What I find interesting is that this definition supports awareness and an the existence of an 'I', but doesn't imply any sort of control or direct influence on the unconscious mind for which there seem to be experimental evidence against. Instead the result of this (literal) 'reflection' would be fed back to the unconscious mind as a sensorial input as any other.
Such a reflective process could possibly arise evolutionarily as it is a way to improve the efficiency of the thought processes.
I know absolutely nothing about neural network, but I wonder what would happen if the time series of the internal signals of a NN was fed to another NN and its output back into the first NN. Probably nothing stable at all and training would be 'interesting'.
Another interesting thing is that consciousness would be 'just' a process and not necessary for intelligence to arise. Peter Watts in 'Blindsight' [2] explores this last point in depth.
[1] Unfortunately I can't remember were I read this reference nor I have been able to track it.
[2] An extremely good first contact hard scifi novel, can be read for free from the author website.
Evolution has brought about creatures that are more successful (in regard to survival and reproduction), the more predictive power they have about their environment[1]. One could say, the better a species can simulate it's environment, the more likely it will continue to exist and be part of the ongoing evolution. Our brains are of course also just products of this evolutionary process and meanwhile very good at simulating their environment.
Now if we think about Plato's cave we could say, that all our experience is just an illusion. It's all just a projection of reality, that our brain creates. I'd go a step further and say: Experience or qualia is what the process of simulation of reality feels like. Or to put it in another way: Conciousness is the process of simulation of reality. The "better" the simulation or the more complete and closer to "reality" it is (whatever that means) - the higher the form of conciousness.
Taking this definition one must also concede that even animals and "lower" life forms have some degree of conciousness. It probably feels like something to be a streptococcus.
Of course all this is just blind speculation - but it somehow feels right to me.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151119-life-is-information-...
"Consciousness is the process of simulation of reality" is a starting point. The question is asked "How does the simulation work?" Why are we so good at simulating certain kinds of counterfactual scenarios? Why do we consider some to be plausible (e.g. worrying about a friend moving away) while others we disregard as immediately absurd (e.g. worrying about being attacked by pink nerve-gas-farting dragons)?
Like most of his books, it's a great yarn in an interesting world. The ideas he's exploring are rooted in platonism (how can a theoretical mathematical abstraction affect physical systems?), quantum physics, and the nature of consciousness. It takes a while to really get rolling, and when it does it snowballs fast, but I found it to be very enjoyable from the start.
So would you say that a supercomputer in the process of calculating the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron to 12 digits of accuracy is a higher form of consciousness than we are? After all, it is performing a much better simulation of reality than our brains in that case.
As in it's possible to knock out a dog - rendering it unconscious. But when it wakes back up it's not going to think about the fact that it's a dog (as far as we know).
So what's the name for a dog's normal not-unconscious waking state?
Philosophers who work on these issues tend to separate out individual aspects of conscious experience and discuss them under distinct terms, for clarity and precision.
The main article isn't really following these conventions (most people don't even know about them), but for philosophy:
Consciousness is generally the state of having subjective experiences. Like, you're conscious when you have some personal experience of things.
Sapience is the capacity to act with reflective judgment. This definition is a mess, just bear with me for now.
Self-awareness is, well, awareness of one's self. Introspection.
There are probably others I can't recall right now. All of these are slightly different aspects of a phenomena we experience as humans, and we tend to lump them all together when talking about it, especially when asking if nonhumans can exhibit any of these properties.
I think what we mean when talking about "conscious AI" is probably something more like "sapient AI" (possibly just "self-aware AI?").
A few millenia of discussion about the meaning of sapience summarized here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/
Being unconscious might imply that the mind is running in a state of little or no consciousness, but it is not defined by that. Assuming a cat or dog has no consciousness, it would still be called 'conscious' in his waking state.
A pattern-matching entity that can match its own patterns.
I might disagree about the intelligence aspect. It seems to me any entity that is at least moderately interesting (has any kind of behavioral complexity) would need some level of intelligence in order to model itself to a respectable degree.
