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f_klemtoday at 7:30 AM2 repliesview on HN

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these theories have in common is the underlying belief that our brain/mind works as the machines we build. Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. The idea of 'internal models' and 'control loops' inside us is a projection of the aforementioned assumption.

There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'. Only by bypassing this epistemological problem, we can build 'theories of computational mind'.

These assumptions are there for already long time, to the point that when Turing asked himself 'can machines think?', he already assumed our thinking could be modeled as a machine.

I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. But not stopping at Descartes/Leibniz. Heidegger made contributions that cannot be avoided.


Replies

codeflotoday at 9:37 AM

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things.

On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and the subjective experience disappears, or stimulate the neurons to cause the experience.

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lxgrtoday at 7:36 AM

> Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things.

Agency: What’s missing, in your view? Agency seems more of a property/function of a thinking system’s position in an environment than of the thinking itself.

Subjective experience: That’s not a contradiction to “complex machines” either. I think the evidence that our minds are highly complex machines is, at this point, irrefutable. The question is really if they’re “only” that.