How do you feel about artificial intelligence?

1. Consciousness is non-computational. -> this directly implies that humans (which are conscious) have some kind of soul or other non-emperical mechanism by which they make decisions, like quantum fluctuations in their brain or something. Something that cannot be measured in a traditional computational way. Most of these concepts would be considered to be religious in nature.

2. Relating consciousness to AI is purely a matter of religious belief. -> only in the way that any belief is inherently religious because to believe something without any kind of emperical backing is an act of faith. Sometimes even when the data supports a conclusion faith is needed to bridge the gaps as a sort of scaffholding that is part of human thought.

But premise 1 connects to premise 2 in this premise:

3. If conciousness is non-computational it is impossible for AI to be conscious. -> That is, non-computational systems have more capabilities than computational ones. So if you are saying that the concept of human thought is beyond computation, then it cannot be that AI has human thought. But in doing that, you have said that there is a religious component to human thought because it is essentially not bound by math.

In computer science there is a term “oracle” which is used as a black box that can solve the halting problem (a non-computational problem of if a program will or will not ever terminate.) Even with a computer that has this “oracle” component in it (perhaps the human brain posseses one, why not) there would still be things that could not be computed with computers that have an oracale inside, thus creating a hierarchy of computation that goes even into a world where some kind of magic/religion/soul/god is giving you answers out of nowhere.

To believe AI is concious of course is religious because we don’t have an emperical definition of what conciousness is, and to believe that … well … any belief has at least some religious backing because that is the nature of belief without any kind of empericisim to measure it.

The turing test is relevant because it gives us a way of testing how concious a computer is in an emperical way: by running an interview and having a conversation without knowing if a human or a computer is behind the wheel. Which we would need more such information, and better tests, to know what is and is not concious as opposed to just guessing through blind faith that “hey this thing seems concious, why not?”

Not sure why we are drilling into semantics here, but you seem interested in that so whatever.

In my explanation, a religious belief is based on arbitrary assumptions. A sound belief is based on strong indication and profound experience. So not every belief is religious.

In ontology, we can classify beliefs into categories like irrational, rational, and based on evidence. I believe 2+2=4 but you wouldn’t say that. You would say I *know* that 2+2=4. That is both that I believe in it, and there is a theoretical backing that explains the veracity of the claim.

In my view, belief is still the domain of religion in that some people don’t believe 2+2=4 for irrational reasons no matter how much you explain the theory. People’s belief structures are based on some kind of “magic” rather than factual empiricism.

There is still no connection because these are two orthogonal statements.

Even in geometry, two orthogonal lines share at least one point (in most cases). Similarly, both statements are about consciousness, so they are at least thematically connected.

1) My car is red.
2) My car is a great car.

These statements are orthogonal, but anyone who knows basic logic knows that we can infer a third premise that

3) There are great cars that are red.

You can say “well the third statement is orthogonal.” I guess? I’m not sure what orthogonal means here.

It is important to not get confused here.

Not sure why any of this is important at all. Even the most popular threads ever here, like Minecraft’s announcement thread … are they “important” would you say?

It only means there is no repeating pattern

A computer may loop forever without epeating a pattern.

No need to relate consciousness here again if you want to be scientific.

My entire point is that consciousness should be more scientifically scrutinized. When we get into beliefs, there are the 2+2=4 beliefs (scientific) and then there are beliefs like “There are aliens who live on Alpha Centauri who want me to do my taxes”

2 + 2 = 4 is something we can check through empiricism, math, and just general scientific knowledge. The tax aliens is something we cannot really check or know for certain because there is no way currently to see the Alpha Centauri star system’s planets, or to know its inhabitants’ wishes Re: Taxes. So the tax aliens is a religious thing.

I’m trying to say that consciousness shouldn’t be the domain of religion, that empirical tests, like the Turing Test should be able to analyze it better and give us more 2 + 2 = 4 (emperical) kind of data on the concept rather than more religious space tax alien kind of belief.

Only by external influence or infinite resources. But this does not invalidate my statement.

No, the way computers work, as in a Turing Machine, it will either run forever or halt. This is a theoretical question like if 2 + 2 = 4 or 2 + 2 = 5, there is an answer, you do not need infinite resources or external factors to loop forever while not repeating a pattern.

For example, the following code:

for(int i = 1; i > 0; i++)
{
  for(int j = 0; j < i; j++)
  {
    print(“A”);
  }
  print(NEWLINE);
}

Will Print

A
AA
AAA
AAAA
AAAAA
AAAAAA
…

We know this will loop forever, and we know that it never repeats a line as each line is longer than the last. We can know this without running the code or even compiling it.

orthogonal

Not really sure I understand how you are using this here: If you are trying to create some kind of semantic difference between intelligence and consciousness I’m sort of only half following it. Being intelligent and being conscious are totally different things? Like a dog is conscious but not intelligent, and a genius human indie game dev is conscious and intelligent, but AI is intelligent but not conscious or something? Not sure how this invalidates anything I’ve said either.

Arbitrary Assumption

Fine, though I wouldn’t belittle such beliefs in the way I wouldn’t belittle “Imaginary Numbers” in math. They can provide real solutions when plugged into different formulas.

1. Consciousness is non-computational. -> this directly implies that humans (which are conscious) have some kind of soul or other non-emperical mechanism by which they make decisions, like quantum fluctuations in their brain or something. Something that cannot be measured in a traditional computational way. Most of these concepts would be considered to be religious in nature.

They were religious in nature, because they had to be. Nietsche (while he was still sane) had no Einstein or Neils Bohr, or even the father of Eels frontman, Mark Oliver Everett, to translate the necessary concepts into language for the common man. We rely on science’s hard-fought-for tools all the time now. Maybe there is a soul, and maybe it has something to do with the quantum realm. I bet it will also be found to have something to do with the next layer of machinery undernath that, once we understand it, and the machinery below and above and all around that, like an infinitely-dimensional fractal. These questions are probably always going to remain religious, because we definitionally can’t understand Everything.