Darius,

It's a critical question you asking, of course you know, expected a critical answer.

It's not much pleasant for myself to be the giver of critical answer, to critic it's not my pleasure as such. Though for your inquisition, may I proceed with analytics of your sub question, I can see of you including your deep thinking to your analytical skill ability.

Human knowledge capacity has been vast in application evidenced into tech advancement, in the recent/current tech advanced era. Aspiration mixing into imagination applied into production of science tech, resulted to incredible technology functioning. Brought, ease, production, efficiency, comfort and better care into society. There is less cruelty in the society per human being under less strain due to machinery taking burden off, people are behaving in better manner and with calmer minds task force managers, supervisors and landowners, workers becoming thoughtful.

Machines , technology after all, is human manufacturing, programming and capacity is limited to human control and creative level, ability. Can excelerated speed and pace to fastest to faster though they are vulnerable to their mechanism function, will break down, once they go out of control, it's dysfunctional.

Technologies cannot exceed limitation of ethic of science, crossing essence of its human programming consultancy. Human brain power and functioning is incredibly Invincible capacitor there is no artificial consciousness.

I am waiting for your exchange argument or counter comment of agreement or disagreement or your further elaboration or expression of imagination, please.

Regards,

Fatema Miah

Yes definitely it is possible , Elon masks project Neural ink in which a device detects the brain signals in order to perform tasks as per signals. the moment of human body parts is performed by brain electrical signals. billions of neurons perform chain reaction to pass the massage in electrical form. same think researchers is doing with devices which has ability to read the brain signals [ like our body parts ] to perform tasks...

Ritik Bhardwaj

You talking about transferring human brain into tech ?

Yes possible .

Fatema Miah

Correct. it is like merging artificial device into human consciousness..

Detecting brain signal yes, it's mere human production by programming, it's not very new. Example of ultrasound, scan system.

Fatema Miah

Yes but things like scan system cannot identify all types of brain signals..

Here on this discussion we are talking about advance technology/programming.

Tech will be under human control, it vast advancement we have seen in my life time we started with Tech and it has come across to this far of Ruling as digitalised globalism.

Computer is a mechanical device for our mind & it will help us to carry out the same with our programming performance in a right mode with this it will be ridiculous to join human consciousness it cannot be a subject of measurement to place computer in the near future.

This is my personal opinion

Interesting

I think that the answer depends on the degree of coupling. If we are talking about very specific signals to the brain, then we are already doing it. This gets complicated with the scope of the interaction

To answer what I think is the more ambitious question of to transfer human consciousness and knowledge to a computer system, my take is that it is not possible with current technology. There are some huge hurdles which I am not quite sure how they could be solved.

Lets think about this complete consciousness transfer (like in "Transcendence") would take place and the difficulties it represents (note that, I am not an expert in physiology of the brain, but here it goes). Discard FMRI since it would not be a suitable candidate for this, so it would leave EEGs(for one way extraction) and direct brain implants (for more" interactive" experience).

First an EEG works through op amps that pick up multiple neuronal firing. That is, a huge group of neurons and not individual neurons. This goes to the locality of the electrodes working on the surface of the head and the sensitivity of the op amp needed for finer pickup of activity from the electrodes. Simply, I do not see how it could be possible to untangle each and every firing pattern to complete the simulation (unmixing by ICA would be a monumental task and would require prohibitively huge amount of electrodes. to be precise one for each source and that means one electrode per neuron!!!). I see the same limitation of locality with the brain implant since we have only removed the distance to the source ( I do not know about you, but one implant in the cortex is enough and personally I would not like a surgeon to remove my whole cranial bones just to get enough surface for signal collection!!!).

Another hurdle would be the total number of neurons involved and their types (take for example the feat of trying to simulate a Purkinje cell communication, much less reproduce its actual firing pattern by picking it up with an EEG). Next there is the feat of tracking neuroplasticity in the brain and its evolution.

Note also that the brain is an electrochemical system and an EEG would only be tracking electrical activity. Due to the complexity of the system I would not see how to infer all chemical interactions from the electrical activity.

If someone has solved these issues please let me know and I will revise my post

Regards

Arturo Geigel

Fantastic counter argumentative reply with fact and knowledge evidence.

