I really do believe that consciousness doesn't really have anything to do with intelligence. Even if humans are not simple. It's conceivable you could create something like a human with very simple machinery, just massively scaled up.
If that is too complex, you could create an even simpler algorithm which produces that. Maybe by creating a genetic algorithm which "evolves" human-like intelligence after billions of generations.
In both cases the end result may be complex, but the algorithm that creates it is not. Whether it be a network of billions of interconnected neurons that arise from simple programming of a few neurons, or a complex intelligence optimized by simple random mutation and selection.
This is the idea of emergence. That complex seeming behavior can "emerge" from simple rules and a simple process.
I really do believe that consciousness doesn't really have anything to do with intelligence.
The problem is that both of these terms are really too vague. What do you mean by "consciousness"? Some people claim insects are conscious; some claim bacteria are conscious; some even claim electrons are conscious.
Also, what do you mean by "intelligence"? By some definitions, the process of evolution by natural selection is "intelligent".
If by these terms, you mean "the properties humans have that we call consciousness and intelligence", then why do you think there is no connection between them? Does your own intelligence really have nothing to do with your consciousness? Or vice versa?
It's conceivable you could create something like a human with very simple machinery, just massively scaled up.
Conceivable, yes. Likely, I don't think so. But that's really a matter of opinion; it depends on how much of the complexity in the parts of the human brain (neurons, chemicals, etc.) is necessary for human consciousness or intelligence, and how much you think is just an artifact of the implementation, so to speak. We don't know enough about how the brain works yet to really judge.
the end result may be complex, but the algorithm that creates it is not.
In other words, the complexity is still there.
That complex seeming behavior can "emerge" from simple rules and a simple process.
Wait a minute--complex seeming? Or complex?
If you're trying to argue that the complexity may not be in the algorithm itself, but only in the actual working out of the algorithm in time and space, I'll buy that.
But if you're trying to argue that it isn't "really" complex because the algorithm is simple, I don't buy that. I never said the algorithm had to be complex; I just said there has to be complexity somewhere for there to be (human-level, to avoid all the definitional issues I raised above) consciousness and intelligence. That's perfectly consistent with the complexity ultimately being built out of simple parts--just a lot of them with a lot of interactions, so the complexity is in the interactions, not in the parts themselves.
(I think it's likely that the parts themselves have significant complexity too, as I said above, but even if that's true, there will still be some lower level, possibly much lower, where there are simple parts, just a huge, huge number of them with a lot of interactions.)
That was actually a typo. I meant to type "consciousness doesn't really have anything to do with complexity." In the sense that you could probably define an intelligent being like a human in very little space.
>In other words, the complexity is still there.
Well yes in a way. By the definitions used in information theory, complexity is just the amount of bits you need to accurately describe something in some language. By common usage complexity just means the amount of concepts you need to learn to understand something (about the same thing.) But it can also mean the number of moving parts a machine has, so to speak, which could be very large while simple enough to understand or write on paper. Like a computer display which has a few thousand pixels each of which is almost exactly the same.
I don't know if you would call a computer display complicated, at least not much moreso than the invidual pixels that make it up. The same is probably true of humans. Even if humans are fairly complicated, someday a connectionist approach or maybe a rough approximation of a human brain might succeed at creating something arguably conscious.
>If you're trying to argue that the complexity may not be in the algorithm itself, but only in the actual working out of the algorithm in time and space, I'll buy that.
This may be a much better way of describing what I just said above. So yeah.
If that is too complex, you could create an even simpler algorithm which produces that. Maybe by creating a genetic algorithm which "evolves" human-like intelligence after billions of generations.
In both cases the end result may be complex, but the algorithm that creates it is not. Whether it be a network of billions of interconnected neurons that arise from simple programming of a few neurons, or a complex intelligence optimized by simple random mutation and selection.
This is the idea of emergence. That complex seeming behavior can "emerge" from simple rules and a simple process.