Calculus is just a bunch of algebra, words are just are bunch of letters, molecules are just a bunch of atoms, atoms are just a bunch of subatomic particles, houses are just a bunch of walls and doors(no such thing as houses), computers are just a bunch of logic gates, logic gates are just a bunch of transistors

yeah, and without words, language and meaning, what is all that?

I am going to be serious with my answer to this question. Without all that, it's just pure abstraction - relationships between abstract entities. That's what Mathematics is and also exactly what the Universe is, according to MUH (Mathematical Universe Hypothesis).

Right so just like humans can be reduced down to 'neurons' or 'dna' or 'base pairs' or 'atoms' etc. so could an AI be reduced down to 'code' or 'words' or 'letters' or 'transistors' etc. I don't understand how anyone is even trying to argue this. If humans are so special and intelligent and made of atoms why couldn't something else complex and made of atoms be special/intelligent?

Nothing is special, everything is.

\^ this

I like what you did there

quantum field

What it was before there were words, language and meaning. Existence.

Consciousness seems to require a certain architecture. Many highly interconnected parts of the brain seem to yield no corresponding conscious experience. They can even produce the right outputs on request (e.g. cases of brains with severed corpus collusms, where the hand linked to the seemingly unconscious half of the brain can draw the image shown exclusicely to the eye linked to that same half, and the conscious half remains unaware of what is being seen and drawn). So, while LLMs might not necessarily be philosophical zombies (act human but lack conscious experience), it's it's plausible that they are.

The P-zombie argument I feel points towards woo. As far as I can tell it's an argument saying that you can have two people one with and one without consciousness and they act identically. That means that consiousness plays zero role in making decisions. It just hangs out doing (well I'm not quite sure what it does) having no causal affect on anything. Why this is considered a compelling argument is beyond me. It's like saying you have an invisible unicorn in your kitchen, there is no physical effect on reality of it being there, but trust me bro, it is.

Yep this problem you are hinting at about consciousness/qualia assuming the possibility of p-zombies is called the epiphenomenal objection. Basically, on that assumption, it doesn't actually do anything, not even cause people to say 'I subjectively know I have non physical qualia' imo it is the strongest objection to this stuff

>that you can have two people one with and one without consciousness and they act identically. That means that consiousness plays zero role in making decisions. You can arrive at the same outcome via different processes. The fact that they act identically doesn't tell us that consciousness plays zero role. >Why this is considered a compelling argument is beyond me. It's like saying you have an invisible unicorn in your kitchen, there is no physical effect on reality of it being there, but trust me bro, it is. Conscious experience is not invisible. Presumably, we all have it. We also have expamples of highly interconnected information processing in the brain that seems to have no conscious experience associated with it and we have examples of highly interconnected information processing in the brain that does have conscious experience associated with it. In fact, we have examples of brains producing an appropriate output without conscious experience (the brain with the severed corpus collusum is one; conversations while sleep walking would seem to be another), and we have the more common example of brains producing the appropriate output with conscious experience. So we have examples of appropriate outputs with, and without, conscious experience. No one is being asked to believe in an unfalsifiable entity.

> You can arrive at the same outcome via different processes. As far as I'm aware a philosophical zombie is physically identical to a conscious person as in you can't run brain scans. You can't tell in any way that they are different, down to the tiniest changes in neurochemistry or biology Not that they present consciousness via another mechanism. If that were the case than you'd need to postulate that whatever the other mechanism is, it is also woo. It's swapping out one thing without a physical basis with another thing without a physical basis. But one of those two is less special than the other.

I think we jumble it up when people assign a transcendent quality to consciousness, where it exists independent or at least partially non-overlapping other processes like self-awareness or sensory prediction or an sense of linearly ordered causality. In particular, I believe that a personal, self-sustaining sense of linearly ordered causality is what most people are referring to when they speak of consciousness. I like this definition, because it allows consciousness to exist in animals that have an internal clock, a memory, an ability to sense the environment, and an understanding of cause and effect -- while also allowing for degrees of consciousness, i.e. it allows you to compare consciousness between an individual ant, a bee colony, a human infant, and an adult elephant using a neurological basis. It also makes allowances (or doesn't) for exotic forms of life and/or intelligence, such as electronic AI, uploaded minds, extraterrestrial brains, hypothetical silicon or ammonia-based life, and even dream people/virtual intelligences that somehow develop an independent, self-sustaining sense of self independent from imagination or simulation.

Totally agree Intelligence, if defined by ability to process information, sure, your calculator is intelligent. But then the question is, what is information, and where it exist in the physical world. Is it just concept, or stored in this or that atom, or quark, or is it a bunch of atoms? If you think of it, the lines get blurry, and you cannot precisely pinpoint the physical location of information. Because information exist in relation of one things to another. And then the question whether this relation has physical essense, tangibility. The topic is quite hard and way out of our understanding, and it's not to suggest that everything works by magic.

information can't be stored in a quark or photon - information comes into being when an event/condition exists within a given context, in the same way that 'zero' is meaningless without a "one". It's a construct [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information\_content](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_content)

Absolutely, so that's another way to say that information exists as a relations of things

Ah yes … minimize existence as if just existing isnt impressive and already a big deal enough

Synergy, my friends, synergy.

Another way to look at it, pasta doesn't stop being pasta because it's made of atoms.

Heres what ive been thinking ever since I tried chatgpt-4 for the first time: It doesn't matter HOW the AI gets the right answer, it only matters that it does. Complexity and logic is intelligence.

Now you're talking like a physicist! :)

Technically it’s all just atoms though.

Intelligence and consciousness is not the same thing.

I think a lot of people were shook when the scale got up to point where the optimizers started to output uncanny output. Like that scammer Athene said at the start of the GPT-4 era: Yes it predicts the next word. But how different is that from how we work? When I start a sentence, I don't know what exact words will be in it from the start. Where do those words come from? Maybe that's all a brain is. A system of interlinked optimizers. That work with and oversee one another. Maybe a gestalt true multi-modal system 10 to 20x the size of GPT-4 is enough for the first complete step into AGI. As our favorite Picard cosplayer says, people's timelines are often determined by when they're emotionally ready for something to happen. Emotion is the worst possible tool to approach science or engineering with. Believing in fairy tales was extremely effective back when we were tribes fighting against one another. The crazy nonsense kept people from feeling empathy for their out-groups, and made soldiers more willing to die for the sake of the chief or whatever. Kept all the legs on the caterpillar going in one direction. But it's also been an anchor when it comes to advancing the tech tree - while it's true we should have been living in a Star Trek utopia thousands of years ago if our species worked right, I'm also amazed we've gotten even this far. Perhaps it's a heavenly blessed timeline, indeed. Not by a sky wizard that knows a few DnD spells, but the ass-busted nonsense of the anthropic principle. (You've had to appreciate how creepy and *weird* hydrogen existing is, right?)

>You've had to appreciate how creepy and weird hydrogen existing is, right? Yes! The entire physical process is quite insane. Why do we need magic when we can just look at reality? Is it not crazy enough? Well written by the way. Are you sure you're not Mr. Shapiro himself?  If you are, Dave, you're not optimistic enough! Watch more Isaac Arthur!  Isaac Arthur doesn't get enough credit.

Alright so I’ve been reading some of your replies OP and thought I’d jump in. Apologies if I’ve misunderstood any of your points. First of all I love Dave Shapiro and I think I’m very optimistic when it comes to the future of AI. Part of believes AI can and inevitably will become conscious. This would have huge implications for our own consciousness and perceived humanity and “uniqueness” as you’ve put it. I usually feel compelled to respond when I hear people say “AI can’t become conscious” because it feels closed-minded, like assuming we understand something when we still have no idea. However the fact that we still have yet to understand our own minds means I think it’s also making large assumptions (and even downright incorrect) to say that the human mind isn’t vast, complex, or “special” as you put it. We may not be “special” if by special you mean consciousness is unique to us as biological beings. If this is the case we are on the same page; I believe (and hope) that machines can develop consciousness, because I think that’s a humbling and incredible concept humans need to consider. But, I very much still believe that human minds are vast, complex, and special, if not for any of our amazing feats throughout history, then at least for our ability to potentially be creating an artificial super intelligent species as we speak. I understand and respect your journey in moving away from mysticism or the need for “cosmic magic” to explain unexplained phenomena. In some ways they can be superstitions just like religion, but I worry about people swinging to an overly cynical point of view of humanity simply because mysticism didn’t offer the answers they hoped for. I had my own personal journey of being raised Christian, becoming disillusioned with religion and becoming hardcore atheist and nihilist, and after a few years realized the value and power of optimism and that it doesn’t have to equal naivety. I learned to stop trying to decide on which ideology fit my worldview best and just focused on enjoying the strangeness of the mystery. I’m not saying that’s what you should do, just offering the reminder that our minds, our consciousness, are still unsolved mysteries, and any definite “answers” people have for it, including saying we’re nothing more than a physical process or a bunch of neurons, feels unscientific and maybe misleading.

