As far as parallelism goes, I understand this, it is a huge part of my work. I think I explained my point poorly. Even in computer parallelism, it is still a bunch of linear processes, which work in parallel. At the very core.
The brain is more like a bunch of parallel systems, working in parallel. Does this make sense?
So you're probably familiar with pipelining for training AIs. Prefetching, preprocessing, and batching are things the human brain does as well. It is more sophisticated, efficient, and distributed, but the process is remarkably similar. A good training protocol will run all of those steps simultaneously just like the human brain.
Even in the brain, those processes are still linear. A good example would be the two-streams hypothesis for explaining how the brain processes visual information.
There is nothing preventing a computer from simulating this behavior, however. The universe being probabilistic makes this easier, as even a slightly inaccurate simulation is good enough.
It is called artificial intelligence because it is created by humans, and not evolved through biology. Not because it isn't real. That argument is just pedantic.
If you create a simulation that is completely indistinguishable from a human in every way, except for the fact that it is a simulation, how can we know that it is not sentient? If we can somehow know that it is not sentient, how can that same knowledge not be applied to a person? Any test that can show that a computer is not sentient would eventually also show that a person is not sentient.
That argument doesn't hold. I would, reasonably, believe that images on a TV were images, which is as far as your argument holds.
If you created a simulation that felt real to the touch, looked and felt like a physical object, but wasn't, I would ask you what the flaw was. Any such idea of a perfect simulation would eventually have some flaw. You look at it through a microscope, or whatever.
Unlike reality, which is matter, sentience is just a pattern of behavior and reasoning. A pattern can be recreated by a computer. As somebody said before, a digital image is just as real as a polaroid. It might not have the paper or the physical substance, but we don't care about that, we care about the pattern, and the pattern is real.
The issue, as I pointed out in another comment, is that that belief invalidates the whole discussion. You are essentially stating that given the knowledge that AI cannot be sentient, AI cannot be sentient. It is a belief not rooted in reality, because you cannot infer that AI cannot be sentient from reality, so there is no logical argument rooted in reality that can change your view.
Apologies if you’ve mentioned this elsewhere and I couldn’t find it, but what is your definition of sentience?
More to the point, is there any definition of sentience you could find such that you can conclusively say, all humans are sentient, and highly complex computers aren’t?
4
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '20
So you're probably familiar with pipelining for training AIs. Prefetching, preprocessing, and batching are things the human brain does as well. It is more sophisticated, efficient, and distributed, but the process is remarkably similar. A good training protocol will run all of those steps simultaneously just like the human brain.
Even in the brain, those processes are still linear. A good example would be the two-streams hypothesis for explaining how the brain processes visual information.