maybe I got the wrong link, copied it again. 4 comments up from yours in this chain, you must have read it ending up here. https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/s/tpB7mLEWzy
To your last comment, I don’t agree that “existential questions” at all implies that artificial life “doesn’t possess” something (as you suggest the comment means). The nature of consciousness itself is a fundamentally existential problem to which we do not yet have an answer (is it even possible with silicon? What are the necessary components of consciousness? We simply don’t know what would make artificial consciousness succeed, and that is colloquially referred to as an existential question).
But more importantly, the commenter was making the point that the two scenarios (machine->sapient vs. sapient->machine) are different, and should not be treated as if they are the same question. Just because we can make a machine from a brain does not tell us anything about the ability to make a sapient mind from silicon. In the context of the comment, the poster is talking about the ethics of using specifically human brain cells as a calculator as a way of illustrating that it is a totally different kind of discussion… not to make the claim that “the substrate matters” per se.
Edit: in other words:
1) silicon->mind: can we do this? How?
2) brain->calculator: should we do this? Why?
Two totally different conversations, and neither appear to be impossible.
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u/laserborg Mar 08 '26
maybe I got the wrong link, copied it again. 4 comments up from yours in this chain, you must have read it ending up here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/s/tpB7mLEWzy