Consider that it's not difficult to make computer programs that introspect. A quine is a trivial example. But since people argue over whether computer programs can be conscious, and it's dead obvious that some computer programs introspect (i.e. operate on their own source code or perform diagnostics on their own state), I think it's clear that people have more than just introspection in mind when they say "consciousness".
This really seem inescapable to me. The remaining arguments all seem like smokescreens. Being able to copy computer programs? Reproducing the running state of even a moderately complex distributed system is effectively impossible, so this argument bothers me not at all.
Even if there is some quantum gravitational aspect of human consciousness, the idea that you'd be able to distinguish between that and a reasonable computational approximation of it seems far-fetched at best.
That said, I feel that we are extremely far away from producing a computer-based consciousness. Even human consciousness needs a couple of years of full-speed processing to reach the point at which it could even vaguely be considered conscious by adult standards. Most likely 5-10 years after we give up on the notion of creating an AI we'll discover that we created one 15 years ago but just haven't yet been able to recognize it as an emergent property of a hugely complex system.
That's a feature of the Xen hypervisor.[1] You can even migrate a process from one machine to another without stopping it.
[1] http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Chapter_9:_Xen_Mig...
It is possible to migrate the state of a distributed system by designing a protocol such that all of the components stop sending information around, so that you can be sure you did not miss anything. But I think that violates the spirit of the phrase "running state", since you essentially stopped the system. It's also not necessarily so that post-migration, the system will act the same.
And even the Xen example is rough; the new copy of the system will be mostly functionally identical, but any reliance on the state of external things (like remote storage or IO or the state of unfair nondeterministic locks) will rapidly cause state to diverge.
Which only begs the question about how high-fidelity a copy has to be to be a "copy", even in the case of a hypothetical consciousness copy, and leads into the even more subtle question of the time evolution of a person and whether the me of now and the me of twenty seconds ago can be said to represent the same singular "consciousness" at all.
Views of distance to the production of "conscious" machines are likely all over the place because there aren't really any clear ideas about what consciousness is and why it's important.
* Is it one state of mind that represents another state of mind? We trivially can construct computers with states which reflect each other.
* Is it being able to act without external control, ie, apparently randomly? Computers can do that better than people right now.
And despite the fogginess and disagreement about what consciousness is, it's highly valued and thought necessary by many people looking into this stuff. If you think about that for a second, it's a reason to be even more skeptical about it.
What's unclear, and some deem impossible, is how we can externally detect consciousness. A machine could act and respond in a manner indistinguishable from humans but still be unconscious.
I personally feel fairly clear on that though I may be wrong. It is I think awareness in the central part of the brain that beings in data from other parts and can think about it. For example if you walk across the room you don't normally have conscious awareness of your leg movements because that happens with more simple neural networks but you can focus your consciousness on that if you want to analyse or modify your walk.
There are probably different levels of consciousness as you go from say humans to dogs to mice to flies etc. and it's a bit up to the individual what you call what. Modern AI systems are probably somewhere between flies and dogs. I'll give you that to get to the human level will take a while.
[1]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/automaton-robots-b...
For example, I can take the idea of a narwhal horn and the idea of a horse and mix them together to create a unicorn. My conscious mind took the excerpt of a narwhal horn and strung it together with the excerpt of a horse body. And I didn't just stick the horn on some random part of the horse's body, there was a contextual understanding behind it - a narwhal horn belongs on the forehead, the head of a horse is the thing with eyes and a nose.
Can a computer do that? No way, not presently at least. There's waaayy too much going on in the process of excerptification for a computer to replicate just this one facet of our consciousness.
Excerptification, as you describe it, sounds like a game of analogies. AI is not far from solving this kind of problem, as long as it is expressed symbolically.
Here's a paper discussing one AGI system, implemented in Haskell, that might be appropriate for work with analogy problems that require "imagination" as well as raw "perception":
Claes Strannegård; Rickard von Haugwitz; Johan Wessberg; Balkenius Christian (2013). "A Cognitive Architecture Based on Dual Process Theory" http://gup.ub.gu.se/publication/178583
Can a computer running a file server realize it is only storing pirated movies and stop it it without being explicitly programmed to do so? A conscious computer could.