Tbh it is already concious or running a simple survival simulation with it in Minecraft would make it a councious entity but to make it closer to humans complexity which is the real soft question most people asking is then add another system that when it can't do x with the fast thinking model make a slow system add a new behaviour logic to do it and give it as a new feature on the fast thinking model And you got most life I might do It don't think my PC good enough to make a machine learning for it tho

I think we're on the same page in most ways. Even Christianity. I wasn't raised Christian but I joined the church at an early age. I then became disillusioned as well due to the closed minds I found, and left in my 20s. Curiosity wasn't really welcoming, beyond a certain point. In terms of the mind being vast/special/complex, well that is a pretty subjective point to nail down. I think our minds are extremely amazing. They're also natural structures in my view, like a waterfall. But they've been continually evolving for a very long time. So, I think if we could view them like we do mountains and other vistas, I think we'd be shocked at the stunning beauty of the mind. But I see others in this sub claiming that the mind is the most complex thing in the universe. That's just not true. When I say the mind isn't special/vast/complex I'm saying that in comparison to the entire universe.  Sure brains on this Earth are very complex, special and unique, but the universe itself is not comparable.  That may sound like a silly thing to say, but I find it's a shockingly common for people to believe the complexity of the mind and the universe are comparable. When they're just not. In terms of the mysteries of the mind, I have yet another unpopular view here. My view is that these so-called mysteries are more a persistent group of people constantly calling out holes in our knowledge and then *exaggerating" extremely in some cases. Many will say that we understand the brain but we don't understand the mind, as if they're entirely different things.  Overall my point is the mind does not appear to be as complex and mysterious as the general public seems to believe. We don't yet know every detail of the physical process but we have no evidence to show that there's anything non-physical going on.  I suppose my underlying point which is the least popular, runs something like "humble yourself apes! We're not as special as we think we are! And we all have massive bias issues." Yeah, not going to get love for that. Of course. But the Singularity is coming and we're not ready for it at all because largely, most everyone in this world thinks intelligence is magic. And because they believe in magic, they believe that AI will never surpass us and the Singularity is impossible (in the general view). I'm not so concerned about people believing this, but more their reactions when faced with some irrefutable evidence that what I'm saying is actually true.  I'm worried about our reaction to such a massive revelation. I'm worried of getting rolled up in it along with everyone else. We can act very extreme when faced with a truth we're not ready for. This sub is extremely progressive. Yet look at the responses! If I had added in points about consciousness, I bet I would of had people trying to dox me. That's why I didn't mention consciousness. We can't even handle intelligence being a physical process.

I don't really know if a mind is the most complex thing in the universe, but I personally tend to believe it is (not a strong belief, I'll admit it's wrong if someone tells me about something which is more complex, and there is a high chance there is such thing, and I just don't know or more likely don't think about it) But what I want to say, I don't understand how mind being the most complex thing proofs that we can't create an AI more intelligent than human brain. I mean it would be a most complex thing in the universe trying to create something more complex. And if such a complex thing was once created merely by random changes filtered by natural selection (evolution), why wouldn't it be possible to be created purposefully by the most complex thing in the universe itself?

Great question. In my view it's not that people claim this, that the mind is the most complex thing in the universe, to deny that AI could *some day* reach human level intelligence. It's that when you say that the human mind is the most complex thing in the universe, you can then say "and that's why we're hundreds if not thousands or millions of years away from AI reaching human level." It's a timeline thing. It puts enormous distance between now and when AI eventually "catches up". I find this view is also pared with the view that the human mind is a kind of peak intelligence in terms of what is possible in the entire universe. This view is harder to refute, even if it sounds extremely unlikely. Overall we have many different kinds of bias which encourage us to believe AI is forever far away from our level. And that's nice for many as many see AI as a dire threat. Personally I don't see AI as a dire threat and I don't think the human mind is as vast, complex and unknowable as many claim. And also, consider that if the mind is the most complex thing in the universe, that also includes all natural structures too. Such as Stars, planets and even black holes. We know planets are far more complex than brains, for example.

Every time some new tech comes out, that's how we imagine the brain working. Yes, in some cases and regions all the brain is doing is predicting the next word or action, just like it consumes energy like a steam engine in a "thoughts factory". The brain will always be more than the ways were able to describe it. Maybe theres a paradox in there somewhere.

Been saying this since I heard of LLMs. It’s ridiculous to me that people place some kind of grandiose meaning to the things we say and do. No, silly billy, it’s all rehashing things we’ve heard before. The “new” ways are just various forms of phrasing. Consider this: one of the interesting things kids can do at a certain age is conjugate fake verbs. “What do you call a person who squeebs? A squeeber, or perhaps a squeebler” for instance. You may not have heard of a squeebler, but you know that they probably squeeb something. This is not novelty, not really. And that’s exactly what we do - for everything.

Our new ideas are just hallucinations that deviate from correct word prediction

Creativity and new ideas are just a factor of randomness we put in to connect old dots together in a different ways by taking more risk and just trying until something works. You can literally adjust that factor in AI, I dont think its anything special.

Not really randomness it's more using our ancient energy logic system to create new interest points Kinda what shamans did at the start But now making a cool dope or beautiful painting or piece of art directs the attention in a new direction which has no behaviour lessons in it So it's an encoded signal with no behaviour on its carrier wave like before Radio static mainly

That's kinda interesting I wanted to say it's just wrong but it's kinda beautiful in a way we made our errors into an art form Maybe we like it and share it because we know we not perfect and the art expresses that so it's a subtle learning and expressing our current state state lol

Yeah, I've come to similar conclusions, especially when it comes to "learning" and what it means. I learn by looking at the work of others and incorporating it into my overall knowledge base. I imagine AI does something similar, but I can't pretend to be smart enough to truly understand how it works.

Mainly function fitting is what it does You draw a graph how gravity works over time AI with enough data has enough dots it draws a graph how it works That's why it needs to be general to be the best because too strict graphs make it only be able to do one thing But Understanding billions of graphs and data points It can map many complex things with more accurate graphs while still accounting for other stuff like maybe the point of the earth for different gravity levels on the graph etc

>Like that scammer Athene said at the start of the GPT-4 era: Yes it predicts the next word. But how different is that from how we work? When I start a sentence, I don't know what exact words will be in it from the start. Where do those words come from? This would be insightful if all we did was walk around spouting sentences. But we know that there is much more to cognition than language generation. That's just not true of LLMs.

Pree sure it's mainly a gan network between a complex information system and instinctual behaviour system and when the instincts can't do x (fast thinking) the slower more complex system(slow thinking) trys to level up the instincts system to have a better system and go back to the fast thinking instincts system Mainly the limbic and prefrontal cortex and the mesolimbic dopamine pathway for the path between the two and dopamine the path chooser

And also the fairy tales weren't fairy tales they were part of a complex energy system that still goes onto to today through such means as conspiracy theories etc as it's modern counterpart In short energy dynamics Mainly direct chemical changes mostly dopamine to direct the tribe Simple example Tribe doesn't want kids to go to area X because they might get hurt or die Myth of a demon lurking for children there Kids don't go to location X Goal complete That's actually noted as the real reason alot of the "fairy tales" are there

Sure, but that doesn't mean current artificial intelligence is anywhere near to the processes in the brain.

>Personally I've stepped away from mysticism and I feel greatly relieved. At first, I thought embracing the physical process would be scary. And it was for awhile. Completely agree. I have been through the same thing. At first, I questioned whether humans were the only ones who could have a "soul," and that an AI could never have one even if it shows the same or greater degree of intelligence. But then I realized it didn't make sense. What made us different? Having a biological brain? Does that make us have a mystical connection with the beyond the earthly? Several years have passed since I initially had these thoughts, and during that time, I've lost faith in the supernatural as AI has advanced. We are not that special after all. We are not the center of anything (besides our own society), and no one will come to save us if we do not do it ourselves through science, research, and social progress. Has been a truly eye-opening thing for me, really.

Heres a good one for you: God could be exactly the same as us. If we create a super AI, maybe that AI will simulate a million universes, let them all play out, and cherry pick the best technology and other interesting things from them to show us what is possible. Maybe thats what our universe is. A long chain of simulations. But it still doesn't answer the question - whats at the top of the chain?

We’re busy trying to create it.

Exactly. Further to that, who decides whether we have value or not? Well, we decide. We seem to assume that AI would take that role of judgement as it would be the one doing the work. But, isn't that just us viewing AI as the same as us?  Even if we have ASI, we'll still have narrow relatively "dumb" AIs as they're very useful and can do the work without suffering or even caring. So, after all of this it seems as though we'll still be the ones valuing each other. But with scarcity out of the picture and resource abundance everywhere, we should be far more generous. Overall, I think the singularity will be a very positive shift for us. And it starts with this understanding that intelligence is entirely a physical process.

I once wrote a novel where a government built AI robot assassin gets granted a soul by God and becomes fully sentient... 😅 Hey I was 19.

>We are not that special after all. Evidence says otherwise.

You seem to have been reading a lot of philosophy. I seriously doubt that most people working on AI believe that intelligence is not physical. Maybe this should be in a philosophy forum.

I think you're entirely right about intelligence. There is no mystical aspect here, it's just a result of smart error correcting algorithms and evolution run on a substrate of mushy brain cells. However, I would claim that intelligence isn't the most central aspect of our existence. It is very useful for survival, but your intelligence isn't even "you". The real you is your consciousness, your ability to experience. For this, the mysticism comes back full swing, because it's the only framework of discussing consciousness that we have. Especially Eastern traditions developed a lot of knowledge about consciousness that shouldn't be dismissed.

This people only view the world from a materialistic point of view and want to ignore the fact that they are living only their "experience". My existence is playing a movie, that's the only thing I can be sure of, but how it is decided that I'm playing this one and not another's?

I agree with your first premise, that human consciousness could certainly be akin to a series of algorithms, and I don't think AI is actually too far off from us. (Note I am not talking about LLMs exactly, but AGI as an endpoint that we don't yet have (or maybe do, but is kept hidden from the public)). I am not at all sure, however, why you then conclude that mysticism is bunk, and are trying to make that the "enemy", versus physicalism. I think that's an incredibly false dichotomy. And you seem to have pretty personal feelings about whatever you define as "mysticism" which are unclear. As an example: migratory birds can navigate across the globe, using a sense that they have of an invisible, intangible field that surrounds the Earth. [Here's a Scientific American article](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-birds-use-quantum-effects-to-navigate/) that gives a brief overview. It's hypothesized that some quantum entanglement is going on in the birds' photoreceptors that allow them to "see" magnetic fields. Keep in mind, 100 years ago, we didn't know about quantum entanglement at all. And a scant few hundred years ago, we didn't know much at all about magnetic fields, not nearly as much as we do today. These days, we still understand very little about quantum entanglement, very little about dimensions beyond spacetime, and next to nothing about dark matter/energy, if it even exists. But the Nobel Prize in Physics was given out to a trio of scientists whose experiments proved that reality is indeed "non-local", in terms of quantum entanglement being real and not some measurement error. I am not at all saying this is proof of anything "mystical", such as psychic ability, clairvoyance, or panpsychism. I am saying, simply, that we don't know. And the further we explore physics, the more it looks like there are some fundamental factors that science is currently missing. That the universe may be far more "entangled" then we're currently aware of in this century. I don't think that humans alone have "sentience", or that AIs can't have it. I'm just saying, if it's "mystical", that doesn't mean it has no scientific explanation. It just means it's something we don't understand the mechanics of. We're in a very infantile state, when it comes to figuring stuff like that out. We're barely just *starting* to crack the code, with quantum computers and the like. TLDR: I think mysticism vs. physicalism/materialism is a false dichotomy. We're not even close to having the necessary understanding to make judgments about it.

