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Originally Posted by Skripter
Are you talking about patents 6,729,337 and 6,536,440? They are listed as a "Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex." The plan fires pulses of ultrasound at the head to modify firing patterns in targeted parts of the brain to trigger certain senses.
Not exactly brain to brain entertainment. Not to mention according to Sony they still haven't even started developing this. But still interesting.
If you are talking about another patent.. please do share. I am interested.
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Not brain to brain, machine to brain. And yes, direct to brain entertainment is what this patent essentially implies, at least in the long term.
They haven't started developing this, and this specific technique probably will never get developed, but it makes it clear that time and money is being put into the issue, and that advances are being made and possible solutions being found.
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Originally Posted by 2HousePlague
That computers will continue to improve is obvious. But, where you get into trouble (yellow text) is in supposing that the direction and magnitude of that improvement (however fantastic and imponderable from here it may be) will ever approach consciousness.
But, even if we allow for the possibility of computers that truly deserve to be called "conscious" by us, how can we presume that the mechanisms of that artificial consciousness will be anything like our own?
The fact that we may create artificial "consciousness" does not REQUIRE:
1 - That we have acheived a breakthrough understanding of human consciousness
NOR
2- That our success in creating artificial intelligence in any way owes to what we know about human intelligence.
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I think the development toward consciousness is an inevitable one (which I will explain in a moment), and I think the magnitude will be far greater than that of unenhanced human intelligence. The last part isn't really interesting - it's a numbers game and one with only a single possible outcome.
Consciousness, however, is a more interesting matter. Indeed, it does seem unlikely that machine consciousness will be just like human consciousness. It will, most likely, take many different forms - none of which predictable - since we're not limited to a single "species" or design. But consciousness will be developed, for one simple reason: that it is possible.
In humans, consciousness results from a complex physical process, and there is no reason why effects following from a specific physical process couldn't be resembled by effects following from another physical process. Pterodactyls flew, birds fly, bats fly, air balloons fly and airplanes fly. Intelligence is an infinitely more complicated thing, ofcourse, but with computers we are rapidly working towards creating it, and it seems not at all unlikely that in time, we will also (deliberately or not) create consciousness.
I agree with you that we will not achieve a breakthrough understanding of human consciousness, but that's because such a breakthrough is impossible. Consciousness as an experience falls outside the range of science, it is something altogether different. Just like love, beauty, fear, etc, we can explain how it works, but that doesn't explain how it feels simply because that's an entirely different language and type of understanding. Knowing how something feels is something that can only be understood by feeling it, and a scientific explanation rightfully doesn't concern itself with experiencing the feeling.
So even if we create consciousness, and discover exactly what makes it possible (something I actually doubt - it seems more likely that there are many forms of consciousness, each brought about by a different set of conditions, and without an "essence" of consciousness there is no way to say what exactly makes consciousness possible), we will still be unable to translate our scientific knowledge to knowledge of consciousness as we experience it.
I disagree with you on the idea of AI not owing anything to our understanding of human intelligence though. ALready theories about the development of the human brain are being put into practice creating computer circuits (eg neural networks).
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Originally Posted by 2HousePlague
Yes, I agree it could be simulated. In far-fetched theory (and I'm not exactly a Luddite, mind you!) anything is possible.
I'm just saying the download of a conscious human brain (forget about the nature of the receiving medium) -- the download alone, is NOT A CLOSE REALITY SIMPLY BECAUSE WE HAVE AN IDEA ABOUT THE AMOUNT OF DATA. The difference is as wide as semaphore and fiber optics.
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We do have an idea about the amount of data, simply because we have an idea about the size of the physical process. That doesn't really matter though. Fifty years ago, pretty much all technology developed in the past 10 years seems far-fetched, and technology is developing at a much greater pace today than it was then. Don't underestimate science
