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Margaret W. posted an update 8 years ago
Forum Borealis public release: Film: The Nature of Consciousness (Pt. 1 of 2: Why A.I. must fail) – A conversation with Cliff High . . . about its nature, function, manifestations, and implications. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tppPWE6DUEs [1:26:51]
The Giza Forum (Legacy)
Closed Archive of The Old Forum
Discusses why computers, however much data they process and however dangerous they might become if they have been programmed by a pathological control freak, can never actually be self-aware since no machine has a self or can access non-local consciousness. Though most human beings are not self-aware either, at least not fully or all the time since, we easily fall or remain in what Gurdieff called the mechanical mode….
I attended a lecture by Roger Penrose back in the late 1990’s on this topic, and he claimed that no rule-based computer could ever develop consciousness … but there were no quantum computers at the time … when I asked him privately about the “soul” he was dismissive … he claimed that quantum effects at the subatomic level can be triggered by a single photon hitting the retina and by microtubules in the brain in which quantum phenomena can be exhibited, and that is what might give rise to consciousness in “natural organisms”
Plants and minerals too may have a “reactive consciousness” (which might be in touch with the non-local nature of reality – we have just lost touch…), but do they, or machines, have a “self” and therefore self-awareness?
I think “self” corresponds largely to what Joseph theologically defines as “person”. The soul is another issue…
The best explanation — that is not really an explanation but can help think outside the box — relating to non-locality (and other weird things in physics) is the virtual reality / simulation hypothesis, and I found this short paper years ago very convincing as well as readable: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0801.0337.pdf
Thanks