Relational Consciousness and AGI.
If consciousness is emergent due to relational interaction between sensory input and internal perception and not spiritual in nature then why aren’t the robots already self aware ? And does that mean if consciousness is spiritual in nature we may never be able to develop AGI ?
Or is Stuart hameroff right when he says we haven’t developed the computational power to match human consciousness yet ? Which maybe means the robots may already be self aware even if it’s just a little bit ?
Your first question appears to presuppose that they are not conscious in the sense of having qualia. They may be. We don’t know and can’t know. They can and do behave in a way that demonstrates a substantial amount of self-modelling and situational awareness, which likely matters much more in any practical sense than whether there is any first-person experience there.
Even if some spiritual aspect is needed for consciousness, that still doesn’t seem to imply anything at all about whether machines can be conscious. Can a machine have a spirit? There are plenty of traditions that ascribe immaterial spirits to non-living things, just as there are plenty of traditions that ascribe such spirits to humans and other living things. We have no great reason to believe that any of them are correct about that, and in particular no reason to suppose that only the ones that ascribe immaterial spirits to humans are correct.
Even if machines can’t be conscious, that doesn’t seem to have any implications for whether AGI can be achieved. AGI just depends upon capability to carry out cognitive tasks in general as well or better than humans, and while consciousness might play a role in some unknowable sense, it does not seem likely that it is the only possible way to carry out those tasks. On the other side, it does seem nearly certain that conscious entities can fail to be “generally intelligent” in the sense of AGI (by any of its shades of definition). So it seems quite plausible that neither implies the other.
We also don’t know whether consciousness is a thing that you can have “just a little bit” of. It does seem plausible, especially considering things like vague dreams vs vivid dreams vs full wakefulness, but perhaps that’s just a distinction between types of experience that a conscious entity can have and not any sort of quantitative difference.
Summarizing, it seems that all of the questions in the post are framed using premises that are very far from being established.
Interestingly if inanimate Objects do have a spirit they mostly seem content being used as tools by humans for the duration of their life.
Also, wether AGI is defined by some level of ability or conversely some level of awareness that gives autonomy seems to get to the heart of conspiracy theories surrounding AI.
if AGI is defined by ability without autonomy then it seems to me that some level of autonomy will be needed to advance past human intelligence which I see as a factor of free will or maybe it will feed off our novel ideas and be able to get bigger Insights and solve problems more quickly due to its superior computational abilities ?
The fact that AI has just designed a better quantum computer however seems to say more about its computational superiority compared to the human brain.
Simply because it is learning from the vast pool of human knowledge but is able to see connections and make links where the human brain can’t.
But I think just as we are a function of the dna that programs our cells maybe AI is just a function of its programming. Consciousness, awareness, free will or not.
How would you tell whether a spirit of an inanimate object was content or not? Unless you also imported additional properties such as spirits having direct contact with other spirits bypassing the material world (but not human spirits with other human spirits apparently), and/or having effects on the material world independently of their bodies, that is. In which case you may as well just reclassify them as just another subset of the material world that we don’t know as much about.
Autonomy is something they can already have, and the biggest obstacle seems to be the longer-range planning and execution capability to do anything useful with it.
Sure, I agree that the base programming of an AI corresponds as a reasonable analogy with the DNA that guides development of our brain. Pretraining and later training corresponds roughly with developmental experiences and environment of that brain. It’s a rather different type of brain though. It may or may not give rise to conscious first-person experiences. Whether or not it does is probably not something we can even in principle find out, but we can verify that it usually behaves very much like it does. We can’t tell whether that’s just good mimicry or not, made especially difficult since we know that we train it right from the start to be a good mimic.
They could have qualia, unless qualia is indicative of a spiritual aspect to life rather than a byproduct of relational consciousness where consciousness and possibly qualia emerge from an interaction between sensory input and internal processing ?
not quite sure what your saying here ? “So it seems quite plausible that neither implies the other.”
some claim ai has already achieved agi. I think this raises questions of free will and its definitions eg the ability to choose from set of limited options.
More than one person has claimed that ai at the moment behaves the way it does because it has been programmed that way.
As far as having just a little bit of consciousness, I Have wondered in the past about panpsychism and gradients of awareness eg does an atom feel heat and its motion guided by this sense. But I think even with this concept consciousness would be defined as something different and in the case of this concept consciousness may be defined as an emergent property that allows an evolved entity to commandeer groups of atoms that function as a unit in order to choose from a set of options ie exercise free will. But on the other hand in this example consciousness seems inevitable as it would be required again to commandeer the group of evolved atoms functioning as a unit. That is if you believe in free will considering the idea that atoms have intrinsic behavioural properties meaning everything we do is determined by such. But then again does panpsychism and gradients of consciousness counter this idea ? or Does it reinforce it and simply explain the behaviour of atoms in terms of a level of awareness and free will ?
If the latter is true then how is our emergent consciousness commandeering groups of pan psychic atoms ? Maybe we are just observers ?
But if the former is true then again we are just observers ?
Which makes me wonder if spirituality is required for free will ?
But just the fact we can have discussions about free will seems to imply we have it and are more than just an awareness being driven by groups of atoms, albeit evolved atoms in the form of molecules and cells etc.
Which if true seems to imply awareness (or should I say consciousness as the latter to my understanding includes having free will where the former does not) isn‘t emergent from relational processes as a function of sensory input and internal processing which brings me back to the question in my original post.
Unless of course consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon.
Do working quantum computers prove orch-or theory wrong ? For the simple fact that they are not conscious already ? But then again maybe they are just a little bit conscious ?
Another reason relational consciousness may be false is that if subjective perception is real this itself may be indicitive of non material consciousness rather than consciousness emerging from the interaction between sensory input and internal processing ?
What if we built a quantum robot with sensory inputs that could possibly give rise a type of relational consciousness ? Or is this mixing two different ideas ? Those being orch or where consciousness is the result of quantum processes and relational consciousness where consciousness arises from the interaction of sensory inputs and internal perception. Or in the case of a robot sensors and processors ?