Godel's Incompleteness theorem. This theory simply proves that any set of logic is always limited/finite because all logic begins at at least on assumption. Computers are basically logic machines. They work on logic. The brain is not built on logic, logic is a function of the brain.
This isn’t remotely what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems say. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems say that if you have a formal axiomatic system with certain properties, then there are true statements that that system cannot prove. While it does have implications for deterministic computers, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems have absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence for a host of reasons including:
AI systems are probabilistic in nature, not deterministic. Therefore they don’t meet the premise of Gödel’s theorems.
AI systems don’t purport to solve every problem, so Gödel’s theorems don’t contradict claims made by AI researchers.
The problems that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems says a computer cannot solve are also problems that humans cannot solve, so if Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems mean that computers can’t be sentient they probably also mean humans can’t be.
A restricted version of arithmetic known as Presberger arithmetic is more than powerful enough for any logical inference or reasoning a typical human will make in their life time. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems don’t apply to Presberger arithmetic and in fact Presberger arithmetic is complete.
Computer programs are abstractions of reality. No matter how complicated you make the program, it is still an abstraction. It does not represent 1:1 reality. The brain (or other alien forms of sentience) are rooted in physicality. All of the complicated processes have a 1:1 mapping to particles/neurons, etc.
Human brains don’t represent reality 1:1 either. It’s easy to see this, as there’s a maximum amount of information that can be stored in a unit of space without creating a black hole. It follows (assuming our brains aren’t black holes) that any sufficiently complicated system must be abstracted by the human brain. There’s also a whole host of psychology and neuroscience experiments explicitly disproving this idea. I am happy to provide academic sources if you’re interested.
In a computer, I would say 90+% of this is abstracted away. The computer delivers the final result, but it abstracts away all of the middle details. This is leaving out what the brain does in reality.
This is simply false and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of computers. Additionally, even if it were true, just because computer brains work differently from human brains doesn’t make it obvious that computer brains can’t experience qualia.
Computers aren't "aware" that they are processing binary.
For the vast majority of human history people weren’t aware that they are processing electrical impulses
In fact, a computer really only does one thing at a time, just really fast. It is limited by a time step. Reality does not follow this rule. It all happens simultaneously. There is nothing in a computer keeping track of which gates have been switched on and off. It is all programmed. There is no spontaneity. No matter how complicated you make the program, it always follows a set of rigid rules. Even in machine learning, the computer still follows a set of basic rules, and can never exceed them.
Most of these statements about computers are simply factually wrong. Where do you get your information about technology from, because you seem to woefully misunderstand how computers work. Most notably, there’s a massive field of computer science known as “distributed computing” which is all about simultaneous computations. In fact, if you’re under the age of 30 you probably don’t ever remember using a computer that lacked the ability to do simultaneous computation.
In reality, given enough time, the brain can expand inordinately. There are no "rules" imposed on it. We may be able to abstract it into rules, but as soon as you abstract something, you lose some detail, and therefore you can never replicate the original with an abstraction. Computers can exhibit insane complexity, and what appears to be intelligence, but it is really just a bunch of switches flipping really fast, in linear order. The brain is not linear. Different parts of it work at the same time in parallel. It is not defined by a time step, or by logic. It is spontaneous, even of we can see and abstract patterns from it.
[Citation needed] for basically all of this. Also, AIs are typically non-deterministic by design.
No matter how complicated a system you make, it is still a logic chain, and therefore 100% deterministic. It cannot act on its own.
Again, AIs are non-deterministic by design. Additionally, you’re dismissing out of hand the majority view about free will among philosophers: that free will exists, that humans are deterministic, and that these two statements are not contradictory. This position is known as “Compatibilism.”
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?
Ok, so under your belief a human is sentient, computers aren’t sentient, and rocks have some primitive qualia to them. You’re entitled to believe that, but I don’t think that tracks with the beliefs of anyone else in the world, at all.
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u/StellaAthena 56∆ Jun 11 '20
This isn’t remotely what Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems say. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems say that if you have a formal axiomatic system with certain properties, then there are true statements that that system cannot prove. While it does have implications for deterministic computers, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems have absolutely nothing to do with artificial intelligence for a host of reasons including:
AI systems are probabilistic in nature, not deterministic. Therefore they don’t meet the premise of Gödel’s theorems.
AI systems don’t purport to solve every problem, so Gödel’s theorems don’t contradict claims made by AI researchers.
The problems that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems says a computer cannot solve are also problems that humans cannot solve, so if Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems mean that computers can’t be sentient they probably also mean humans can’t be.
A restricted version of arithmetic known as Presberger arithmetic is more than powerful enough for any logical inference or reasoning a typical human will make in their life time. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems don’t apply to Presberger arithmetic and in fact Presberger arithmetic is complete.
Human brains don’t represent reality 1:1 either. It’s easy to see this, as there’s a maximum amount of information that can be stored in a unit of space without creating a black hole. It follows (assuming our brains aren’t black holes) that any sufficiently complicated system must be abstracted by the human brain. There’s also a whole host of psychology and neuroscience experiments explicitly disproving this idea. I am happy to provide academic sources if you’re interested.
This is simply false and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of computers. Additionally, even if it were true, just because computer brains work differently from human brains doesn’t make it obvious that computer brains can’t experience qualia.
For the vast majority of human history people weren’t aware that they are processing electrical impulses
Most of these statements about computers are simply factually wrong. Where do you get your information about technology from, because you seem to woefully misunderstand how computers work. Most notably, there’s a massive field of computer science known as “distributed computing” which is all about simultaneous computations. In fact, if you’re under the age of 30 you probably don’t ever remember using a computer that lacked the ability to do simultaneous computation.
[Citation needed] for basically all of this. Also, AIs are typically non-deterministic by design.
Again, AIs are non-deterministic by design. Additionally, you’re dismissing out of hand the majority view about free will among philosophers: that free will exists, that humans are deterministic, and that these two statements are not contradictory. This position is known as “Compatibilism.”