Fatema

This is an interesting question that has occupied much of my history as a pioneer of interactive media and more recently a student of cognitive neurobiology and thermodynamics to explore the pathway for improving communication between humans and computers. Briefly, here are some of the issues involved:

1) The idea of figuring out how the brain works by probing neurons is absurdly misguided. It's like taking the cover off the microprocessor in an iPhone and probing the bit streams on the data busses to figure out how Whatsapp works - and having no idea of how the programs themselves are structured. It yields interesting insights into brain structure, but as a sophisticated communication mechanism it is utterly worthless. Sorry, Elon.

2) Next, computers are by nature state machines. Given a known set of input parameters, they always produce the same results. The human mind is a coupled, chaotic system that evolves but never returns to any previous state. The connections in our brain are constantly evolving, which leads to a host of problems for the proposition of "downloading a human mind."

3) The human mind is not just blob of neurons disconnected from the rest of our body. Our consciousness (or that of a worm) is defined by the brain's connection with a suite of sensory organs that provide it with information about the world and enable outbound communication with that world.

I argue that the most productive way to increase communication with other humans and machines is by multiplying the capabilities of our existing senses. Learning other languages, learning TicTok, doing art, speed learning and many other modalities are available to be exploited. Computer technology is at our service to improve our own capabilities and doesn't need to, and indeed cannot, become us, because:

4) The human mind is not just a bunch of neurons any more than a city is just a bunch of highways. In reality, there are at least five levels of information systems (all running versions of the Turing Machine), that make up our beings:

- Small molecule signaling (e.g. ion channels)

- Large molecule information systems (e.g. proteomics, antibodies, etc.)

- The DNA subsystem

- Hormones, produced by every cell, including gut bacteria - the democracy of the body

- The neuronal system provides communication and executive functions that integrate all of these information systems and make us think we know what we are doing and why. Sort of.

- The experiential environment - Every second of every day, our experience defines our consciousness - ever evolving and changing. Which means:

5) Even if it was possible to create an exact simulation of a person down to the finest detail (it isn't for a host of physics reasons), within a microsecond the "new you" would diverge based on its unique experience. Design engineers have a saying that for any complex system, the only accurate simulation is the system itself.

6) Nothing is ever done without a defined benefit. What is the defined benefit of exactly duplicating any one of us whacky, flawed, human beings? How would it make money? Other than TV dramas, it won't.

All of this leads to an observation about the evolution of humans and machine intelligence:

We are already well along the path of integrating ourselves with technology - computers and otherwise. What is to come is an explosion in the TYPES of intelligence, leading to a multi-species future for humans. This is where I diverge from the singularity hypothesis. Instead, we will find many new forms of existence/intelligence emerging, all competing for energy to grow, reproduce and evolve.

If humans become agents of some larger techno/biological form, then that is what was meant to be. 67% of the humans on earth are already using smartphones. The potential for a new global form of democracy is already emerging, along with possible dark sides.

Evolution can be a cruel mistress - Buckle up, we are in for a wild ride...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361603624

I feel how today's technology is advancing, will test the human mind on a daily basis due to the high-tech of artificial intelligence. In otherwords, that the human mind can only think off its psychological thinking as from experience, or personal opinions regarding a topic, but a computer has automatic response through research that is embedded in the data depending on a topic.

A fundamental and often overlooked aspect of this question is "What is consciousness?"

It may be tempting to dismiss this question, but deeper consideration of what we actually mean when say "conscious" reveals that it is not so simple. Obviously, we consider ourselves to be conscious and might describe our ego as a unified train of thought. But our own minds are not nearly as unified as our language would suggest. Rather, at any given time, we have many different systems largely operating independently of each other that are only intermittently unified. As you sit reading this, your visual and language centers of your brain are unified, converting the image of this text into understandable language, most likely incorporating auditory imagination as well and perhaps an element of visualization in imagining the physical interactions occurring within the brain. Now, redirect your focus to your posture. While you were reading the last paragraph, you were probably adjusting your posture in subtle ways to relieve pressure points across your body. You may even remember specific adjustments you made or a particular itch you scratched while reading this. Your decision to do so was fully conscious, so was your decision to read the text in front of you. Yet at no point did the text affect how you sat or vice versa, at least until I specifically mentioned your posture thus unifying the otherwise independently functioning systems.

It might be fair to describe your consciousness as momentarily fractured into independent systems before that moment. Or, momentarily unified after. This raises the question, "Unified by what?".