Can a person from 1975 know your hard drive was full of pirated content? Probably he knows no title from your library, so he could not assume one way or another. It's as if specific "programming" was missing from him, or people from 1975 aren't passing your consciousness test.
It's a question of are there meta-patterns and meta-meta patterns.
I've done things where a minimal set of rules in a filter led to very mildly emergent phenomena in control systems. I didn't tell it what the answers were; I told it how to find the answer ( this is much less impressive than it sounds - think of a filter into basically a running average ) .
I joked that this was AI, but I'm not sure I was really joking because it's a difficult question. In the end, it was just a (perhaps unnecessarily complex) feedback leg. But it worked when nothing else would - but once you find the thing you're looking for, you tend to stop looking.
Yet, we interact with people all the time, and at least some of those we consider to be concious. So, by definition the answer to the question is yes. But I think that exploring why that is so, can also shed some light on what we mean by "being concious", how one might demonstrate that something is (or isn't) concious -- and how much of being concious relates to being able to relate to other that we consider to be concious as well.
If we could (and was willing) to raise a child without any human contact, what would such a thing become? Would it really become something we would call human? Concious?
I think that going down this line of questioning, we'll find some ideas about emergent systems, part-whole relations and in general a lot of complexity.
I think it also hard to claim that if we can merge a sperm and egg cell, and create a new concious system, that we couldn't be able to create some artificial (meaning, constructed by us, not "found" in nature) system that develops into being concious.
INMHO, the controversy isn't if an artificial construct can become concious, but what conciousness is, and how we know it's there.
The interesting twist in Enders Game (and other scifi) is that the alien invaders do not understand humans as conscious beings. I see no reason to believe that there aren't beings on earth, animals, who are farther up the spectrum than we. There are some very large brains out there that we do not understand.
The interesting twist in Enders Game (and other scifi) is that the alien invaders do not understand humans as conscious beings. I see no reason to believe that there aren't beings on earth, animals, who are farther up the spectrum than we.
Ahh, that's funny. It's the Blub Paradox [0] all over again! People generally seem to believe that they are special. That they live in a singularly special time in history. That their generation is on the cusp of some indefinable revolution. This bias seems to be extremely pervasive. Another pervasive example is the belief among evangelical Christians that Jesus will return to earth during our lifetime [1].
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
[1] http://www.people-press.org/2010/06/22/section-3-war-terrori...
Consciousness appears (intuitively, on the surface) to be the thing which creates the possibility of describing consciousness. A description of consciousness must account for itself. A theory of consciousness must be written such that it writes itself.
Penrose is strange. He once sued a toilet-paper manufacturer for supposedly copying his Penrose non-repeating tiling scheme for the embossing pattern on their toilet paper. He lost.
I think it's just perception, attention, memory, imagination and behavior learning. We have made progress on all these fields, so there is reason for optimism.
To make an analogy with AlphaGo - before the match, everyone was incredulous about it. After the match, we were stunned, but it was real. In just a few months a computer learned to beat the best human at Go. The same will be with reasoning and other high level skills.
> not a feature we would (or even could) effectively develop towards.
We, the people, are made of the same stuff as computers. We have no magic dust in us. There is no reason for consciousness to be unique to our particular way.
So yeah.
But the system which the computer is a part of though might create consciousness.
I think a lot of our problems with thinking about consciousness is that we think of it as a thing that exist some specific place rather than as a component in a feedback loop.
What we fundamentally are, are pattern recognizing feedback loops, on top of pattern recognizing feedback loops.
technological analogies for the human brain in history
I'm sure we're on to something, but I think it best we take it all with a grain of salt.
A violation of the UCTT would be a Big Deal.
Because of this, we now know that previous models of the human brain (as a hydraulic system, as a mechanical system of differential gears, as a weaving machine) are, in fact, also capable of expressing all computable functions (and we can even add Minesweeper and Conway's Game of Life).
I don't think anyone is saying that the brain is directly analogous to a computer (in the sense that it has a CPU and volatile memory or anything) so much as the fact that a computer, sufficiently powerful, could compute the same things that our brain is capable of computing, because of Church-Turing.