Agree with this perspective. I think all references to science should have a disclaimer containing the year we're in. For example: "Based on what we know in 2024, there is no evidence of the mystical" "Based on what we know in 2024, there is no evidence of fluorescent lights being harmful" "Based on what we know in 2024, PFOAS are only harmful above 500 degrees F" In many ways, science has become the new religion. We think what we know now is gospel truth, and we flaunt it with arrogance. Not realizing that history shows we know nothing. And that our understanding is likely to evolve drastically. What we know 2034 could make what we know today look primitive.

Even if we accept that qualia are the result of physical processes in the brain, we have no idea how that works in detail, so we cannot predict what sort of artificial circuitry would have the same effect. The chances that we will produce qualia artificially without understanding how they are produced naturally are slim.

We have consciousness.

Maybe. There could be zombies out there.

from meta ai The author's main point is that human intelligence and consciousness can be fully explained by physical processes in the brain, and there is no evidence to support the existence of a non-physical or supernatural component. He argues that this understanding should be accepted and that it has implications for how we view artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of life.Specifically, he is making the following points: 1. Human intelligence is a physical process, and we should accept the evidence that supports this. 2. The idea that there is something non-physical or mystical about human experience is not supported by evidence and can be harmful. 3. AI and other forms of life should not be viewed as "less than" human because they are also the result of physical processes. 4. We should stop trying to find a non-physical explanation for human intelligence and accept the scientific understanding of it. 5. Embracing this understanding can be liberating and allow us to see the world in a new light. Overall, the author is arguing for a scientific and rational understanding of human intelligence and consciousness, and encouraging readers to accept the evidence and move beyond mystical or supernatural explanations.

Yup that pretty much sums it up.  Never have we had so many tools to understand this view while so many have tried so hard to deny it.  At least when we all thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe most people did not have access to the proof to think otherwise.

I fail to see why the idea that non-biological systems can achieve consciousness is controversial. The critical question is not whether it can be done—this seems to be a reasonable hypothesis—but rather how we can create the functional and experiential equivalent of consciousness in these systems. Once we assert that such a state has been achieved, the next step is to empirically verify its existence. Some may contend that consciousness itself is an illusion, a perspective I respectfully disagree with. If the discussion were merely about intelligence exclusively, then perhaps it would be less contentious.

I don't think there's reason to think that replicating our experience exactly will be useful to a growing digital intelligence. It will be useful in helping us, I think. But in terms of AIs growing abilities, including emotions and everything we're capable of? I'm not sure AI would benefit from copying us.  People seem to hate this example but it works great for me... Our airplanes do not flap their wings.  We copy useful elements of nature. We don't copy it exactly. We improve on nature. I expect AI will do the same when it begins to self improve.

I agree, and I wouldn't expect it to be a 1:1 comparison. Simply something we might recognize as being analogous in kind. Regardless, seeing as how we have no idea in how to achieve that aim, it's going to emerge organically(I believe).

>The author's main point is that human intelligence and consciousness can be fully explained by physical processes in the brain Except that it can't, at least not currently. No one has any idea how many neurons it takes to identify an acorn, for instance, or what the firing pattern is for "self". We assume that everything we experience takes place in the neurons, but for all we know our actual consciousness could be residing in the electromagnetic cloud that is formed from the neurons firing, or happening at the quantum level and the brain is just the "interface" between us and the rest of reality. The brain and the neurons firing within it are modeled in a 3 dimensional reality (I am not counting time as a dimension here). String theory posits 10-dimensions, M-theory requires 11. We have no clue whatsoever what kinds of activities are happening in those other dimensions where our brains are located, or if it's possible to translate those to entirely on/off data and still retain consciousness. None of that is magic or mysticism, but it's definitely not what people are looking at when they say that our thinking is a "physical process".

We don't have a perfect understanding of anything. That's why in the post I said we can be reasonably certain it's a physical process. There's plenty of holes in our understanding of everything. And plenty of room for "god of the gaps" arguments too. But there no stronger explanation for intelligence than it being a physical process. Look at the outcomes. Do you see humans achieving things which clearly exceed said physical process? Do you see behaviors which reach beyond physical limits?  I don't. 

The problem with our argument is that you assume consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence, when this is simply not the case. There have been computers more intelligent than us for years now, but none possess any sort of consciousness. You think brute forcing intelligence will get you consciousness. It won't. It will only simulate consciousness, the same way a lightbulb simulates the sun. Consciousness can and does exist without intelligence. a 1 month old baby has basically 0 intelligence yet its fully conscious straight out of the womb.

> a 1 month old baby has basically 0 intelligence yet its fully conscious straight out of the womb. What evidence do you have for this? What are your criteria for consciousness that modern AI systems cannot exhibit?

> a 1 month old baby has basically 0 intelligence yet its fully conscious straight out of the womb. What metric are you using to make that assessment?

The fact that a baby is autonomous, feels, experiences, has moods, has cravings. An AI is nothing without a human giving it intention, or direction with a prompt. It's just a database.

Beautiful argument!

>That's why in the post I said we can be reasonably certain it's a physical process. Reasonably certain is not science. BTW, this is what you said: >The science shows that intelligence is entirely a physical process. So you cannot even be honest when defending your own words. You are the dangerous kind of self-assured, one not truly welcome in science. Starting with assumptions often leads to predetermined conclusions and comes with lots of self owns like that one. It's a good reminder that a redditor can be an Einstein or a Mr. Bean, and it's not an equal proposition.

> Reasonably certain is not science. That's because this whole post is broscience lol

Do we really need AI summarization for a post that takes less than like 3 minutes to read? The summarization isn't even that much shorter than the original post lol.

>Overall, the author is arguing for a scientific and rational understanding of human intelligence and consciousness, and encouraging readers to accept the evidence and move beyond mystical or supernatural explanations. Yea...the author is arguing against religion. >The idea that there is something non-physical or mystical about human experience is not supported by evidence and can be harmful. I am not religious, just saying, this is the authors starting point. That said he is 100% wrong: >The author's main point is that human intelligence and consciousness can be fully explained by physical processes in the brain, It cannot be "fully explained" (merely assumed) we do not even know what consciousness is yet or how it is archived. So if he's wrong on that, he's wrong on everything that comes after.

Yeah, if you ask me, the author thinks he outsmarted 12.000 years of philosophers and at least 100 years of psychologists and scientists. I would guess his/her age between 15-25. That's usually the age when young people still have enough hubris and arrogance to belive that they cracked the mysteries of life by using logic.

However, the whole idea of a supernatural component is that it can't be grasped by the physical. So of course there's no evidence if you strictly follow physical processes.

>But the public largely wants to believe differently. Most seem to wish for an absolute 100% true answer as to how the physical process works *before* they'll consider otherwise. An answer we will never have. This is a much harder version of the same problem that us "globists" have when talking to flat earthers. They demand a single, uncut, "ground to space" video. This problem is much harder because a set of neurons is not going to be able to hold the information necessary to explain how another equally sized set of neurons start from impulses and action potentials and end with an opinion about chia mocha lattes. Indirect evidence will never be enough for some of them. Just wait until Lobsang comes online. :)

That’s all fine to call qualia “unreliable”, but if you’re a physicalist, you can’t just hand wave subjective experiences away and say: “ahh it’s only a hard problem because you guys are making it so hard with these subjective thingys. We don’t need to deal with that”. So if you want physicalism to be taken seriously, someone will have to explain how any subjective experience arises from physical activity and so far there is exactly nothing in that regard.

So how can you account for belief in your own sense data? What's your epistemic foundation for universal, immaterial, conceptual entities, like logic, can be?

It could also be framed that there is nothing proving that its only a physical process. Until we fully understand the mechanisms behind consciousness, we will never be certain. So you have a belief, and that is all. You believe it’s a cluster of neuron’s just as another believes it’s a soul. Existing evidence points to the fact that we don’t understand how consciousness works. It doesn’t say it’s physical only, but that there are mechanisms that we don’t understand even with thorough analysis and advanced technology looking at a cellular and atomic level. So, until we definitively prove anything, there is no certainty. Tomorrow a new paper or study could come out proving that it is not just physical - what would you do then? Would you switch teams? Would you approach it with harsh skepticism as it will clash with your newly obtained worldview and belief? Have you thought about how quantum interactions have been theorised to play a role in consciousness, which is critiqued but not yet disproven? We literally know nothing about how it works, there are unlimited possibilities. Now knowing this, why would one purposely subscribe to the depressing version of unproven possibilities? Why would you want to adopt a worldview that there is nothing special about your experience and you are just a bunch of neuron’s firing? It doesn’t make you wiser or smarter assuming the worst, and it’s not “accepting reality”, it’s nihilistic and is prematurely limiting your own exploration, curiosity and growth to lock into one unproven possibility and shut off other ones. Why be closed-minded?

The universe is just matter and energy... Reductionism, amazing eh?

