Well stated. I also agree that intelligence is not what LLMs or Stable Diffusion are, but merely large collections of samples from which to draw and a set of algorithms by which to weight samples and choose between them. The very good job these AIs do reflects the expertise of their creators, not intelligence. Some folks find the idea of AGI terrifying, and I try to reassure them that such a thing will never be created.

Consciousness has been shown to not arise in the brain. Brains do moderate consciousness, but aren't the source of it. Consciousness has been shown to be a collective, multi-species event, because our gut fauna participate in our thoughts. This shows that consciousness does not arise in brains, because our single celled gut fauna don't have brains. Other single celled creatures have been shown to learn and make decisions, also despite not having brains. A really weird creature called a slime mold, for example.

We have very limited tools for detecting consciousness. While living things have electrical fields, these fields aren't consciousness, or we could make all kinds of changes to them using our extensive knowledge of how to manipulate electricity. We can only make determinations if a thing is conscious or not based on it's actions, and we know that we are conscious even when we are prevented by circumstances from acting, such as when we're asleep, or in a coma. So we really don't detect consciousness at all, but secondary effects caused by consciousness. Given that limitation how could we tell if a tree, that has no means of acting on a scale we can detect, is conscious or not? What reason do we have to suspect that consciousness is limited to things that have the ability to act? How could we test to see if a tree, or a rock, for that matter, are conscious?

The short answer is that we cannot. We simply don't know how to detect consciousness at all, because we don't have any idea what it actually is.

Given that people trying to create Artificial Intelligence are trying to mimic brains to do so, they're not going to create consciousness by doing that because brains don't create consciousness. Researchers into AI are really handicapped by the facts that we don't know what consciousness is, where it comes from, why it eventuates at all, and a whole slew of other things. It's like trying to make a nuclear reactor without even knowing what causes radioactivity. It's about as likely as 100 monkeys given treats for banging keys on typewriters turning out the works of Shakespeare. It's theoretically possible, but the probability of it happening is so small that it is practically impossible. It's far less likely than winning the lotto, for example.

Thanks!

Very insightful post. Thanks for sharing. i have Bookmarked this post (on @ecency) so i receive a notification of additional comments (a very useful and probably underused feature). Will you add a comment with link to next in the series, please?

Ps.
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