> But the idea that if we just get better at statistical inference, consciousness will fall out of it is wishful thinking. It’s a premise for an SF novel, not a plan for the future.
My impression of Silicon Valley types like Ray Kurzweil in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" that if we wire up enough transistors somehow consciousness will somehow arise out of the material world. The somehow is not explained. Materialism is a dead end in my opinion. I am more interested in theories about consciousness as a field and our brains as receivers.
If our brains are receivers to a field of consciousness, why would it be impossible to replicate one of those receivers with a machine?
You also seem to have just kicked the can down the road. "Consciousness arises from a field somehow, and the brain acts as a receiver somehow. The somehow is not explained."
I didn't say I knew how. I said I believe materialism is a dead end, by which I mean I doubt the consciousness arises out of atoms configured as neurons. How those neurons receive a conscious field seems a more productive line of inquiry, but for some reason people resist this idea. Not sure why.
Imho, materialism and non-materialism mesh well together. It's just the two camps, materialists and occultists, are too arrogant to recognize that the other camp might understand certain things better.
A self aware intelligent organism or machine needs three key components: a material foundation that's sufficiently organized (a large net of neurons, a silicon crystal, etc.), a material fluid-like carrier to control the foundation (that's always electricity and magnetism) and the immutable immaterial principle to constrain the carrier (math rules, physical laws, software algorithms). That's the core idea of occultism rephrased in today's terminology.
The "conscious field" would be identical with the magnetic field here and neurons don't need any magical properties to receive this field: they just need to be conductive, like transistors. I think the reason the AI progress has stalled is because 0-1 transistors are too primitive and too rigid for the task. I guess that superintelligence is only different in the performance and connectivity degree of the material foundation: instead of slow neurons with 10k of connections it would be fast quasi crystal like structure with billions of connections that needs to move very little matter around (but it has to be material and consist of atoms of some sort).
By studying the atoms configured as neurons, we've managed to develop machines that can learn to play board games and Atari games better than humans, and can write prose and poetry at a convincingly human level. Those skills may not require consciousness, but it's not clear that these machines would be more useful if they could "receive a conscious field".
Do you think that animals receive a conscious field? Could we create an accurate representation of a mouse's brain just from modelling its neurons? If a mouse brain can't receive a conscious field, but a human brain can, then what relevant physiological differences are there between the two, other than size?
They have mapped out the synapse structure, there is no evidence that synapse structure is enough to actually run the brain. If you can run that brain and show it is an accurate representation of a flea brain then you'd have something, but until then I'll believe that the neurons do way more than ML researchers hope they do.
My main point was that you seemed to be criticizing materialism for not yet having a solid answer for "how", which is the same issue any alternative theory has.
Everyone I've ever spoken to who has insisted that materialism is a dead end, has never been able to provide a compelling explanation for why they believe that. It's not as if materialistic progress in neuroscience and ML/AI has stalled. If anything, it's accelerating.
I have no doubt that Kurzweil's timelines and outcomes are wrong, as have the predictions of just about every prior futurist. I don't see what that has to do with materialism being a dead end.
My impression of Silicon Valley types like Ray Kurzweil in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" that if we wire up enough transistors somehow consciousness will somehow arise out of the material world. The somehow is not explained. Materialism is a dead end in my opinion. I am more interested in theories about consciousness as a field and our brains as receivers.