In 20 years or so, if it turns out that all of the dire predictions were significantly overblown, would you at least have the courtesy to blush in embarrassment for the current alarmism?
And perhaps better computing is why the polar ice caps are only shrinking this fast and not faster. We normally see 30-40 MPG in cars, and that is due to a lot of things, but the one big thing is electronic engine control. That is one in a long list of reasons why it's important to at least see how we can make these things work better.
Nuh-huh. You can't keep blaming it all on the hardware. Every year there's bigger and bigger computers and more and more people who claim they'll do better next year, when there's bigger computers.
Well, it just ain't gonna happen. Fascinating intelligence that eats our most powerful artificial one for breakfast is all around us, and it runs on as little as five ganglia. Look at insects. They don't even have brains. They may not know calculus, they may be completely incapable of even acquiring the concept of a mathematical operation, but they are autonomous and viable in a harsh, hostile world that the most powerful machines we've built are completely incapable of inhabiting.
If recreating insect-level intelligence artificially was just a matter of computing power, we 'd have done it already: we got more than enough of it. Five ganglia? My calculator is more powerful than that! But we don't have a single machine that can do what the lowliest fruit fly can do: survive on its own, and thrive, in the real world [1].
So- why is human-level intelligence just a matter of more computing power, but insect-level one is not? Is there some kind of secret ingredient? Is there some kind of magic involved? Will some sort of -gasp- singularity occur when the number of gates on a processor reaches a critical mass? Will the machine suddenly acquire a S.O.U.L. [2] when we stuff enough processors in a single casing and plug it in to the mains?
I don't believe in magic and I don't see how this whole thing is supposed to work: "Just add more computing power". And then? What? What is the plan?
______________
[1] Actually, these things can, for limited periods, but nobody thinks they portend the coming of strong AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYGJ9jrbpvg - why not?
[2] Self-Optimising Unbeatable Logic
That's not related to intelligence. That's other components of the fruit fly (reproductive system, etc). AI research is not really focused on creating systems that consume resources to do nothing but reproduce.
Yeah, here's a little paper I had to peruse lately for a uni assignment (on neural networks, of all things):
Bio-Benchmarking of Electronic Nose Sensors [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....]
It's a comparison of a Metal Oxide "electronic nose" and the olfactory receptors of a ...fruit fly. Results: the MOx sensors are nowhere near the fly's antennae in discriminatory power. The insect's neural system seems to be extremely fine-tuned to discriminate between an impossibly broad range of odourants, with overlapping signals in odorant space. The MOx sensors are rubbish at discriminating between the different odours for exactly that reason (that the odours blend with each other and leave you with so much noise). The MOx receptors even get damaged if the odorant signal is too strong. The fruit fly? It doesn't care.
Here's a bit from the paper, that's really enlightening:
We also note that the nature of the fly's broad and overlapping sensor fields would seem to require sophisticated and powerful neural processing for classification of odorant signals. There is anatomical, experimental and computational evidence that the insect does have such a system dedicated to olfaction [22], [23]. In contrast, it is known that the chemosensory system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, has very few interneurons and synapses between sensory and effector units [24], [25]. Given its deficit in neural processing power, we expect that the nematode approaches one-to-one matching between chemoreceptors and odorants, with less reliance on combinatorial processing than the fly. This would imply that nematode chemoreceptors have very tight tuning curves compared with either fly ORs or MOx sensors and may account for the remarkably large number of chemoreceptor genes identified in the C. elegans genome [26]. Whilst replicating the nematode model in an electronic nose may theoretically be feasible, it would present daunting engineering challenges to develop and deploy a very large number of tightly tuned and independent sensors.
So much about "systems that consume resources to do nothing but reproduce".
Oh yeah, AI is too interested in them, yes indeedy-oh. If we could make _one_ measly computer that could find its way around the real world with the purposefulness and accuracy of a mere nematode worm, we would be happy. No, scratch the "we". _I_ would be happy. The mother of AI they'd call me, you know? It'd be Nobel this and Turing award that and oh, here's a honorary readership to add to your collection, ma'am.
