[Ben Franklin]

Originally Posted by GrumpyOldMan

Second question first:

I think what happens in surgery, I have had several - colonoscopies, and AAA repair - is that they administer a drug which inhibits long term memory formation - so you don't remember anything that happens. It is the same as it didn't happen from your perspective, .In my case it feels like I turned off in the OR and turned back on in recovery.

First question:

There are two arguments on self aware - consciousness. For "robots" with tasks, factory workers, home maids, farming, lawyers, doctors assistants, etc - production oriented, most likely there will be no need for them to be self aware - in the sense we are. They instead will be trained using deep training like GPT-3/4 are trained on massive amounts of text from the internet, so they learn to "understand" and create language based output.

Then there are the crazies, like me, trying to make a true sentient self aware artificial intelligence, that will learn and have motivations, etc. The current idea here is to not program what they AI does, but teach it to learn to solve problems on it own and in its own way. Back in 1977 or so I wrote a program that was just a matrix math process - sort or, based on work done earlier at NASA. The program accepted two inputs a and b. They could be numbers or letters (although letters are weird in this case). And then it would "guess" the answer of the two numbers. You would then tell it if it was right or wrong and if wrong how much wrong. Within 20 or 30 examples the program would start getting within 10% of the right answer. Within a 100 cycles it would narrow it down more, etc. The interesting part was the program had NO math programming. And you made up the relationship and didn't tell the program. Meaning, you could decide to teach it to add, and the next time teach it to multiply, then the next time teach it to divide. And each time it would learn the new relationship. This is "basically" (very basically) what GPT-3/4 does. but where my program had 2 factors, GPT has billions. and is trained over a vast trillions of data samples. z

Anyway, my point is, take my example, and run millions/billions of these little self learning programs, link them all together so the decision (answer) from one feeds the next, etc. And you have a simplistic model of the human brain. If we can approach the number of neurons in the brain, we can approach the abilities.

BUT. At that point religion and philosophy come in, is the machine really thinking and feeling? or is it just a simulation... dunno.

I've been reading that some scietnist think we are in a simulation. Since all religion and philosophy is/was created by man, then doesn't anything we create still have our footprint?