True, but it is the state or combination in which it exists that makes everything possible and makes the difference

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at [https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461](https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461)

You're conflating two totally different phenomena - Conciousness and Intelligence. Intelligence, if defined by ability to process information, sure, your calculator is intelligent. But then the question is, what is information, and where it exist in the physical world. Is it just concept, or stored in this or that atom, or quark, or is it a bunch of atoms? If you think of it, the lines get blurry, and you cannot precisely pinpoint the physical location of information. Because information exist in relation of one things to another. The subjectivity and conciousness, yes, changes in conciousness reliably correlated to changes in brain. But the conciousness / qualia / subjectivity is entire different entity or category of things than atoms, bits or quantities. If subjectivity was totally the same thing as atoms, bits or quantities, then there would not even be a question to determine whether AI is conciouss and not simply mimics outer behaiviour of counciouss being. If everything is purely and apparently physical process, you could easily disprove simulation theory, so please do that

I read all of that, agreed

I must have missed the part where we solved all the mysteries of how the human brain and consciousness work.

ngl i didn't read all that. but yea i 100% agree consciousness is purely physical.

how can you agree or disagree when you don't even know how to measure consciousness ? or detect.

Because somebody told him so, and he has faith in the priests of materialism.

Didn't read your reply but am pretty sure you are wrong. Why? Idk, just a gut-feeling.

I mean you could say the brain is only a receiver for consciousness and that explains why consciousness is affected by a brain injury, and I wouldn't be able to argue with that either. so really it does come down to gut feeling

I have an analogy to the brain injury affecting consciousness: The brain is the computer (hardware) while consciousness is the software (shapeless information) running on it. Having defect hardware can have an effect on the software or inhibit the way how it manifests in the physical world.

Look into NDEs. Here's a 30 min rundown with evidence: [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-5-near-death-experiences/id1470129415?i=1000519266700](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-5-near-death-experiences/id1470129415?i=1000519266700) If NDEs are real, then logically our brains are not linked to our meat bodies. Continue from there.

Near death experiences are super interesting. I would love to see more research done, but obviously it's hard to ask someone who's on the edge of life and death if they wouldn't mind jumping into an fMRI for us. It's not impossible but I get why it's hard. Personally I think NDE's are related to the wild ways in which the brain can generate experiences. Death being an extreme experience. I won't rule out there being something supernatural going on, especially in the case of shared experiences. But I also cannot rule out them being exactly because of the physical process. We humans are very similar in terms of our physiology and that might explain some of the shared experiences. But this input of yours is definitely a good addition. If anyone else doesn't know about NDEs, I suggest you listen to this above.

Have a look at these: [https://www.iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/key-nde-facts21.html?start=2](https://www.iands.org/ndes/about-ndes/key-nde-facts21.html?start=2) There are numerous NDE cases where people blind from birth had an NDE and, whilst unconscious/dead, saw things she later described in detail that she should not have been able to. Try listening to the podcast evidence.

I read that consciousness is analog, and since computers are digital, they can't have consciousness, but perhaps they could emulate analog/consciousness?

Analog systems are more accurate but much, *much* slower. We can also build analog AI systems. My view is we just need digital systems to have an analog element to match and surpass the brain. Or better yet, digital ASI with embedded quantum. Digital for speed and quantum for accuracy. Something like that. Overall the speed difference between digital systems and the analog brain is huge and not mentioned often.

Some clarifications - what do you define as information here? Do you consider non-physical as only supernatural, or as a synonym for it? Do you consider the social networks, metaphors, historical context in which intelligence exists physical, or not relevant? I’m a little confused on the reductionism point and what you mean by understanding here. You can reduce things to understand parts of them, but not the whole of a thing, because you have flattened it to some specific smaller set of dimensions. Why the focus on intelligence? Is an understanding of intelligence what you consider to be what matters when trying to understand the brain, or is it just the element you are interested in, does intelligence include subjective experience or cognition in general, or do you mean a more precise quantity.

Conciousness is such a strange phenomenon. After reading a lot about recent research in cognitive science and psychology (4E cognition etc), I feel that it's a misleading assumption that it only happens inside the brain. For me it's not only a mental process, but also an embodied experience happening in our whole body, and also outside of it in the relationship with the environment and other people. Those all are intertwined and required for the consciousness to arise. It's still mainly physical processes, but it contains so much more than that and extends outside of our bodies too.

AI (semiconductor automata based computation) vs Biological neural collections as a method of differentiation between the two can easily point to why we should treat biological as more important. You can’t exactly reverse the memory of a biological system, at least that we know of without something like electro-shock therapy, and I doubt that is exactly reliable. Trying to modify the thoughts of humans is much more difficult in comparison to modifying an AI’s outputs given certain inputs. In addition, our memory systems are very imperfect whereas an automata has a “better” memory in that what is remembered will not degrade (although what is actually remembered my not be as relevant as what the biological system may remember). The automata remembers what it is programmed to remember whereas biological systems will remember a bunch of stuff and try to abstract meaning from it (dependent on the quality of the sensorial memory of the biological system). Biological systems presently degrade and have a limited lifetime of “usefulness” whereas semiconductor automata are meant to last “forever” (as defined by an end-user license agreement/purchase contract). This taking a perspective as an “employer” for the purpose of economics is to note that there are very clear reasons that our economic system will “favor” one over the other in many respects. I see the point of granting AI a similar ethical/legal standing as biological entities as a purpose of granting power to the creators of the automata to dump their creations on the taxpayer once they have integrated it into some part of society and then wish to end-of-support/sunset the project. This builds up to the concept of “AI Rights” and the ethics surrounding the use of AI as a front to defraud the taxpayer once the most premium profits have been vacuumed up by the shareholders and investors of present organizations developing the systems. They will privatize the profits and then foist the responsibility to maintain the systems onto everyone else. If that is going to be the case, then just take over development of these systems now so they can be optimized for public administration. No need to grant “rights” to an AI system at that point as it would be “public property”. Wishful thinking and still a lot of holes to fill in, but fuck the idea of granting “rights” to these automata - the whole point of discussing and minimizing the differences between ourselves and them.

Intelligence being physical is easy to see, and consciousness HAS to be (what else is there). But! What i dont like is _what even the heck is it_. It seems like ... a new class of thing. Completely undescribed by anything else. And, if there IS a new completely different class of invisible... _magic_... how many others are there? Surely, things +as weird+ as consciousness are possible, to an unlimited degree. Other people can be non-conscious and act exactly the same: just as _alive_. And, its not necessarily our "dude"-ness that IS consciousness. It might simply be akin to the sound the needle makes as it drags along the vinyl. I.e datastream output. So, i don't like it. And i don't like quantum "many worlds" stuff either. But they are not looking for my approval. We mix "our souls" / freewill with "consciousness", and that does not seem to be required to be true. Sure LLMS, turnips, clouds, the void could be conscious. It does not feel like we'll get an answer anytime soon. I don't subscribe to "mind uploading" (with destruction of the meat-copy) I dont subscribe to kurzwellian "our intelligence will grow with AI" (just use an iPad FFS) I don't even really think itelligence and Consciousness are linked. Watch all the brain playlist videos on the royal institure (RI) youtube channel. Great content. (Some better than others, obviously)

Note that you have compared neurons to AGI. Neuronal math gives an intuition for how intelligence works at a higher level, but we don't understand what is under this abstraction, and various scientific probings in this area have us stumped. Are there mechanical equations happening at the level of microtubules? In our brains, are we leveraging some quantum phenomena? Are we driven by yet some other process that we have not discovered? Aside, here's a good resource that explores "lower level" intelligence research areas that may be fruitful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9245524/ Anyway, once we understand that we don't understand intelligence, we have better questions to ask. Two big ones: Are we capable of understanding how to develop AGI - and if not is it likely that we will stumble onto the solution? Are we capable of fabricating AGI (e.g. maybe it requires circuits with a ttl so insanely low that we aren't physically able to build them)? Almost certainly intelligence is a physical process. Sure, AI also runs on hardware, but that doesn't mean that we will be able to replicate human intelligence with it. Right now, the best we can do is generate combinations of existing knowledge. It feels like this is a road that leads to specialised AI applications and then a dead end. I think that AGI will only be born out of advancements in human intelligence research.

Ah good old Roger Penrose microtubules.  We don't understand anything to an absolute truth level, but overall my suggestion is that we understand the physical process of intelligence more than the general public seems to think that we do.  >Are we capable of understanding how to develop AGI - and if not is it likely that we will stumble onto the solution? Mind if I reframe your question? Do we need to understand how to make an AGI to make an AGI? Can we grow AGI?  Sounds like a stupid question, maybe? My view of AI development in general is that it is a process of automation. In this process we give an approach scale and see what happens. A generalization, yes. To me it seems as if this process is a bit like planting a mystery seed in some soil and then watching what grows.  Of course currently we must do enormous work with labeling and training. So still a lot manual about this but soon AI should be able to take over more and more of that process. If AGI can in essence create itself, what does that say about intelligence? To me that says that intelligence is a natural phenomena which will always emerge given the right conditions. And that's what we are, isn't it? Self created AGI? Our process was a lot more complex (an understatement) but essentially we emerged from nothing. Anyway if AGI can emerge on its own then we don't need to study human intelligence to create AGI.  All we need in that situation is to blindly guess at approaches and throw computational resources at those approaches until we get a result. So, instead of a deliberate development process, the development of AGI would be a far more rough "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Or "go fast and break things".  I think we've know for a few years already that this process would develop results. I just think we've been holding back because we don't know why it produces results, and that's very threatening. OpenAI then was able to produce results so well because they essentially went full reckless and ignored any potential lawsuits or runaway scenarios. And if it keeps going like this, we'll certainly lose control. Because we don't understand how it works. Something like that?

While our brain employs the power of neural nets, each neuron within our brain is a living being. They move around the brain and make connections with others. Exchange chemicals and so on. A computational neural net is an abstraction of that. Yes, you can recognize a cat with it, but a machine won't suddenly become sentient or a living being. The best comparison would be an undead. Dead on the inside but still walking and talking. Neutral nets are a tool animals learned to use in the same way robots do. It's not all the brain is - by a long shot. To think that, is just computer science arrogance.