I mean you have to be joking, right? We're not interested in reproducing the cognitive abilities of biological systems? That's like, the definition of AI.
I didn't know that there really was a prominent thinker who postulated gravity (and quantum mechanics) as the place where subjective consciousness is hiding.
The reason some people think QM and consciousness are related is that some interpretations of quantum mechanics requires a conscious observer to collapse the wave function and make the final measurement (e.g. by taking a reading from a measuring apparatus, or listening to someone else (who they can't be sure is conscious) telling you the measurement over lunch. I'm not familiar with Penrose's argument re gravity, but so far general relativity has resisted attempts to quantize it, so maybe he's saying that GR and QM must be incorporated into a more general theory yet to be worked out, like electricity and magnetism are incorporated into Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.
May I ask, where did you get the part about "conscious observer"? Yes, there's a thing in QM about observation collapsing the wave function, and there's disagreement on what that actually means. But I can't imagine that an interpretation promoted by actual physicists would use a squishy term like "conscious" in their hard science.
Consciousness is the state of being awake, hence able to react normally to sensory stimulation. Computers are nothing but consciousness, unless they're freeing memory.
And how'd you go about verifying that? I know that I'm conscious, but you could be a p-zombie. That means if I poke you with a toothpick, you will scream in agony (responding to stimulus), but that doesn't give me any information about whether or not you are conscious.
If only I understood it! Does anyone else know how to interpret the sentence "in order for you to be unpredictable and unclonable, someone else’s ignorance of your causal antecedents would have to extend all the way back to ignorance about the initial state of the universe"? That and the following couple of paragraphs seem to establish something really interesting, but I haven't been able to follow it.
Which means that even if you know everything that happened between the initial state of the universe and now, you still can't predict that person decision. So you would have to ignore some things about the whole initial state of the universe.
Because the only possible things that can explain you not being able to predict that person are : 1) The decision is completely non causal... Which destroy a lot of things, because a non causal decision having impact would destroy the chain of causality. 2) Or! There is something in the initial state of the universe that you can't know. Hence the person acts are unpredictable but still causal.
Currently the paradigm of our epoch is to look at everything as a computing problem. Before it was hydraulics, then electricity etc. Maybe in 100 years our successors will be dealing with a more complete picture and their children will be laughing at schools that we thought consciousness was related to computing?
That said, I believe that consciousness is "supernatural", something like another state of matter of a quantum phenomenon that cannot be manipulated like an Excel spreadsheet.
Look at chickens. Piled on one another, slaughtered at will. We would simply stack conscious computers on one another and then delete them when they are not needed.
I don't think runaway general AIs must be conscious in order to be a danger, but that might depend on specific definitions of consciousness.
What about DRM? We can copy programs because we make them or we know specifications of the original computer it was meant to be run on or we can guess (because there aren't that many architectures, etc.)
What if a DRM scheme didn't need to run on modern architectures, was written in new programming languages from machine language and up, on entirely new paradigms? Do you think it would be easy to copy? What if it was unethical and illegal to do anything that could stop the program, or break the hardware? Would it even be surprising that we couldn't emulate it?
Even today's DRM schemes have not all been broken, and not all programs can be run on other substrates. The ones that have been reverse engineered is because they're written for architectures that are already known, and there's just specifics that need to be figured out. (Or so is the impression I get from reverse engineering discussions).
Couldn't we have a profoundly efficient, intelligent and organised AI (dangerous or not, i would follow mister Asimov on the fact that we are going back to the Frankenstein complex) that could do all that Singularity thingy without counsciousness?
What if counsciousness was just... something completely different?
Do we have enough information to create a rat? I think so. Is that an A.I.? To be rat-like you have to be able to adopt to new environments, learn new things.
Could we also model in the same way a human baby? Ok, that's perhaps a bit too hard. What if we try to create a model of a mongoloid baby. It would still be considered intelligent, right? Is it an A.I.?
Why does a system need conciousness in order to be able to dominate its environment? To me, clonable robotic rats would be as much of an inconvenience as real rats are.
Even if it's true how could you tell?
$DEITY bless Roger Penrose nonetheless.