
>> ​ ​
>> it's irrelevant.
>
>
> ​> ​
> Yes. That is why I call it the generalized Turing test (GTT) to
> ​ ​
> distinguish it from the historical Turing test


​
I don't understand, are you saying the
​ ​
historical Turing test
​ ​
will work for consciousness as well as intelligence, or are you proposing
some new test that could distinguish between a
​ ​
intelligent conscious being and a intelligent
​ ​
non-conscious being? If so then Evolution must have used that test too, but
then it must be based on behavior because
​behavior is​
 what improves survival chances not consciousness, but if it's based on
behavior then it's just the standard vanilla
​ ​
Turing Test.

Consciousness theories are a dime a dozen because unlike intelligence
theories there is no way to prove or disprove any of them, so I have no
doubt one of those theories could be used to make a consciousness test fine
tuned
​ ​
to make sure humans passed
​ ​
it
​ ​
but
​ ​
computers
​
didn't (such as consciousness theory#93,642: conscious beings must be
squishy)
​ ​
but there would be no reason to think
​ ​
the theory was
​ ​
correct
​ ​
or that
​ ​
the test actually worked.

John K Clark




>
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