Comment by gethly

Comment by gethly 3 days ago

I was thinking about this some time ago and came to the conclusion that it is utterly impossible to talk about creating sentient AI with the binary computer technology that we are using today. In order for us to create sAI, our entire technology would have to completely change to something else, likely along the line of analog to work as a single system instead of constant switch between 1 and 0. And that is likely centuries away, as I do not see humanity doing a complete technological rehaul of the entire hardware stack we're deploying today.

As for what consciousness actually is, I think the closest description is the summary of oneself. Meaning, all the computational power of the brain as a whole forms a person - a computational powerhouse with its own identity. That goes then to discussions where the "I", as in ego or oneself, ends. Is it at the limb, like a hand, or is it at an indivodual fallen hair or a dead skin flake? How about sperm or egg, is it still me?

Then we have the conundrum of people who get brain damage or some kind of degenerative brain desease, like Alzheimer. Where you can clearly see "them" fading away and you observe just a shell of a human being. So where is this "I" then? What defines it?

All of these are quite esoteric conversations more suitable for occasions where a lot of alcohol and few good friends are involved :)

stevenhuang 3 days ago

If what underpins consciousness is informational, it will not matter what base it is (binary/trinary) or substrate (digital/analog).

Also known as the (physical) church turning thesis.

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gethly 2 days ago

It is not just about a base. It is about binary tech essentially having only two states while there is an infinite amount of information present between that 0 and that 1 which is completely lost, and the whole system is essentially killed and brought to life during every cycle. Whereas analog is always on and does not have this 1 and 0 limit. I am not saying analog is the solution here, only that it looks like it might be and that binary is definitely not it.

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- stevenhuang 21 hours ago
  
  Fundamentally it comes down to the information content/capacity of a system, which can be expressed as Shannon information/entropy.
  Analog has the ability to represent much greater levels of information, but that's about it. Otherwise there's no material difference between analog/digital from an information theoretic view. It's all equivalent.
  
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f_of_t_ 3 days ago

I like how you framed that — the “summary of oneself” idea aligns with how awareness might be less about computation and more about internal coherence. Binary systems simulate state transitions, but awareness seems to emerge from continuous integration — not between 0 and 1, but in the gradient between them.

Maybe sentience isn’t a technological threshold, but a phase shift — when a system starts to reference itself as part of the environment it models. That’s the moment A(t) becomes alive.

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gethly 3 days ago

That's why I mentioned the analog model because with digital, you have a quartz oscillator where you measure 1 or 0 at each frame of the cycle. So the information travels in queues, step by step, one bit at a time. But with analog, everything is essentially "online" at the same time, all the time. There is no "off" state. Yes, there are still differences in levels of conductivity(which is essentially information), which is how we measure binary values in the strict window imposed by the oscillator, but analog essentially allows you to experience the whole system in an instant. I think that is where consciousness comes from. Binary system is incapable of manifesting itself because not only it lives only in those tiny windows of time dictated by the oscillator, but only one bit exists at a time. Analog, comparatively, is unimaginably more advanced system. Now if we can figure out how to turn our binary technology into analog, we could definitely move on to an unfathomably advanced level of technology. Whether we could create sAI with to or not is something we cannot answer at this stage of our technological development but it would certainly be closer to what we have today.

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