39 minutes ago, Eric LeClair said:

It's like the human body is our 'virtual reality' suit. It's real (The earth is real as f**k) but you and I are "experiencing" it AS 'humans'.

Yeah, so why can't we build a robot suit that an external consciousness can wear? If humans are all just molecules and robots are just molecules, what's the problem?

2 hours ago, Hodgman said:

Even if our brains are some kind of magical antenna that channels in a magical spirit consciousness from another plane of existence... what's stopping us from building our own mechanical antennae that channel magical spirit consciousness into our AI's?

I agree, and I think that perhaps the more relevant question would be why would we want to channel this magical spirit consciousness? What would that actually accomplish? There are two possibilities worth thinking about. Either the magical spirit consciousness does something that can also be fully described by an algorithm running on a computer or some other formal machine (which of course means that there's no need for merely channeling it -- it can be replicated instead), or that it can't be described computationally.

The latter case sounds interesting: magical spirit consciousness generates output in a manner that can't be described by an algorithm. Great! What does that even mean? Superficially it seems like it could be something like "free will," but unfortunately that doesn't really work: it might be "free," but it's pretty hard to think of an action as willful if it doesn't actually follow in any describable way from the initial conditions.

In fact, behavior of this sort isn't even meaningfully distinguishable from randomness (if it was, we'd be able to describe the non-random aspect of it computationally, which by assumption we cannot).

Now, I certainly can't argue that channeling this magical spirit consciousness won't magically result in something desirable (it is magic, after all), but I think it's also safe to say that arguing about something that by definition cannot be described formally probably won't be very productive.

Just asking, are you trolling this forum?

EDIT: You seem to be using a proper name & profile picture, however the profile picture does not belong to anyone of that name, rather it belongs to someone holding a Ph.D. in engineering, who does not seem to have any record of being particularly interested in spiritualistic stuff.

That plus the fact that it's such a fresh account here makes me wonder, given the 'trollishness' of your posts (claiming stuff without any actual proof, even when you claim to prove stuff).

Actually, it's only an assumption of me that other people than me have consciousnesses (it the soul sense). Yes, consciousness feels like magic, I can't explain why. But why should I assume other people have it too? Just because they are "similar"? Animals or machines (what's the difference, really?) can't have consciousness just because they are "different"? Or because I can't perceive their consciousness directly (or indirectly, because I can't communicate with animals). I can't perceive consciousness in people directly either, I can't even communicate with most of them either...

Sci-fi: Maybe one day we will learn that so many entities can be associated with a soul (trees, planets, whatever), even if we may never communicate with these entities because the so alien nature of them.

Chaos, there is nothing within the laws of physics that prevents a mass from getting from its origin too its destination at a speed that appears too an outside observer to be faster than light.  Physics only prevents a mass from accelerating to the speed of light by conventional means.  The most obvious example is that if something like wormholes exist, that would allow you to "cheat Einstein".  The ability to fold space would be another example.

Eric.  I can't create actual intelligence through AI, but I could fool you into believing that an intelligence is at work and do it in ways that would shock you with their simplicity once you understood what is actually taking place.  Creating the illusion of an intelligence at work is actually not very difficult.  It would even be "self programming" and even I could not predict what might happen in the future of the simulation.  This is not actual intelligence, of course, it isn't really "thinking".  But if I can already do this right now, it isn't crazy to think that in 200 years or so AI will have advanced to a point that it actually can and does "think".  Imitating the actual thought process of a human being is another thing yet again, but 1,000,000 years from now... our own technology of that time would be indistinguishable from magic to us 21st century apes.

3 hours ago, Hodgman said:

Yeah, so why can't we build a robot suit that an external consciousness can wear? If humans are all just molecules and robots are just molecules, what's the problem?

Because the "link" can be only be established by God. He was the one that breathed life into Adam after all. He (presumably) does the same for every fetus that is formed. Humans can't do it (well, unless they build the robot suit and then they pray for God to infuse it with a soul, and He actually listens). Otherwise, they can't wield God's breath, or the Flame Imperishable, or however else you wanna call it.

I'm not sure why this thread is going on - a dude claims "AI is impossible because AI is impossible". Last I checked, you don't really have to do much to dismiss circular reasoning.

2 hours ago, szecs said:

Actually, it's only an assumption of me that other people than me have consciousnesses (it the soul sense). Yes, consciousness feels like magic, I can't explain why. But why should I assume other people have it too? Just because they are "similar"?

Why not because they can talk about it? As you point out, your own consciousness (insofar as that's a thing that exists at all) is self-evident to you, but when you talk about it, are you actually referring to it?

If so, then it would, at least, be pretty implausible that other people would appear to talk about their own consciousness if it weren't something that they themselves also actually have.

If not, then there's some even weirder coincidence afoot: you experience consciousness, but when you talk about your own consciousness, you're actually talking about something different than the consciousness you actually experience.

Basically, either consciousness manifests itself physically to the extent that people are at least able to refer to it in speech and writing, or it doesn't, meaning we can't actually refer to it at all despite the fact that we appear to be discussing it. In the former case, the fact that people outside of your own perception of consciousness claim to refer to consciousness would suggest that they too actually can refer to it, and thus experience it in some way.

In the latter case, either it's pure coincidence that we merely appear to be discussing a phenomenon that actually exists (but cannot actually be discussed), or consciousness doesn't exist at all.