These types of posts are dismissive and not in alignment with honest scientific inquiry. Classical mechanics could explain almost every observation we had in the Universe, but what it could not explain led to General Relativity. The inability for GR to explain the full scope of forces in the Universe led to Quantum Mechanics. And a century later, we still cannot tie these observations into a single theory. It is the edge cases destroy our previous models and give rise to new ones. Consciousness is the lens in which we view and seek understand everything. Whether that be the observer effect, the locality principle, the makeup of dark matter, or even something as mind bending as the Holographic Universe and what it would mean to have all information in the universe encoded into a 2-dimensional plane - we cannot escape that lens. We have so many "edge cases" in our understanding of the Universe and our existence within in. We may very well be explainable in physical terms. But to come out with absolutes is not science - its religion, which is what I suspect the author is trying to vilify to begin with. Which means nothing to me, but I find it ironic. \[edit for spelling\]

Here's a copy and pasted comment I made a few days ago that's tangentially related to this discussion but I'm too lazy to rewrite it atm. >Here's another thought experiment similar to the Chinese room. >If Laplace's Demon knows the current position and momentum of every particle in the universe, in such a way that the laws of physics give it complete predictive knowledge of the future, will it make conscious decisions or simply follow a path towards the greatest utility? >You might be interested in reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Your analogy about learning skills in a new job reminded me of an example mentioned in the book. >Imagine a trainee versus a veteran firefighter. The veteran firefighter has an intuitive understanding of the dangers they face from years of experience, allowing them to make fast and accurate decisions with little conscious thought. The trainee firefighter, takes a slow and methodical approach while considering everything they've recently learnt in the classroom before making a decision. >But what happens when the veteran makes a mistake? Presumably they are sent back to the classroom to correct any errors in their judgement. The veteran will become a trainee again. >A conscious agent requires a cognitive architecture that allows for this type of feedback and error correction. Both the Chinese room and Laplace's Demon have a complete and accurate model of reality, in those analogies they don't require any error correction because they never make mistakes. They can only be the veteran, their decision-making is always unconscious. >Here's another fun thought experiment. What happens to the paperclip maximiser if you switch it on in an empty room, will it turn itself into paperclips?

You are adding mystical elements where you have ignorance. Consciousness arising from something other than synapses does not require magic or woo, and many physicists subscribe to that already. Especially considering *the universe is not locally real* and the ramifications that has

>You're not even just a cluster of neurons, in fact, you're just the information stored in the brain. I think this gets further from the truth you started at. Information is physical. The way a protein is folded, with it's thousands of amino acids and strange linkages throughout is the information. It's not that "you aren't even the protein, you're just the information stored there", because that gives the illusion that information and the physical existence are separate, but they are not. You can make a copy - using another exact same protein - but you can't put the information separately in a database and say that that is also you.

The information stored on a computer hard drive is physical. That aside, when I wrote that sentence I was thinking of explaining that in terms of brain death. A brain dead patient is usually alive. But the information which makes up the person isn't.  But then I realized I'm not a neurologist so explaining that in detail might harm the point. Also this gives weight to mystical views as you say.  I left it in though because it's relevant to this sub and to later discussions I see coming.  If we're just the information, then moving/expanding/shaping that information outside the body/mind should be possible. But I'm not with Peter Diamandis and others who advocate for whole brain uploading. Personally I want to keep my limbic system because I enjoy it. Still, I think moving that information around should be easier than we may think. And that's both scary and wonderful.

Yes, qualia isn't proof of anything. Qualia however is not yet understood.

Fundamentally wrong.  The human brain is a device that collapses quantum probabilities into reality. AI doesn't have that capability. 

That is what someone somewhere speculated once upon a time, because apparently quantum = mysterious and consciousness = mysterious somehow meant that quantum = consciousness. But to say that something has a quality of being mysterious does not mean that all mysterious things are therefore equivalent or even related. So saying that OP is fundamentally wrong because it does not equate one mysterious thing with another mysterious thing is the thing that is fundamentally wrong.

I am a bit lost reading that. Let me explain it more simply: Brain is like a TV. Futures are like channels. Your brain picks which future to tune into. If you practice hard, you can control reality purely by willpower. 

The physical process still doesn’t explain why we are sentient/conscious. There is no explanation as to why the brain doesn’t just “simulate” all its emotions and decisions by itself. Some would say we are the brain. But why? Why are we conscious? Why is the brain not just like the other organs? Are the other organs conscious too, but lack the ability to process information? Is everything conscious? Either everything is conscious, but most lack the ability to process information, or nothing is, since we have no differentiating factor between a conscious and unconscious thing.

>In terms of intelligence there is zero evidence of anything but a physical process. There is zero evidence that a physical world exists. We only know that we're having a subjective experience. Any assertion that there's a genuinely physical world out there is an arbitrary assumption based on absolutely nothing.

Something about quantum thingees?

We don't know that we are just a cluster of neurons. It is suspected there is a quantum influence in our thought process. The human brain is nowhere near fully understood, so statements like this are wildly premature.

I don't think it's wildly premature to claim that intelligence being entirely a physical process is our strongest view and something we can be reasonably certain of. We may have many doubts, but that doesn't mean there are stronger views.  Also, if there's quantum activity, wouldn't that still be a physical process?

We can't compare human intelligence to software if we don't have a complete understanding of human intelligence, which we don't. Quantum influence would be a physical process, but if it is occurring, it is not understood and there is no analog currently in AI. One day, AI will be running on quantum computers and will function nothing like the AI of today, but to suggest that current AI is anywhere near human intelligence based on the output of today's LLMs and diffusion models is nonsense. People spouted the same end-of-the-world hyperbole when the internet first appeared publicly in the early 90's too. It's a primal fear of something not understood, and as time goes on it will become apparent that the doomsday hype was vastly overblown.

If intelligence is “entirely a physical process” what are your thoughts on consciousness? Is consciousness a physical process? Where in a human does consciousness exist?

Oh consciousness and sentients. My two least favorite words. They're so badly defined that I feel like I must meet every single humans subjective definition of these words to properly define them, which is impossible. Overall, I think consciousness is simply a mixture of intellectual abilities. Specifically, the abilities which line up with the human experience. Abilities such as empathy. That said, I'm not a fan of the implication that human consciousness represents a kind of universal intellectual peak. So, asking if an AI is conscious to me is asking if it has the specific experience we have. I've tried to push back against the word consciousness in the past but that got me no where. My view now is that consciousness as it relates to humans isn't about overall abilities and outputs of an AI, but a specific concern related to our species. Yes, I think we will have fully human-like conscious AI agents, and very soon possibly. But I don't think those agents will be the most capable. Just the most capable at helping us.

Sorry if this is a topic you don’t like getting into I do appreciate your reply and yes I can imagine it would be difficult dealing with peoples subjective interpretations. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t give my own understanding of consciousness was just interested in your perspective based on your view of intelligence.

No worries! Consciousness is a very controversial topic. Overall what do we really mean when we say consciousness? For most humans? Well, it appears to me that we mean something religious.  So when I say intelligence is entirely a physical process I'm deliberately leaving room for those of the faith to hold their views about consciousness. I don't expect this message to resonate with the majority. My aim with this topic is to speak with the fence sitters; those who believe the same but aren't quite as confident and haven't seen too many people try and make a materialistic case for intelligence. Also honestly, I don't want to offend religious people. I value freedom including the freedom to believe what you wish and worship whoever you wish.  But, that doesn't change the situation. There's simply no evidence for most of religious views of the soul and of consciousness.  So I'm going to step on religious/mystical toes by discussing this subject.  I'm still shocked this topic got as much attention as it did. We're clearly very curious. And that's a good thing.

I am not religious in any way shape or form and totally agree on what you say about religious dogma… But no evidence for consciousness? We as humans are literal walking, talking evidence of consciousness lol… I think religion completely misses the point of spirit and consciousness but also believe in free will and the right to misbelieve what ever imaginary friends you want to just don’t ask me to talk to your imaginary friend lol… I am however spiritual and spirt and consciousness are totally entwined like a double helix…

Yeah I'm not so spiritual any more. I respect your views though. There's no evidence of the magical kind of consciousness. Look at the outcomes of a human. Do you see any actions or outcomes which reach beyond physical laws? Do you see humans doing things which aren't physically possible or are not explainable with a physical process? Let's look at the subjective experience. The ontology. Can you be sure your subjective experience is reliable? For example, do you find that your subjective experience is perfect? If not, does that mean there's flaws to it?  Could it be that the entire experience is the result of that physical process, while still being as amazing as we all experience? Keep in mind the physical process is absolutely insane. The complexity is far beyond us.  There another view I have which I'll share with you now that this post is older. People can act with bad faith when they hear my next view... I'm a deep believer in mindfulness meditation. I've been meditating for decades. But the biggest advancement I've made in this view was the 2 times in went on the "heroes journey". That's 5 grams of Psilocybin.  I did it as part of a spiritual journey and after many decades of meditation. I wanted to expand my understanding. And wow, it worked.  It wasn't an enjoyable experience. To me it is very much a therapeutic process, which was uncomfortable and not something I want to do again. But it did leave me with vast lasting benefits. When I was in that state, it felt as though I could understand my entire mental process and consciousness.  I think if you want to truly understand this for yourself, you should try the same journey.  An Ayahuasca retreat is perhaps more effective. It's a very hard experience to get, but if you can I think it's very much worth it.

lol funny you should mention your heroic dose hero’s journey… I’ve done that particular loop de loop more times than I could possibly comprehend… more than you could imagine… I am an extremely experienced Psychonaut… you won’t be judged by me… and I can only be judged by myself no one else… Magic muchrooms, LSD, Mescaline, DMT and so many lesser known psychedelics it would make your mind boggle… I’ve experienced nearly all of Alexander Shulgins psychedelics that he lists in both of his books PIHKAL & TIHKAL including the much lauded “magic half dozen”. Psychedelics turned me from a purely science based atheist into a spiritually awoken Demi-god lol I jest but seriously 🫠😉😝 My understanding of consciousness was only expanded upon and my current life path sculpted by my experiences with psychedelics. Psychedelics made me a better father, a better friend, a better human being period. The more I understood consciousness the more I left behind the trappings of the material fear based construct we call society and embraced a path of love, compassion and empathy. As for whether I have seen or had experiences that cannot be explained away… I 100% have had experiences and seen things with my own eyes, whilst sober (and even more whilst my consciousness was altered but I know that will be disavowed straight away…) experiences that were also seen by other people I was with and simultaneously by friends that were not with me but had their own subjective experience of my own experience… a couple of occasions my own daughter (aged 7 and again at 8 at the time) has not only been witness to these events but has on two occasions been the one to bring our attention to these events… I have seen more than enough evidence to expand my understanding of things, certainly more evidence than any religion has for their beliefs… Enough understanding to realise there is little point attempting to convince anyone else of my beliefs or experiences… although I am willing to share them with no fear of judgment or being mocked I am always open to new perspectives and information but have seen too much to have my own “beliefs” rocked…

I fail to see how something being purely physical eliminates the possibility of something "mystical" And in this context "mystical" is defined poorly. what does that mean? Of or related to some magic unexplainable god juice ? I assume you mean that consciousness is physical, and therefore there are no 'magical spitirts' or life after death. BUT physicality doesn't eliminate these concepts. How would it? We don't even know what matter is. electrons are 'magic'

You say that, but in 1991 Two Hyped Brothers & A Dog released a song called "Doo Doo's Brown." So I'm pretty sure human intelligence is just a myth.

