I just discovered machineslikeus.com.  @steve used to write for the website though it’s now only available through the wayback machine at archive.org.  So much great stuff he wrote back in the day, but unfortunately the archive only lists the first ten pages of Steve’s email debate regarding the seat of consciousness with a particularly smug academic type.

I feel like Steve had him on the ropes, as it were.  Perhaps it’s a debate lost to the mists of time but I’m dying to know how it ended.

Call me what you will, sycophantic, a zealot, a groupie.  These things are all true, but no one in academia seems to care for the holistic nature of biology and as Steve has said many times (which I’ve honestly felt is the real intrinsic truth of a matter for a decades now) “scientists” or “academics” are often more concerned with looking clever and releasing papers than they are with actually solving or understanding the problems that they are studying.  So much effort goes into creating (again, Steve’s words) “toy problems” which are so reductionist and simplified (or in Joejohn’s case, simultaneously overcomplicated and oversimplified) that they have little bearing on reality. 

Too few researchers are actually in it for the passion of discovery, it might just be the state of the modern world, but research always seems to be bound inextricably to finances.  Thinking is free, consciousness is just an emergent feature of life, unfortunately modern life is expensive.

There’s a very legitimate reason that AI hasn’t progressed beyond chatbots and that reason is; researchers are often more concerned with reproduceable results and flashy mathematics than they are with truly understanding the dynamics of inherently messy and difficult to reproduce systems such as the brain.

The version of the Turing test that I ascribe to is the one from xkcd ( https://xkcd.com/329/ ), and we just aren’t there yet, in any chatbot conversation by the time I get three prompts deep it’s all gone to hell.