Put another way, if we make artificial intelligence or meet alien intelligence, do you expect the way experience and knowledge get embodied in matter should be broadly similar?
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In the extremely broad notion of a roughly neural network-like structure? That seems plausible. Intuitively I'd expect much deviation from that to result in something we'd struggle to recognize as intelligence as we think of it. More specific than that I wouldn't want to make assumptions.
Actually to expand on this a little more, maybe the question should be about thinking rather than intelligence. A genetic algorithm or a slime mold might arguably show intelligence of a sort, but they don't *think* in any way we would recognize.
The intelligences all map onto each other - things are computable by humans iff computable by other intelligences (by trivially simulating a Turing machine on paper) but they don't have to look similar - lambda calculus looks very different to Turing machines, which look very different to brains
It's too early to say. We barely know how our current experiences and knowledge is stored. There are theories how trauma is stored in the body, diseases etc. It's hard to map all of it. But if you assume everything is interconnected, then technically it's just matter (ha!) of perspective.
I do, but it might also just be attributed to the limitations of my own conscience. I believe conscience instantiates whenever there's sufficient neuronal input capacity aimed at the lower level neural loops that inspects the data flow and is able to influence it with its output sufficiently.
Within the same timeframe as the lower levels operate, that is, so - in parallel. And conscience might just depend on the number of feedback loop levels that exist, which itself depends on the sheer number of neural pathways available in total.
I don't understand the question. In my construction,what you'd call conscience is a real-time analysis of the subordinate neural activities with leverage for influence on many knots. So in such a case, it just follows from the setup. No miracle needed.
Yes, but that's exactly my point. It doesn't follow.
Consciousness (at least) entails having experiences, but how does what you describe explain how that happens? Why wouldn't it just be neurons firing in the way you describe and that's it?
I don't claim to have evidence, it's just a hypothesis that could be tested at some point. The obvious points are: 1) we are conscient 2) we evolved, and we know approximately how more primitive forms of neural networks work. It's a proposal. If you have better alternatives, go for it
I think you can encode information in different ways, so our neural system is not the only way for sure. But it will need to be distributed, run parallel processes, record information for later, and manage a body of some kind. However it is encoded, it will be simulate-able and thus translatable.
I would imagine the experience of time would be fundamental and broadly similar in the sense that something can remember the past and anticipate the future.
But contrary to that the film Arrival does a great job of showing an Alien species that experience time radically differently from ourselves
Surely the question is circular? We'd identify "consciousness and intelligence" as anything that looks like our experience, so it's bound to look alike
Ah, but that is a completely different question. For your original question I was assuming you meant "for humans", in which case it's probably true... There's only one fundamental way to express algorithms and systems, and all instantiations (prog langs) are isomorphic. But for aliens, likely not!
I can’t make myself say no, but the I wonder if we could communicate with a species that somehow fundamentally understood the world in
momentum space rather than position space. And I don’t know how to rule that out, kinda?
There are at least two groupings of non-human animals that appear to be sapient and we can't communicate much better with them than with dogs and cats. Without that communication we can't even really be sure that they do experience consciousness as we seem to.
No. I do not. Human made AI maybe, in that to a lagre degree we are specifically trying to replicate the specific way experience and knowledge are embodied in meat with humans, but instead with fancy rocks and plastic. But otherwise no.
Even in the case of human made AI I don't think that's a guarantee, just that I think the chance we succeed at making an approximation of human consciousness actually exists.
Maybe evolution (or hasty computer scientists) always arrives at one kind of structure, it being a kind of local minima for implementing intelligence, but I wonder if pathological cases could create weird outliers in some corners of the universe?
Like some sort of widespread brain parasite or cephalic disorder deep in the genetic history that forces brains (or brain analogues) to use a different, less generally optimal structure. And maybe that gives you creatures with extremely weird cognition.
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Consciousness (at least) entails having experiences, but how does what you describe explain how that happens? Why wouldn't it just be neurons firing in the way you describe and that's it?
Qualia are unique even within humans and don’t map to individual neurons.
And the machinery of our sapience is a very odd assortment of parts.
We evolved to perceive a world at 1G under a G2 star.
With good enough senses and non-Turing complete sapience to avoid basilisks :)
But contrary to that the film Arrival does a great job of showing an Alien species that experience time radically differently from ourselves
Here we go
momentum space rather than position space. And I don’t know how to rule that out, kinda?
should probably also include at least some nominal mollusks
Lots of evidence of intellect but we don't even know how to ask their names.
I doubt we'll ever be able to translate between human and squid because our worlds are too different. Other mammals, maybe.