As a strictly physical matter, these systems are unified by neurons within our brain, obviously. But suppose the neurons responsible for that integration, the white matter, the long neurons that traverse the interspatial region of your brain and connect the various structures to each other, were substituted with artificial electronic relays designed to perfectly mimic the function of those neurons. Would this affect our consciousness? Surely if you were to ask a person fitted with this modification whether their consciousness felt different in any way, they would reply "No." Any other response could only result from a discrepancy in the function of the artificial neurons. There is no reason to believe the physical laws that govern the behavior of a neuron are uniquely different from the physical laws that govern the behavior of an artificial neuron, or that an artificial neuron cannot reproduce the electrical impulses of a biological neuron. This same logic can be applied to all the types of neurons within the brain and even to virtual neurons or hypothetical portions of the brain that are entirely simulated and do not exist in physical reality except at the connection points where the impulses are reproduced.

It would therefore appear that "consciousness", as we use the term, does not describe the material structure of our brain, but the informational structure. That "structure" refers strictly to the relationship between an unimaginably huge network of physical and/or virtual logic gates and is not dependent on any specific material of construction.

There is also no absolute barrier between manifestations of consciousness, only varying degrees of interconnectedness exhibited at any given time comparable to the effective bandwidth between systems. The bandwidth between the language and visual centers of your brain at this moment is very high, much higher than the bandwidth that might arise during an intimate conversation with a friend. But the integration of information processing is none-the-less real for both examples. I would argue that it is just as real for non-biological interactions.

I am currently typing this reply on a fully electronic interface, but the interaction is harmonious and the text on screen truly reflects my thoughts. This interface serves, for all intents and purposes, as an extension of my own memory. In a certain sense, the information within the computer is unified with my own consciousness and, vicariously, to YOU as well.

The integration of our minds with non-biological extensions of our minds can even be "felt" at times. For example, when an experienced driver operates their car. We don't need to consciously think about turning the steering wheel in order to respond to a bend in the road. The feeling of unity we have with our cars is exposed by the language we use. We say "I hit the curb," not "The car hit the curb." We might say "That truck wants to get over," not "That ruck driver wants to get over," perhaps projecting how our internal concept of identity at that moment includes the car itself.

As such, it isn't really useful to think of consciousness as a strictly biological process, or as an isolated discrete process. Consciousness is fuzzy and clumpy, but ultimately universally pervasive however tenuous the connections may be between the highly interdependent and organized nodal regions we refer to as brains. In that sense, our consciousness has always been somewhat entangled to our computers and the degree of entanglement has been increasing ever since their advent.

As for whether technology will someday allow us to copy the entire informational structure of a human brain, that is difficult to say. That information is stored, not merely on the cellular level, but on the molecular level. While we have the computing power to store and process that amount of information and may someday be able to do so in an energy efficient manner, simply reading that information without destroying it, or even reading it destructively may prove physically impossible or too impractical to ever occur.

Computer programs are profoundly the same as the human mind.

Therefore, a computer can be conscious, and a human consciousness can be run on a computer.

Check out details: https://humanmind.uk/reference/1-2-beyond-the-project/

Many (maybe most) scientists subscribe to the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). Even some philosophers agree. The theory holds that the human mind is an information processing system, and for most scientists this means that it is a Turing machine.  However, even people who tend to agree with CTM, are cautious to endorse all the consequences of it.

If we take CTM really seriously, then we must acknowledge that there is no deep mystery about anything the mind is or does, all is just some computation, that even a typewriter-style Turing machine is capable of. This piece of thought is difficult to embrace. We humans are seeking explanations for everything, but for those things that are very difficult to explain we have a feeling of mystery. When the mystery is over, the generation who grew up in the old culture (which still held the mystery to be valid) has difficulty to change their mind.  We see this everywhere in the history of science and human knowledge.

However, taking CTM seriously means that the mystery is over. Every mental phenomenon can be explained in terms of information processing. And not only explained, but it is information processing. Every state of the mind, every thought, every feeling, is a piece of data. Every decision making, every action is information processing. The “self” is a piece of data with some processing. Humans are living organisms with a highly developed information content and processing capacity.

Humans and machines

Information processing (and data on which it operates) have the important feature of equivalence: it is unimportant how it is implemented, on what material basis, as far as the information content and the algorithm is the same.  From this, it seems to follow that a real human, and a human mind implemented in  a computer will be equivalent. Not fully, though. Because human minds constantly get information about the medium they operate on (their body, their nerves, their cells etc), and this biological medium is missing for the computer, therefore the total information processing is not the same. Apart from this, in many aspects the real human, and a human implemented in a computer, are close to being the same.

