[intjk]

I'll repeat what I posted on facebook because I thought it was clever: "Yes, but only if we tell them to dream about electric sheep."

So, tell the machine to think about bananas, and it will conjure up a mental image of bananas. Tell it to imagine a fish-dog and it'll do its best. What happens if/when we have enough storage to supply it a 24/7 video feed (aka eyes), give a robot some navigational logic (or strap it to someone's head), and give it the ability to ask questions, say, below some confidence interval (and us the ability to supply it answers)? What would this represent? What would come out on the other side? A fraction of a human being? Or perhaps just an artificial representation of "the human experience".

...what if we fed it books?

[andor]

Neural networks are a relatively simple mathematical model. They don't actually "think" or have a conscience. Neural networks are also regularly fed books, in order to model some properties of natural language.

Here's a good introduction: http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-07-NLP-RNNs-Representation...

[gradys]

Neurons are also relatively simple, at least in comparison to the mind. I don't think the simplicity or complexity of the underlying model has much bearing on the higher-level properties of the network.

Now, this isn't to say that the kinds of neural networks we build today are conscious, but I don't think that's because they're based on a simple mathematical model; I think that's because they don't have the network-level properties that conscious humans do, for example, a self-representation.

[sp332]

It would have some kind of intelligence, at least able to recall information and form associations between things. But there's no reason to think that it would come out looking human. I mean you can show a dog lots and lots of images and it doesn't turn human.