Neural nets are not “slightly conscious,” and AI PR can do with less hype
I highly encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to listen through John Searle&#x27;s lectures on the philosophy of mind [1].  He taught a course at UC Berkeley on the subject for many years, and one of the years was recorded and uploaded to Youtube.<p>He walks through the history of the subject from Descartes onward and spends a lot of time about how philosophers got very excited during the 1960s and 70s as computer science was just taking off because it seemed that at long last we had a new way to explain consciousness.  This idea is that the brain is just a kind of computer and consciousness is just doing a certain kind of computation.  If we wrote the right program and ran it on a sufficiently powerful computer, we could make other kind of computers conscious as well.<p>But Searle is most famous for the Chinese Room thought experiment which is (in my opinion) a fairly decisive counterargument against this position.  That, along with the What Mary Knew thought experiment and Nagel&#x27;s What Is It Like to Be a Bat together made the &quot;consciousness is computation&quot; position increasingly untenable.<p>It took about 40 years, but by the time these lectures were recorded it seems that the tide has really turned among philosophers of mind (Searle has his own biases but he tries to be impartial in explaining all sides).  At least among philosophers who specialize in the subject it&#x27;s hard to find many who seriously believe that a GPU running Resnet is conscious.<p>Obviously there&#x27;s a whole semester&#x27;s worth of material in those lectures and the arguments can&#x27;t really be summed up in an HN comment, but anyone who is interested in thinking about these questions should really give the whole course a listen.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko</a>