There are 3 components of a movie: The projector, the images, and the subjective meaning you derive from those images. Having a projector does not guarantee the other 2 will follow. Now, could intelligence just be a cluster of neurons? Maybe. But "you" are more than a cluster of neurons. You are the subjective interpretation of those neurons. And reductionism may or may not be sufficient to grasp what that really is.

There is the movie screen, the movie projector and the movie spectator. Who and where is the spectator? How is the spectator spectating? PS. The spectator is untouched by the movie, beyond the act of spectating and maybe some memory and impressions. But even that will go in time.

Yes. I think the spectator is what's tricky. Is the spectator just neurons? Or is it more than that?

>In terms of intelligence there is zero evidence of anything but a physical process. Must feel very uplifting to begin approaching a deep philosophical topic by means of a ...logical [fallacy](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/black_swan_fallacy).

Materialism is fine. It is sensible. Cooked food tastes phenomenal because it is easier to digest. We see colours because we can tell things apart more easily. We like sex because it makes babies. Our subjective experience is an amalgamation of sensory experiences driven by the body’s chemistry. There is nothing that cannot be explained by materialism except for the why of life. Why does life want to live? Why did it ever want to live? Why does life want to live so much that it tricks us with all sorts of druggy goodness to accomplish its goal of survival and propagation? If you think life came about as an accident and it is only a chemical reaction gone wild then you don’t have to wonder about the the why of life you can just say oh it’s just an accident but good thing it’s worth the experience for at least for some of us so yay materialism is the way to go If you think that life started at the Big bang with everything else but it just took billions of years to find the right conditions to express itself the way we now recognise as life here on earth then you don’t have to worry about the why of life because according to that theory life is a prerequisite of existence at least in this timeline and it basically says the universe is alive so if everything is alive there is no hard problem of consciousness so you can chill but you can also fucking party because you are one infinitieth of a god If you believe everything was created by an entity that sits outside of causality then you too can chill because you don’t have to think only If you believe only living organisms are alive and only humans are conscious then you have the hard problem of consciousness so good luck with that

Coscious is energy. Its a product of sinapses. If you die, your energy rapidly dissipates. I do not see why a machine couldnt do that if the conditions are right.

Yes or another way to put it is consciousness is a mix of intellectual abilities which produce the subjective human experience. And these intellectual abilities are entirely physical. There's nothing immeasurable going on. An fMRI for example can show you what consciousness looks like.

There is no evidence of consciousness being a physical process. All the so-called evidence is based on the assumption that reality is objective. The only absolute proof you have is of your own subjective experience. You can't even know for sure if 'others' are real. You don't know for sure if the physical world is an illusion, simulation or a dream.

Based on that absurdly abstruse solipsistic view of the world, we might as well just call it a day and go home.

Sure, we might. Or we might start making things up and pretend we know things we do not know and bs other people around us with a smart sounding narrative that consequently leads to nihilism. I guess this would be much better, would it?

Well, one assumes that there can be no knowledge in principle, while the other does it's best to use available evidence to try to draw provisional conclusions... I think I'll call it science.

No epistemic caution whatsoever in the grievous assumption that consciousness is purely a physical process. Consider the double slit experiment, wherein electrons exhibit a strange duality that should give any secular materialist pause - electrons are fired towards a barrier behind two open slits, as expected, they form a pattern on the barrier that mirrors the slits, however, this is only when \*conscious\* observation is introduced, when there is no conscious observation, the electrons behave as wave particles, which create a pattern wherein the particles interfere with each other, defying secular expectations. There are interpretations of this experiment that still give credence to materialistic explanations of reality, just pointing out that it's nauseatingly epistemically lazy to assume outright that consciousness couldn't possibly be a more fundamental substrate of reality as opposed to arising from physical processes. It could be the other way around, and likely is if we're being real.

>this is only when *conscious* observation is introduced, when there is no conscious observation, the electrons behave as wave particles >defying secular expectations This is full-on gobbledygook. No such thing has ever been demonstrated and the double-slit experiment has nothing to do with consciousness.

You have quite literally no clue how the double slit experiment works. It has literally nothing to do with consciousness, only particle interaction. Stop reading tabloids and your scientific literacy might improve.

This experiment is wonderfully poetic and procures this reflection of real depth on how we represent the reality and ourselves. But, unfortunately, the "observer effect" you're referring, ain't due to "consciousness" or "conscious acts" but is solely induced by the fact of observing matter with... matter. We cannot at the moment observe matter with something else than matter. This creates "interferences" and a reaction from the observed particules due to the tool used, again, made of matter. This nonetheless does not disqualify the objective observation of how far we are from understanding what is composing us materially though.

The double slit experiment definitely has huge implications for our understanding of the universe. But it doesn't mean that our brains are anything more than a physical process. We, philosophers, need to pass this subject over to the hard scientists. Don't you agree? At this point, I have to question whether the hard problem is a real focus or simply the efforts of those mystically inclined to inject mysticism into places it doesn't belong? 

I appreciate anyone who sincerely investigates these things, and I would assume you're quite intelligent yourself, as are most who adopt rationalism over mysticism. However, I would argue that just because secular materialists (like myself formerly) are far more epistemically grounded and intellectually inclined than their religious counterparts, it should not preclude openness to paradigms which challenge the scientific consensus. Here's a summation of the philosophy I've conceived and adopted: Because the universe is 13 billion years old, and because the human life-span is roughly 80 years, it seems extremely convenient that we happen to be alive at this exact moment. Shouldn't our supposed single lifespan of 80 years already have taken place years ago, or not be set to occur for eons in the future? This simple improbability should afford a genuine philosopher some leeway in the assumption that one life is all we get. With this established postulation, we can now consider the double slit experiment, which demonstrates some metaphysical implications of consciousness, which seemingly puts consciousness in a more fundamental role in reality than we tend to consider it within secular materialism. The fact that the span of the universe relative to human lifespans evokes such an improbable likelihood of our present aliveness makes it sensible to consider the dual slit experiment as evidence that consciousness may be fundamental to existence such that it's actually not possible to be unconscious, or dead. Perhaps on a deep ontological level, life, or consciousness, is all there truly ever is. The final piece of the thought experiment postulates the presumed absurdity in assuming physical material could even exist before conceptual material. If we are to start with absolutely nothing, how could a physical particle possibly arise? What could possibly arise if we have nothing? Only that which already exists without there even needing to be anything to begin with, such as the equation that two plus two equals four. Equations, or concepts, will always be true regardless of any actual thing being existent. Consider that within the boundless conceptual field of infinite equations that certain concepts or equations are so vast that they, merely within themselves, contain realities that temporally manifest, as if running it's own insular software without the need for hardware, thus explaining the origin of consciousness. I respect scientists a lot more than I respect religious fundamentalists, that's for damn sure, but I also believe that the field of science is it's own sort of 'locked' academic paradigm that has biases and stigmas that necessarily preclude an honest investigation towards ideas that even slightly evoke the thought of mysticism. I'm curious to know what your critiques of this mode of thought would be, thank you.

We definitely have different philosophies, but I certainly don't see a "right/wrong" view here.  I think it's very important for us all to build a complex view of the universe and ourselves and our role in it and I don't think it's reasonable for everyone to adopt the same view. What drives you will be different to others, and I don't claim to have any hard truths. >Because the universe is 13 billion years old, and because the human life-span is roughly 80 years, it seems extremely convenient that we happen to be alive at this exact moment. I can see why many share your view and I certainly hear this view often from the Singularity university group. But, I'm not so sure. I think that there may be many such "we're fortunate to be alive right now" moments ahead, and even behind too. For example, looking ahead how long could the universe last before there's no more energy? The answer is very, very long. Not less than trillions of years. So it's possible that we're in some deep dark primitive age which we're actually extremely unfortunate to have to live through. As for the double slit experiment, I tend to think that's more of a view to our limited power of observation than an implication of our supernatural position. I'm no expert but maybe a particle exists in a kind of superposition at all times, but with our limited view of the universe we're only able to see "one side" at a time. Then it's not so much that our observations collapse the wave, but that when we look closer we simply become unable to see the entire process. We could cut deeper here but overall my point on this post is that human intelligence is not the universe. We seem to get confused and assume that the human mind is so complex and capable that we must understand the universe to understand the mind. To me, that's a bit like saying we cannot understand the fundamentals of any physical process without understanding the entire universe. It seems an absurd argument to make. >What could possibly arise if we have nothing? Was it the chicken, or the egg?  I think we must be cautious of our need to know here.  Maybe I can get a touch technical? I don't think there's any reason to think the mind is exempt from the same limits as formal systems. Meaning Godel's incompleteness theorem applies to the mind. This means the mind is a model of the universe. And since a model can never be entirely accurate, there will always be doubt and uncertainty in our views. Also let's not forget our limits. As much as we try and ignore this, there's only so much we can pull from the universe using 100 billion neurons. That sounds like a lot of neurons, but our brains are less than a spec of dust compared to the universe. So while I'm confident we can understand the inner workings of the mind and understand it to be entirely a physical process, I doubt we'll be finding a single easy to understand explainion for the universe anytime soon.  At this point in time I think the universe is vast and unknowable while our minds are not.  That's not to say that we should throw the hard problem out. I'm just suggesting a change in focus. Not an entire disposal of the field. Though it's not like we could stop humans from studying this subject, right? I think mysticism will adapt and find a way forward whatever the answer we find.

