Towards Artificial Consciousness

jzoom555 writes "In an interview with Discover Magazine, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices. His lab recently published details on a brain model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex.'" Edelman's latest BBD contains a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, and is modeled on a cat's brain.

Comments

Neat...

[viyh]

And they only need to increase that by 100,000 times to get to about the same number of neurons as a human brain, let alone the synaptic connections (which would be somewhere on the order of 2,000,000 times what they've done). Nonetheless, progress!

Re:Neat...

[TapeCutter]

"And they only need to increase that by 100,000 times to get to about the same number of neurons as a human brain, let alone the synaptic connections (which would be somewhere on the order of 2,000,000 times what they've done)."

Not as far fetched as it once seemed.

From the link: "At the end of 2006, the Blue Brain project had created a model of the basic functional unit of the brain, the neocortical column. At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations."

Note that some major parts of the model are down at the molecular level. Since then experiments using data from brain scans have shown that the simulated neocortex appears to behave like a real one.

I doubt people (particularly the religious) will accept a computer consciousness. A good number of scientists belive animals are prue programming (nobody home just trainable automata) and there are a shitload of ordinary people out there who still don't belive climate simulations are usefull predictors (scroll down to embedded movie).

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[HadouKen24]

Hmm, we routinely "shut down" beings that we are pretty sure are conscious, if not very intelligent. Been to McDonald lately?

Eating meat is not necessarily as ethically unproblematic as most of us would like. Ethical objections to consuming animals go back as far as Pythagoras in the West, and possibly much further in the East. The arguments for minimizing, if not eliminating, meat consumption have not gotten weaker with time. If anything, the biological discoveries showing the profound similarities between humans and other animals provide a great of justification for ethical vegetarianism.

Furthermore, we usually don't treat all animals alike. More intelligent animals, like the great apes, dolphins, and elephants, tend to garner much more respect. Should such a creature through a fluke gain human-level intelligence, I don't think the ethical implications are at all obscure; we should treat them with the same respect we give to other humans. We would at least have to set out guidelines as to how intelligent or sentient an artificial consciousness would have to be to deserve better treatment.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[daeglin]

No, Turing test should decide whether a machine is intelligent (you should read the links you provide). The test also has very severe weaknesses, see Weaknesses of the test

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[daeglin]

"Red" is what your parents told you it is. A name arbitrarily assigned to a specific visual sensation, which is defined by the physical makeup of your eye.

Yes, but the fundemantal qeustion is: What is this "visual sensation"? In other words: What is qualia?

Otherwise, I do agree with you, you parent post is mostly gibberish.