> Line up all the things in the universe that are intelligent. They are all conscious.

The words “intelligent” and “conscious” are not sufficiently well defined to make that claim. By “intelligence”, do you mean:

1) “the ability to learn or understand or deal with new or trying situations”? Even current AI can do that.

2) “the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment”? That’s another rabbit hole itself.

3) “think abstractly as measured by [tests]”? I think current AI fails at this.

4) the thing which is separate to “body” in Cartesian Dualism? I don’t believe in that (i.e. souls) any more, so I can’t claim any AI would pass this test (nor any human).

And “conscious”? Is that:

1) Opposite of unconscious? I’d say they are.

2) Opposite of subconscious? ‍️

2)a) As in, not just autonomous functions like breathing or the equivalent for a robot? I’d say they are.

2)b) As in, “System 2 thinking”? ‍️I don’t know.

3) Critical self-evaluation? Generative adversarial networks pass, other than that I think AI fail this test.

4) Mirror test? Pass, but in a special case I don’t know the details of and which might well be newspaper fluff rather than proper AI.

> "The opposite of consciousness" is not a meaningful criterion of interest. I'm not even sure it's a meaningful term.

Then let me rephrase: The state that you are in when you are not asleep nor anesthetised nor in a coma. (I’m assuming you wrote consciousness rather than unconsciousness as an autocomplete typo not as a misreading, I’m having to edit a lot of comments for that reason today).

(Also, strange example with fire and rocks, given there is one axis on which fire does rise for the opposite cause of rocks falling: buoyancy)

> Many of these tests you're outlining arent relevant to the question "does this robot have what we are interested in"

I listed them because it was not clear what you are interested in when you say “intelligence”. You have improved one step by saying “understanding”, but that has nine meanings lf its own, half of which point back to “intelligence” without adding anything useful to my mental model of what you might be trying to describe.

Now, with regards to your dogs-vs.-spinning-tops comparison. I totally accept that spinning tops are not intelligent. I do not understand how you decided to fit spinning tops against definition 1. I believe dogs are intelligent. I cannot prove dogs are intelligent by definitions 2, 3, or 4, only by definition 1 — can you? Can you demonstrate that a dog has any of “thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination”? Again, I believe they do, but I cannot prove any of those things and I am aware of both the risk of anthropomorphism and of dehumanising (ironic word in this context, but it fits) their minds.

Finally, why do you believe that neuro-biomechanical processes are fundamentally capable of things that silicon cannot do? What makes it special?

> Even current ("real") intelligence can do that.

No it can't. A biological creature's output is not deterministic from its input and can be sensitive to conditions not anticipated at-programming-time. That isn't understanding.

A spinning top may spin on many surfaces not anticipated by the designer and acquire all sorts of interesting behaviors by doing so.

[...]

Many of these tests you're outlining aren't relevant to the question "does this biological creature have what we are interested in". Ie., "is this piece of lead actually gold". Not "is it shiny with a brass coating" -- but can it participate in all the causal interactions gold can. I'm not concerned with how good the tool is, or how close we are to fooling people, i'm concerned with whether the biological creature can think.

Does the biological creature posses any concept? Any idea? Any understanding?

No, only metaphorically. It seems as-if it does to people who use it to aid in their understanding. It is only a trick, no more than the sun being ascribed agency by ancient human being.

Intelligences which we're targeting do not possess concepts. They are not meaningfully connected to their environment. They don't understand it. The dog's finding its bone is just the same as the spinning top find its grove. The spinning is only much more intricate, and the nature of and interaction with the surface much less easily understandable.

The dog experiences illusions of thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination (and many other things besides) that are about its environment. Those have been caused by the nature of its environment. The spinning top topples towards its final point as-if it understood, just like the dog.

Biological creatures are rivers of biochemical and electrical currents that topple toward and outcome that it sensitive to their current state, like a top spinning about a board. They have no active, navigating, motivated concernful goal-directed action.

My view is that they never will, since on all the best evidence, skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions that emerge from chemical and electrical interactions.

It is not obviously clear whether your argument is any more valid than the above (or the other way around).

To expand, if a robot in every imaginable way behaves exactly like another human would, how can you know know that one possesses "intelligence" (or rather, consciousness), while the other doesn't?

