[dekhn]

Not just consciousness- all of science requires a leap of faith- the idea that human brains can comprehend general universal causality. There is no scientific refutation for Descartes' Great Deceiver- it's taken as a given that humans could eventually overcome any https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon through their use of senses and rationality on their own.

I have long worked on the assumption that we can create intelligences that no human could deny have subjective agency, while not being able to verify that. I did some preliminary experiments on idle cycles on Google's internal TPU networks (IE, large-scale brain sims using tensorflow and message passing on ~tens of pods simultaneously) that generated interesting results but I can't discuss them until my NDA expires in another 9 years.

[Surgeus]

Very good point.

Genuine note - if you remember me in 9 years, please shoot me a message! I'm sure even then I'd be very interested in what you've observed.

[webmaven]

How likely is it that the results will still be interesting in 9 years?

[dekhn]

Dunno. For all I know, DeepMind will publish a paper titled "Evidence of Emergent General Intelligence in Deep and Wide Perceptron Hypertoroidal Neural Message Passing Networks of Tensor Processors Trained over the Youtube Corpus" and get all the credit. :)

[webmaven]

Which brings up a related tangent. How is it Deepmind has a veto over what you publish? I understand keeping proprietary knowledge and implementation details secret (though the industry trend is in the other direction), but forbidding publication of your research seems excessive.