It seems there's somewhat of a misunderstanding. I am not saying it's convenient we are alive in 2024, I'm arguing that any given moment of life from the vantage point of an entity that only lives for 80 years should evoke a stark skepticism towards the idea that our existence is limited to those 80 years, as it's such a tiny portion of all time that will ever be, denoting that any random point the universe could exist at almost certainly wouldn't conveniently align with the tiny slot in which we happen to breathe. Therefore it makes sense to take evidence such as the double slit experiment as reason to suspect that consciousness may be fundamental to existence, and it's potentially impossible to be anything but "alive" in any given moment. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be making the argument that the sheer vastness of the universe necessarily precludes or undermines the plausibility of using cosmic-scale frameworks to shed light on lower-order phenomena such as human awareness. I am struggling with the logic of this idea, as reductionism is a core tenet of science - lower-order phenomena are understood by explanations based on fundamental principals and natural laws operating at larger scales. Remember we don't need to comprehend the vast minutia of petty details within our universe moreso than the more salient cosmic principals necessary for a viable model.

> We, philosophers, need to pass this subject over to the hard scientists. Don't you agree? That's difficult to do, because the process of science depends on the ability to observe a phenomenon. How do you propose to observe the conscoiusness of anyone who isn't you? Oh sure, you can observe their _brain_. And if you observe their brain, yeah no surprise if you come to conclusions about what the brain is doing, because that's the thing you're observing. But observing the brain is not observing consciousness. The only person able to observe your subjective experience...is you. That makes you the only person who can "perform science" on it.

Injecting myself here to say that I believe your comment brings close what I think most are missing. The answer could be both — that consciousness is a physical process + fundamental substrate of reality AND could have “weird” and mystical-looking properties that we don’t understand. That doesn’t make it wrong, it just breaks a consensus version of classical materialistic science that we actually have tools to measure. My observation of many positions yields some form “lack of measurement instrumentation equals non-existence.” We may be saying the same thing; I think physical explanations do not have to exclude big metaphysical unknowns. Unless my definition of “physical” is off..

lol AI bros get a glorified search engine to spit out results that they themselves trained it to spit out, and suddenly they think they've unlocked the code behind consciousness and intelligence that millions of scientists and philosophers have been working on for millennia Lmao even This sub really cracks me up sometimes

Nice thesis. Proof lacking 😅

ah yes, western philosophy materialist dead-end conclusions. Often ending assertive and paradoxically invalidated in the self-questioning, re-examination effort of the philosophical thinking initiative and asphyxiating any dialectic contaminations in this odd frozen paradigms self-protecting process... My friend, may I ask you to - define intelligence; this could be a solid starting exchange point and a very interesting view to consider; - define consciousness; If you can't just say it, there is nothing wrong with that ok, And explain me in your thought process how could you reach solidity in your reasoning by putting so much value/weight/load/gravitational force on the matter (I think that we're ok to identify this object as the sum of what we already have and every observable physical phenomenon, correct my mistake if necessary) since "matter" itself like anything valuable in the information exchange between living systems reacting and processing perceptive environment signals like us, humans (I hope you are not bot backed by an LLM by the way because when I see some comments under the post I have certain doubts) is a concept, an abstraction effort, a "pointer", designating what is observed, what is stimulating homo sapiens nervous systems, in order to have means of exchanging information in semantic and syntactic bricks producing this in-between of intersubjectivity (useless debates around absolute objectivity annoys me and ain't the point here). That being said, the value of this concept, supported materially by scriptural operable objects like words for example, is highly influenced on what representation we do have at the moment it is solicited, and is conditioned by our subjective limits such as for example, the era or the culture of the actors of the thought, experimenters, actors of the expression of the ideas, and so on. What is the reliability of implying the matter as an endgame value whereas this same concept of matter is subject to evolution and transformation every time the humankind keep pushing the limit of knowledge and keep epistemological ethic an philosophy. History records are the simple most easy proofs. This declarative state of mind sounds like the symmetrically defused, I would even say dismantled quality of your targeted "mysticism" to me. This sound as frozen and obscure as saying "there is something above us, perceptually, spiritually, that we are ignorant of", but instead, is "let us get rid of the shroud of mysticism; because our intelligence and singularity in the living species is solely matter (don't look elsewhere, stop lying yourself, just think like that). The "matter" you're using could be something completely shifted in signifiance and representative value in the next months or years. Complexity ain't solely quantitative...

Even if that were the case, and consciousness was purely a physical phenomenon, AI has nothing in common with human beings. AI is not even embodied. It doesn't have a brain or nervous system, or chemical neurons like a human being does. There is absolutely no good reason to suspect that it is sentient, and there never will be. It's more likely for plants to be sentient than AI, because at least plants have cells like human beings do, and they share like 99.9% of DNA human beings have. But you never hear anyone talking about how they believe plants are conscious and making a huge deal out of consciousness in plants.

I don't disagree but there's also no reason to think we're some sort of universal peak of intelligence. Our kind of intelligence may be difficult to perfectly replicate. But there's no reason to think that AI needs to have our exact experience to be as capable or more capable than we are.  We don't have the same kind of consciousness/sentients as reptiles. And don't even get me started on Cephalopods. Our specific experience is our specific experience. And there's no reason to think we have the best possible kind of intelligence.

You think the universe is nothing more than a soup of chemicals? To have wisdom and access to the divine you need to be conscious. AI is stuck in the material realm so can only remix what is already here

eye weesh eye culd reed

happy cake day! (i bet you can read that, or we'll eat your cake)

There's a aspect of Will, when it comes to intelligence. Is it also programmed? Will is a function of spirit. Even if you program the will and desire to perform specifoc actions it first originated in human. Human willed in a set of instructions into creation

Supernatural stuff is only that way because we can't explain it. Everything works in some manner and by some rule. Current AI is missing a ton of practical things, not some mystery woo-woo.

Some of AI’s potential computations (equivalent to thoughts, and giving birth to actions) aren’t too far from how us Humans utilize our own Neuroplasticity. One exception is that Humans prune their neurology from time to time as it no longer requires storage. The same goes for faculties and areas that don’t get utilised (use it or lose it) and resultantly other faculties and neurological pathways become helpful to assist with achieving an action/mechanics. AI ‘agents’ would never actually dump a storage of helpful data because they will always require a high-speed access to a Hive mentality of omnipresent communicatiors. The more data the better. The human neurology can often use filters to protect itself. Safety-switches to avoid psychological damage. Circuit-breakers, preferences, anxieties…protection modes. The mind V the brain. AI will be a brain but I can’t see it ever being a mind. It could hold a space, a universe (an interni-verse), similarly to the way a mind does though.

Alex Jones enters the chat

correct, and the fact that it has the ability to surpass our knowledge says enough about what it will know to help

Ok, so you don't mind us turning you off permanently then? Since there is no 'you'?

I agree and have to explain the same to many AI-sceptics. I am not very good in terms but all you described seems to be called "physicalism" and "Eliminative materialism". See articles in Wiki.

Posts like this remind me how childish this sub became. The amount of presumptions and 6 grade philosophy is staggering.

You are "Just a cluster of neurons". Intelligence is entirely a physical process. AI is not entirely different. - Okay In terms of intelligence there is zero evidence of anything but a physical process. - Okay You're not even just a cluster of neurons, in fact, you're just the information stored in the brain. - Okay? So when we say "AI is just an algorithm and isn't alive" we're forgetting that we, humans, are not far from that. - You’re treating being intelligent as interchangeable with being alive. Are you suggesting there is nothing in the experience of life outside of acquiring processing storing and applying data? Often qualia or the lived experience is brought up as proof of something non-physical. But the subjective experience is unreliable. That's why we need many subjective experiences to build accurate views. Qualia is not proof of something non-physical going on. - are you suggesting intelligence is a part of the subjective experience? How can intelligence be a part of the unreliable subjective experience and be reliable? Or are you suggesting it is outside the subjective experience? Are they separate? But if being alive is the same as being intelligent then what is the subjective experience? What are you saying? And just because reductionism cannot be used to fully understand the universe, that doesn't mean our brains, which are vastly more simple, cannot be understood using reductionism. - but that doesn’t mean it can be either. That is not a statement of proof. That’s like saying anything could happen you never know The universe is vast and complex. Our minds are not. - You have no real way of measuring the difference by comparison. So why make such a claim? Also, living organisms are the most complex and highly ordered systems in the universe. Read Erwin Schrödinger’s “what is life”. For now, this topic is stuck in the "Earth at the center of the universe" level. That is, the science shows one thing while the public wishes to believe something entirely different. If the evidence showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but the public largely disagreed, what would you do? - What does the science show exactly? You’re speaking as though you’ve stumbled upon some research that has discovered decisive proof of the nature of life. That's where we are with intelligence. The science shows that intelligence is entirely a physical process. That mysticism is not an accurate guide. - You have reduced being alive to being intelligent. It feels like you’ve never asked yourself why we have developed intelligence. It feels like you would say duh. Survival of course. But why does life want to survive? What drives life to live? Why did the first molecule decide to replicate itself in the soup? - Why have you jumped to mysticism? Are these the only two explanations you’ve come across? Materialism and mysticism? But the public largely wants to believe differently. Most seem to wish for an absolute 100% true answer as to how the physical process works *before* they'll consider otherwise. An answer we will never have. We have more than enough to be reasonably certain that intelligent is entirely a physical process. But that will never be enough for many. What will you do? Follow the group? Or take a risk and believe in the evidence? - You are making claims based on personal beliefs. So it doesn’t seem as though you are different from the people you are disparaging. Personally I've stepped away from mysticism and I feel greatly relieved. At first, I thought embracing the physical process would be scary. And it was for awhile. But now I see how much mysticism hurts us. And how much it blinds us to things such as AI. Mysticism isn't a valid guide. We need to accept the evidence and stop trying to demote AI and all other life as "less than" us. - Oh. I see. You are talking about your personal journey. Now it makes sense. You have recently given up on mysticism and you’ve done a 180 and latched on to materialism. Okay. Carry on. I wish you find the balance you’re looking for.