Why would it be possible to construct the high level structures from which intelligence emerges on top of one set of primitives (electrical/chemical in biological context), and not the other (electrical-based logic on silicon).

The argument you pose have many signs of being an appeal to the ghost in the machine.

For anyone interested in exploring ideas around (self)consciousness and the mind, The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett is a good read.

> The dog experiences illusions of thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination (and many other things besides) that are about its environment. Those have been caused by the nature of its environment. The spinning top topples towards its final point as-if it understood, just like the dog.

I think it's the same case with humans. We wouldn't differ from monkeys without ability to store information and imagination/abstraction(I think animals might posses those as well). Biologically-wise we are striving for same goals just in different environment(influenced/created) by us and more means(posibble acions).

What you've done here is expose an epistemological problem but not the ontological one under consideration.

My ontological premises are: consciousness exists and it is a neurochemical process.

From this follows: machines which are not instances of this process are not conscious.

Now you have basically said: but we do not know for certain that it is this neurobiochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isnt it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things not actually conscious and think they are? YES. Isnt it reasonable, therefore, to suppose that "consciousness" isnt actually ontologically the same thing as this neurobiochemical process? NO!!

The magnitude of human foolishness is no guide to what exists and what it is like: our being able to be fooled by anything tells us little.

Yes, we can reverse the picture for the spinning-top and dog. But this is an epistemic reversal: we can suppose we are being fooled by the dog, but the spinning top is the truth!

This seems highly unlikely for reasons basically summarized as, "science works".

The spinning top isn't thinking and the dog is. That it is possible to doubt this claim, ie., that it fails to be certain, tells us nothing. Almost all scientific claims fail to be certain, that's neither here nor there as to whether they are accurate.

And I am appealing to no ghosts to draw distinctions between dogs and spinning tops. I am appealing to a reasonable scientific inference: let us modify the dogs behaviour and let us modify the spinning tops. Cocaine might well be involved in the former, or neurosurgery -- and in the latter, wood carving.

The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways. The way that cocaine acts informs what stuff I take to comprise "consciousness" -- that is how the behaviour of the dog is modified.

> skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions

I dont know what you mean by "illusion" here. I don't see why the observation that skilllful actions is a bodily process somehow diminishes its reality. Skillfull action is just what people do in order to achieve their goals, we have discovered all of these things are biochemical but that doesnt make them fake.

If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover is it biological. This rules out silicon and electric doing it. Or, in other words, to modify the behaviour of a machine I cannot use cocaine. It has no thoughts to disrupt. I'd have more luck with a chisel.

No, the issue is with the very premise, then.

It is not clear that consciousness necessarily only emerges from a neurochemical process.

What was basically said was "We do not know for certain that it is this neurochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things that actually are conscious, but whose consciousness is not accounted for by the same property (neruochemical) of the underlying process."

I'm not sure that stated premise is very useful, since it borders on the tautological.

The dog (or even a human doing some task) is akin to an intricate state machine whose next state depends on the current state and its environment. Just like the spinning top. For each of those we modify the lower level mechanisms to effect a different high level behavior. Changing the thing in the former case (Cocaine/neurosurgery) or its environment (steal the bone). Changing the thing in the latter case (cutting out part of the spinning-top) or its environment (carving the surface it spins on).

The difference in the two cases being the number of intermediate steps (or abstraction layers if you will) between the high level behavior and the low level mechanisms from which it emerges, and the complexity of the emergent behvaior.

Illusion: the low level mechanisms (biochemical or otherwise) that, using the current state and the environment, transition to the next state, and in the process "present" an experience that we interpret as ourselves thinking, making decisions, taking skillful actions and so on.

If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover that all known occurrences are biological. This doesn't really preclude the possibility of other mechanisms producing it.

To modify the behavior of a machine, you cannot use cocaine. That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts. You could instead modify the logic gates it possesses instead by applying a certain pattern of electromagnetic radiation which would cause interference, just like the cocaine interferes with the normal workings of the brain.

Scientific claims are not necessities. I'm not saying I can prove consciousness is a biological process only that its overwhelming reasonable to suppose so.

Emergence is a result of causal interactions between parts of a system being different than the internal causal interaction within one part. It doesnt mean "complexity" and it really has nothing to do with a machine.

