Comments by "Kristopher Driver" (@paxdriver) on "What Do We Know About Our Minds?: A Conversation with Paul Bloom (Episode #317)" video.

  1. Bayesian symbolic vector associations are not expériences. If à machine were to become conscious via machine learning it would not be able to experience the qualia of experience. I know this because biology is life stemming from life, it is emergent. Machines don't have the cellular memories of animals and plants which create opinions and bias that shape character with culture, hope and desires. A bit has no culture, no kinship, no feeling of the data it processes just like a cleverly designed river that counts in binary is just water falling into jugs, not a conscious act of the waterfall to perform binary logic. A matrix dot product system of weights is not feeling anything, it is electrons tumbling in order based on probabilistic circuits it resides in. It produces language because language is a tool we use to transmit and receive abstractions from/into our psyches. Mimicking a tool is not the same as mimicking the users of that tool. When a computer develops its own language on its own to achieve its own goals in its leisure time, maybe then you could make the case for conscious AI but signs of that would show long before the tipping point just like amino acids appear long before RNA and DNA. Real synthetic life projects do exist but they are not computer systems, they are us mimicking the tools of biology - electrical signals and implants in regenerative organisms. You're worried about the wrong side of artificial intelligence when talking about machine learning. It's like claiming my saw is a real carpenter... Logic gates are not life. Life takes quantum mechanics, chemistry, and time to develop its capacity for experience. Circuits are fixed straws not amorphous clouds. Brains and culture are clouds, mutations are imprecise; circuits are randomized by algorithms relative to their clock cycles which are also fixed and determinate. The danger of ai is the users just like weapons or parliamentary power. It's the wielder and exclusion of access that creates risk. It's the guardrails and lack of regulation and transparency that's the risk, not a conscious silicone rebellion.
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