I looked into the article you linked regarding self-attention. I quote:
> Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark.
So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it.
Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.
Not sure about that, the example was more like, you CAN restore the shattered glass 100%, but there will still be something missing from it even if you do.
Well, we know that heart transplants, for example, can give someone many more years to live. But if you transplant a good heart to a person who died 10 minutes ago in the same way you would to a living person, the person won't come back.
That's exactly how any heart transplants used to work: you stop the heart (now the patient is dead), cut it off, put the new one back. If the body is cold enough, 10 minutes might be OK.
The reason it does not work past 10 minutes without cooling is that brain cells start dying en masse, including ones running vital functions.
> Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark.
So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it.
Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.