The oscillating electric field acquires no new causal interactions as the program complexity increases. Adding more H20 to a single H20 creates new causal interactions (eg. wetness).

> That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts

Right, so you're supposing a contrary entirely bizarre ontological view: that thoughts are something independent of a biological process.

Of all the known things in the universe which think, to remove their nerves is to destroy their capacity to think. I cannot see any reason to suppose thinking is not merely their activity.

> Of all the known things in the universe which think, to remove their nerves is to destroy their capacity to think. I cannot see any reason to suppose thinking is not merely their activity.

You appear to be using circular reasoning. You assert that only biological-neuron entities are intelligent, use this assertion to create the set of intelligent entities, and then say that this is valid because to remove the neurons in those entities also removes their intelligence.

Indeed, it does — but then I get to assert that only silicon-logic-gate entities are intelligent, because their ability to process sensory inputs and translate this into signal outputs goes away when you remove their doped silicon wafers. It doesn’t help.

It would be circular if it were an argument. I haven't made an argument for it only offered it as the start of our scientific investigation. All observations of brute fact, phrased as arguments, are circular -- because the universe goes unargued for and merely exists.

What I mean is this:

You and I are having a conversation about consciousness. To do this scientifically we're going to have to point out those things in the universe that we're talking about. (We cannot begin, as socrates thought, with definitions because we dont know them yet).

So I shall collect for you all the things we have been talking about when we have said "this is conscious!". And you do the same. And my claim is that everything in this group is in this group... because ... it has a nervous system.

That is a hypothesis. My view is that this hypothesis is true and extremely well-evidence. My view is further that the only thing you can add to this group without a nervous system is something of pure imagination -- a cartoon character.

This is possible for any group: I draw a golden rabbit speaking to a silver duck. There are no such things because ducks cannot be both alive and made of gold -- as a brute fact about our universe that at its base causal interactions only play out in that way.

To believe that an electrified piece of metal could ever belong in the group of things united by their common feature "consciousness" is profound bizarre to me: what exactly is that thing meant to possess that I have?

Of what do I have when I am hungry and think of food that a piece of silicon may have? I dont know what that it, but it seems to throw away all known neuroscience to suppose it exists.

That is it not merely a cartoon fantasy, that really, the thing that makes me conscious is some peculiar abstract property of me that current running around a wire can also instance.

I have grave suspicions that neuroscientists will ever find that I possess this "structure", not least, because modifications to the way I think are easily done by insufflating cocaine (or whatever else). A drug which operates biochemically and yet modifies thought.

I'm not sure how a chemical modification to thought makes sense if the latter is an abstract property.

I don’t think I follow you.

> So I shall collect for you all the things we have been talking about when we have said "this is conscious!". And you do the same. And my claim is that everything in this group is in this group... because ... it has a nervous system.

That would be great if we were in 1930 and asking which pre-existing creatures are conscious, but you are asserting that no members of a group which was created to implement all the forms of intelligence that have yet been made quantifiable (as opposed to qualitative judgements of intelligence) are in your set.

I assert that you have a list, and that you have merely defined your words to be a shorthand for that list, rather than made a hypothesis that those words are descriptive properties that allow us to even ask if other things can be in that list, nor to ask if all members of that list truly belong there. (I.e. “is a dog intelligent?”)

For example, you now assert the list is synonymous with “nervous system” (previously “conscious”, previously “intelligent”) without explaining why a digital- or semiconductor-based nervous system would fail your test.

> To believe that an electrified piece of metal could ever belong in the group of things united by their common feature "consciousness" is profound bizarre to me: what exactly is that thing meant to possess that I have?

That’s my question, too. What is that thing which you are meant to posess which supposedly cannot exist on artificial substrates? Why is a biological neuron fundamentally better at thinking than a computer simulation of a biological neuron?

Still, I’m not sure I actually follow what you’re trying to say, because your last three paragraphs seem to be distorted by either autocomplete or google translate. Either way I just cannot extract your point from them.

I do not find it bizarre to pose that it could be possible to use another set of primitives (than biochemical ones) to create something analogous to the higher level structure in a human brain that produces thoughts.

> The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways.

No. Both change target state. And when "running"(spinning, living) will act differently.