Meaning and understanding

It has been a topic of numerous studies in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science etc, what is “meaning” (of a word, or a sentence), and what does it take for an AI system to understand meaning.

It we consider thinking to be computation, it is rather straightforward that a system (like the brain) that understands something has a particular set of information and performs related computing – this is all about “understanding”. In our view of CTM, this is Turing-machine computing, therefore it can be done with a computer.  Such a computer has a fully equivalent understanding to a human, if the information and the processing is the same. We cannot say it is not “real”, because there is nothing more “real” in humans, only the actual material carrying the patterns of information is different. But there is no reason to think that cells carrying information are more “real” than silicon.

Therefore the Concept Network Model we use in the HMS project does have the option to represent “real”, human equivalent meaning and perform human equivalent understanding.  It all boils down to the details of the information processing in humans versus in the model.  Our goal is to define these requirements and implement them in the Cogito system.

Based on the Concept Network Model we arrive at a simple, technical definition of “meaning”: the meaning of a concept (which can represent a word, a phrase, a sentence etc) is nothing but the graph the concept is embedded in the Concept Network. The graph consists of

• the parents of the concept, the parents of the parents etc – this sub-graph is the compositional meaning of a concept, the meaning that comes from its parts.
• the children of the concept, the children of the children etc (more complex concepts in which it is a part). These add the contextual meaning to arrive at the full meaning of the concept.

The totality of compositional and contextual meaning may not be usable in an actual usage of the concept, because it may be too much – parts of this total meaning may be contradictory, and at the point of actual usage a subset must be selected to achieve understanding. This is completed in the Cogito system by activation. Activation selects a subset of the meaning, driven by the context. Understanding a concept is nothing but activating some of its meaning; properly understanding it requires that this activated subset is usable to perform the task given to the system.

Feelings

Now let us consider feelings in particular.

In discussing feelings and similar topics we can make an important distinction between assertions that are absolutely true (meaning they can be proven by the scientific method and they are independent of human beings existing or not) and assertions that are true only in the context of human beings – these make no sense if human beings do not exist.

Feelings of human beings are obviously in the second category. I argue that even non-human feelings cannot be discussed “in general”, detached from humans (even though we can image feelings in animals etc). The reason for this is that the word “feeling” gets its meaning  intuitively, from introspection. If we disallow this intuitive understanding to play a role then we can redefine the word, but then we do not speak about the same thing.

Therefore I discuss feelings in a way that I do rely on intuition. However this will not inhibit to give a kind of technical view on feelings. First, going back to the CTM: feelings are a set of data (together with some processing). But intuitively we do not call any set of data in our minds to be a feeling. So there are some features, what set of data can be more or less called a feeling. An evolutionary approach is useful to identify some of these features. Why are feelings adaptive? It seems that feelings evolved prior to rational thought and therefore can be found in animals. The adaptive role of them is to motivate the animal to perform the proper, adaptive behaviour. So feelings are generalized motivations: they are not formulated as particular goals, but are more general, vague incentives for some basic behaviours. Let us consider the most obvious kinds of feelings: fear often motivates to escape, hunger often motivates to put effort in seeking food, lust motivates to mate, love motivates to care, hatred motivates to avoid and punish. The behaviours motivated by feelings are not specified in detail, and can take many many forms, influenced by other infromation content of the brain. But the feeling is a piece of information content that is there as an important input for the brain’s decision making process.

So the conclusion is that feelings are sets of data (and corresponding processing) that contribute to the governance of basic behaviour types, necessary for survival.

This means that feelings are not really special.  They do not stand out as something absolutely different from rational thought. They are just more ancient, more vague, less specified. In humans (and mammals etc) a perception travels through several layers of representation. One (or some) of these layers have the property to motivate the organism toward some basic behavior. The data of this layer are feelings. In humans, feelings can be conscious. Importantly, conscious feelings  appear in consciousness in a separate modality, in the “feeling” modality. By this we can tell apart a motivation caused by a feeling from a motivation caused by a rational thought. Most probably telling these two apart is adaptive. And this is the reason why we have the notion of “feeling” at all, why it is a different thing than any thought.

Suffering, pain, good and bad

Now, let us come to the point: can a thinking machine, an almost human level AI, be sentient?