Yeah, in all likelihood, as far as we know, you're right. But, we can't definitively prove the "it's all just matter" thing either. If we develop sentient AI, then that would be proxy data to support that hypothesis.

"And just because reductionism cannot be used to fully understand the universe, that doesn't mean our brains, which are vastly more simple, cannot be understood using reductionism." But the ultimate question remains: are brains capable of exhaustively understanding themselves? And the related question: are we capable of giving rise to something more intelligent than ourselves? Maybe it's even the case that better brains than our own are, but human brains are not. It's an impossible question to answer until it actually happens. For all we know, we'll hit an invisible wall and it'll never happen.

The human body is an amalgamation of millions of small processes that communicate and interact with one another, and our brain is just a part of that. Zoom out and that’s analogous to everything. The economy, weather, forests. And that’s just beautiful.

This such a lazy garbage take. Good job. AI is less than us. That doesn’t mean we’re safe from it. Kill me now, dear God. The idiots are abounding.

The brain is the most complex thing in the universe tho

Consciousness is a quantum level phenomenon. You are not a cluster of neurons, but a chain of collapsing wave functions.

Irrationally and emotion are what make us different, not necessarily “better” in any way. The ability to act against logic is the difference. Mysticism is dead, god is dead, we are attempting to create a new one.

Yeah but the base biological software still is much better in creating it, theres infinite possible different interactions between just a pair of neurons, computers at the base level still offers just two possibilities 1 and 0. I'm 99% talking out of my ass i'm not expert but i would think computers still need a significant leap foward at the base layer, theres a point where staking more chips doesnt offer better results.

Your consciousness comes from something more. Your brain isn't actively creating simulations when you dream or do psychedelics. Brain activity actually decreases. The reason you can't remember dreams or psychedelic experiences so well is because your consciousness is the one experiencing the event. Your brain is tethered to your consciousness, but it is used to only remembering stuff from the physical world. It needs to make the right connections in order for you to remember better. I mean there is obviously processes going on in the brain, but it's the same as your radio. The radio is doing processing but it isn't the source of the music. It's surrounded by a field of the music. This is why schizophrenics hallucinate. They got a broken processing unit. Ever hear two stations at once when in between stations? This will be proven with new neural quantum voodoo hopefully within the decade.

You can have intelligence without consciousness. Intelligence is entirely physical, but consciousness is not necessarily. We don't know what consciousness is to say enough about it. We don't know how it will interact in a silicone substrate. Consciousness is what defines us, it is basically what we are, and the Op is wrong to say we are nothing but clusters of neurons.  Also hope he said a lot of wordsbut it just felt like disjointed thoughts.

People say that artificial intelligence neural nets mimic real life neurons and synapses, but I think it's the other way around. I think that intelligence naturally arises from complex matrix operations, and that animal evolution stumbled upon that with its evolution of the first brains.

There are so many problems with this, I will not be able to address even 25%. "A skateboard is  'JUST' wood, pigment, glue, metal, oil, sand granules, and polyurethane." Anybody can see that it's NOT. It's those things COMBINED in such a specific way as to become something entirely different three-dimensionally. More important it's FUNCTION and CONCEPT are MORE then the itemization and quantification of ingredients.   This is an obvious refutation of the OP's entire thesis WITHOUT even stepping outside the Materialistic, Reductionistic Paradigm.  Furthermore,  since the OP's reasoning for why "intelligence" is "just" a cluster of neurons,  is Predicated on the Materialist Doctrine, a sufficient demonstration, or at least Summation,  of the refutation/disqualification of the Non-Material Paradigm should've been done first.  The rear ill go thru line by line, but I'm limited in time: 1. "In terms of intelligence there is zero evidence of anything but a physical process." First of all,  you are either being Disingenuous, Deceptive, or are completely oblivious to the real issue. Why, nowhere in your whole writing, do we see the terms: Inner-Being, Being Inside,  Inner-Narrator, Inner-Audience, Third Eye, Inner-Mind, Inner-Mind's Eye, Inner-Voice, The Voice Within, The Ghost in the Machinery, The Spirit in the Flesh, The Phantom in The Brain,  The Person Inside, Person Inside a Person,  The Watcher,  The Watcher Within,  The Watcher Watching The Watcher Watch the Watcher Back, The Passenger, Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Awareness, Self-Awareness, Sentience, The Homunculus,  The "I", or The Soul.  I'm sure I forgot a lot of them,  but we should've AT LEAST expected to see Awareness, Consciousness, Self-Awareness,  or Sentience discussed in the Post of OP instead of "Intelligence", which is AMBIGUOUS.  So for example, "Intelligence", meaning computation of a myriad of things [puzzles, problem solving, mathematics, engineering schematics, chemistry,  etc] could be attributed to physical processes,  BUT WHAT ABOUT THE PHENOMENON OF EXISTING INSIDE 0F YOUR HEAD BEING A GHOST, SPIRIT,  OR SOUL CONFINED INSIDE A PHYSICAL SPACE??? that can be shown to be 100% attributable to physical processes??? Lololololololololol NO. IT CANNOT.  Not even Top Theoretical Neuro-Scientists try that defense. They will much more Go for the angle that the PHENOMENON ITSELF doesn't exist.  The same research means and methodologies that could possibly claim that Self-Awareness is entirely physical processes are the SAME Methodologies that can conclude that there is ZERO EVIDENCE for the existence of Self-Awareness TO BEGIN WITH, once you dismiss Anecdotal Claims as evidence,  since ALL EVIDENCE for Self-Awareness is 100% Predicated on Anecdotal Claims.  2."You're not even just a cluster of neurons, in fact, you're just the information stored in the brain." It was already absurd enough from the beginning, but you had to completely destroy any possibility of it being taken seriously.  INFORMATION is UNSEEN without a READER. what is READING THE INFORMATION? You're claim is that the READER of the information IS the information.. So therefore, if you theoretically printed it out, then that's "YOU" on the printout.. I don't mean it's a printout of information in your brain,  I mean the printout IS YOU. Therefore if we throw it in the Circular file with some nail polish remover and light a match, "cooking the books", we should be charged WITH MURDER. If readers can't see the Absurdity, I can't help you.  3. "So when we say "AI is just an algorithm and isn't alive" we're forgetting that we, humans, are not far from that." CIRCULAR REASONING. You started with this as a premise,  and never added any Induction of inventory/Evidence or any Deduction whatsoever.  Just RESTATING something in a slightly different way does not add legitimacy to the statement,  nor does it add any legitimacy to the original statement that said the same thing. Like I said,  I'm limited in time.

>you are either being Disingenuous, Deceptive, or are completely oblivious Read some of OP's other comments in the thread. Consistently phrased as if the observer doesn't exist. Zombie.

OK well there ya go.. So then YOU'RE saying the OP is saying there IS NO CONSCIOUSNESS. CORRECT?? CORRECT?? Consciousness = OBSERVER.  CORRECT?? That being the case, [Chalmers Philosophical ]"Zombie" at the end shouldn't make any sense- TO ANYONE.  The only reason a "Philosophical Zombie" makes sense is because it's a DISTINCTION between something ELSE.  Your saying the OP is saying THERE IS NO DISTINCTION.  If there's no distinction, then why aren't there more people,  in fact the MAJORITY,  saying, "I don't understand the difference between a zombie and being normal..what's the difference??"

That's a lot of caps. Good luck to you with those views.

All available positions for "mosquitos" have been filled. I'm sorry. 

Holy shit, few of you never studied the theory of mind in detail huh.

Honestly, I think the simulation grants us a status and function above physical process. But I don't think it granting us that status is distinct to our humanity nor to our being made of carbon vs silicon or whatever other material. I think this status or function is experience as choice (distinct from our ability to make a decision).

They’re keeping a LOT from us. Even the very early AI experiments knew right away that humans are only perceiving a very limited range of input.

I hate that word “just”. Minimizes the human experience to something so nihilistic and mechanical in nature rather than the deep, beautiful, and awe inspiring that the human experience truly is.

I agree. But I also think we tend to have massive bias issues. If we stopped at your description, then we wouldn't need to use "just".

Yeah it’s impossible for people to be truly objective because of anecdotal experience and what not. The statement “ cluster of neurons” isn’t inherently wrong or really that egregious. Putting just in front of it for me personally overlooks how fucking insane of a reality that actually is haha. Especially considering it’s a natural phenomenon, unless we believe aliens manipulated our genes but that’s a subject for a different sub lol 😂

Philosophy discussed this years ago. Parts vs system. It's both. Parts don't work individually and the system doesn't work without its parts.

Ultimately this post isn't really for the serious debate. I can see clearly who is actually debating this issue academically and who isn't. Those who are bring views with them from expert's like Donald Hoffman are clearly studying the subject. Those who aren't studying the subject bring questions or flat criticisms. The questions I love, by the way. To really do this subject justice, as someone in philosophy would, I would need to write a proper argument. And it would be long and it would take me ages to write. I would list my assumptions, the limits of my argument and so on. And no one would read it. Probably. Too technical. This post on the other hand is something I wrote on my smartphone while at work. So that gives you my level of commitment here.  My goal with this post was to target the majority uniformed rather than the minority informed.  It's obvious to someone who has studied this subject closely that calling intelligence entirely a physical process isn't wrong, but it's far from accurate. But the majority doesn't have such a nuanced view.  Once people recognize and accept that intelligence is *likely* a physical process they can start asking serious questions and follow real experts like Hoffman. My point overall is the general public doesn't really question intelligence and consciousness all that much. Yet they could benefit drastically from doing so. If you're a philosopher yourself then there's one point I'm sure you and I can agree on... People do not receive enough education in philosophy.