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Consciousness ... Human And Artificial

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smcder

smcder

Paranormal Adept
Spawned at the very heart of the Consciousness and the Paranormal thread ... This is an open discussion on the possibilities of artificial consciousness ... AND its ethical implications.
 
As i stated in the original thread my position is Consciousness like underpants isn't going to be much of an issue if SI is ever conceived.
Synthetic intelligence - Wikipedia

We've already created Synthetic life.

Is Synthetic Life Dangerous?

Reality not fiction, the rest is a matter of degree and complexity.

Synthetic biology, with its goal of designing biological entities for wide-ranging purposes, remains a field of intensive research interest. However, the vast complexity of biological systems has heretofore rendered rational design prohibitively difficult. As a result, directed evolution remains a valuable tool for synthetic biology
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1367593112000695
 
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How Close Are We To An Entirely Synthetic Human?

Synthetic human genomes may be produced one day, resulting in the development of an entirely artificial human being. But how close is science to creating a living, breathing human being from nothing but a mixture of chemicals?

Harvard University held a closed-door meeting on the subject on May 10. Attendees, including researchers, business leaders and others, discussed ideas on developing such artificial gene sequences. Members of the press were not invited to the meetings, generating waves of controversy over what may have been discussed at the get-together.

Human genomes are normally passed on from parent to child, transferring inheritable traits. Creating such a genome may be possible in as little as a decade, organizers of the meeting contend
 
Scientists Have Built Artificial Neurons That Fully Mimic Human Brain Cells

Researchers have built the world’s first artificial neuron that’s capable of mimicking the function of an organic brain cell - including the ability to translate chemical signals into electrical impulses, and communicate with other human cells.

We're really looking forward to seeing where this research goes. While the potential for treating neurological disorders are incredibly exciting, the artificial neurons could one day also help us to supplement our mental abilities and add extra memory storage or offer faster processing, and that opens up some pretty awesome possibilities.
 
mike said:
Synthetic biology, with its goal of designing biological entities for wide-ranging purposes, remains a field of intensive research interest. However, the vast complexity of biological systems has heretofore rendered rational design prohibitively difficult. As a result, directed evolution remains a valuable tool for synthetic biology
Click to expand...

Can you tell us more about, or link us to detailed explanations of, "directed evolution"?
 
Correlates of consciousness

In the last few decades, neuroscientists have begun to attack the problem of understanding consciousness from an evidence-based perspective. Many researchers have sought to discover specific neurons or behaviors that are linked to conscious experiences.

Recently, researchers discovered a brain area that acts as a kind of on-off switch for the brain. When they electrically stimulated this region, called the claustrum, the patient became unconscious instantly. In fact, Koch and Francis Crick, the molecular biologist who famously helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA, had previously hypothesized that this region might integrate information across different parts of the brain, like the conductor of a symphony.

But looking for neural or behavioral connections to consciousness isn't enough, Koch said. For example, such connections don't explain why the cerebellum, the part of the brain at the back of the skull that coordinates muscle activity, doesn't give rise to consciousness, while the cerebral cortex (the brain's outermost layer) does. This is the case even though the cerebellum contains more neurons than the cerebral cortex.

Nor do these studies explain how to tell whether consciousness is present, such as in brain-damaged patients, other animals or even computers

Neuroscience needs a theory of consciousness that explains what the phenomenon is and what kinds of entities possess it, Koch said. And currently, only two theories exist that the neuroscience community takes seriously, he said.

Scientists Closing in on Theory of Consciousness
 
In the past, Google relied mostly on algorithms that followed a strict set of rules set by humans. The concern—as described by some former Google employees—was that it was more difficult to understand why neural nets behaved the way it did, and more difficult to tweak their behavior.

These concerns still hover over the world of machine learning. The truth is that even the experts don’t completely understand how neural nets work. But they do work. If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus. If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language—words or phrases that people might type into a search engine—it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them. In some cases, It can handle queries better than algorithmic rules hand-coded by human engineers. Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more.
 
It will likely create itself, all we've done is create the primordial code.

Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what's called "recursive self-improvement." As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions. In turn, these modifications will kickstart a cascading series of improvements, each one making the AI smarter at the task of improving itself. It's an advantage that we biological humans simply don't have.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/how-artificial-superintelligence-will-give-birth-to-its-1609547174

This is really the big issue with this topic, what happens when the code starts to rewrite itself ?
 
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No doubt that's why the Internet is really for (1984) gets every human background and replications for future off World explorations using colones/robotics. Darker development maybe replace Human population/reduce it?
 
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