Again, the meaning of “sentient” must be understood in the context of humans.  People will probably call an organism sentient, if it shows  the signs of having feelings. So a sentient information processing system is one that has feelings.

Above we have seen that feelings are a set of data and related processing that provide motivation to an organism (no need to be biological) for some of the most basic behaviours. The most basic feelings are the feeling of “good” and “bad”. A feeling of “good” motivates to carry on the current behaviour. The feeling of “bad” motivates to to avoid it. The feeling of “bad” is pain and suffering: if you feel pain or you suffer, you get motivated to avoid it (the situation, the object you touch, the person you talk to, etc etc etc).

The sentient computer

So the most basic sentient computer should be capable of the feeling of pain and suffering, which means it should have data and processing that causes the behavior of avoidance. So far this is quite simple, we do have programs that initiate actions of avoidance. To make it even more similar to biological suffering, the pain-data should be some non-specific variable (probably a simple scalar) that is an input to all behaviour the system can exhibit. This is also doable.

However this seems not to be the whole story, because a plant, which may show avoidance of excessive sunshine by making its leaves wilt, is usually considered to be at a lower stage of sentience than a dog. So being sentient is along a continuum for us humans.   I think it involves the capability of communicating the message “I am suffering now” to a human. This can be some behaviour that is recognizable as pain-induced behaviour (making painful sounds, for example). This can also be body language, or simply talking about one’s own pain.

So one one hand, we need the pain-feeling going on in the system in the form of information-processing; on the other hand, we also need the pain-communication behaviour; and the more effective the communication behaviour is, the more we recognize the computer-organism as being sentient.

Cognition is a huge beast intertwined with consciousness through multiscale effects we call "negentropic entanglement". On the front of cognition, IBM has been developing a cognitive mind since the early 2000s.

Consciousness on the other hand is precognitive and does not depend on Deep learning computations. So Google's efforts in terms of their Lamda series of AI being sentient are unlikely to come to fruition. Because consciousness runs on nonTuring computations and DeepMind is all about Turning computations.

Basically, the question comes down to this: Can IBM's cognitive mind be augmented with a consciousness quantum analog model developed in our lab? See

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Demystifying_consciousness_through_its_mathematical_modeling

The answer is most likely, no. IBM's spiking neurons limit the requirements for functional interactions that could foster consciousness in a Strong AI.

What is the solution? The best bet is new AI developed by yet-unknown research companies like Leanardo is a real possibility if they are prepared to invest in Strong AI.

Eda Alemdar

Fusion, no. Interaction, yes.

Hi Zoltan Foris

"Computer programs are profoundly the same as the human mind.

Therefore, a computer can be conscious, and a human consciousness can be run on a computer."

This is completely false.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karl-Sipfle

Karl Sipfle I admit that my statement is based on the assumption that any activity of the mind is computation, and that consciousness is an activity of the mind. You probably don't accept one, or both of these. This is legitimate and you may prove right. I may also prove right.

HI Zoltan Foris It is not a question of an eventual empirical discovery, but what can be even in principle. Your first statement is the incorrect one: "any activity of the mind is computation."

Feeling cannot be made out of data processing because they are completely different, ontologically.

See short article Article The Primary Pitfalls on the Road to Understanding Consciousn...

With respect to positive medical applications, dear Dariusz Prokopowicz , I do see a great tech-know-logical potential to merge AI and human organic functions, in the tradition of the pacemaker as medical invention (1951).

https://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/news/top-ten-medical-inventions-pacemakers

The extension into human consciousness works by the interplay: humans program computers/computers program humans, e.g. learning/teaching as a computational way of thinking as a behavioral curriculum.

In this sense, we are always also sorcerer's apprentices, but I do not expect an evolutionary change or leap as a full merger of living and non-living (dead) matter.

Your query, dear Dariusz Prokopowicz , reminds me to the most famous golem narrative of Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th-century rabbi of Prague.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/artificial-intelligence-human-brain-to-merge-in-2030s-says-futurist-kurzweil-1.3100124

It's all Sci-Fi for time-wasters ............

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons (as many stars as could be counted in the Milky way) - one million times those contained in our cubic millimetre of mouse brain. And the estimated number of connections is a staggering ten to the power of 15. That is ten followed by 15 zeroes - a number comparable to the individual grains contained in a two meter thick layer of sand on a 1km-long beach.