Artificial Consciousness - Possible or Not?

[peter12]

Originally Posted by troutman

Would you rather have a 30 year life expectancy, or 75 year?

It depends on what kind of life I was living...

[Ford Prefect]

Originally Posted by jammies

They are already working on it by analyzing the styles of particular drummers and mapping that into quantizing formulae that convert a basic drum track into a track that carries the "groove" of a specified drummer (or even an imaginary drummer with certain qualities). So far the results are mediocre, but I'd guess it'll be 3-5 years at most before you won't be able to tell the difference between a studio drum track done by a real drummer and one done by a sufficiently talented programmer.

Colour me dubious. Machines can't get drunk or stoned and improvise based on the "cosmic groove of the moment" they way a wasted humanoid can. Would Dock Ellis ever have pitched a no-hitter had he not been wired on acid? Would Keith Moon have been Keith Moon without similar "substantial" creative enhancement?

[troutman]

Originally Posted by peter12

It depends on what kind of life I was living...

Life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"

[Ford Prefect]

Originally Posted by troutman

Would you rather have a 30 year life expectancy, or 75 year?

It's better to burn out than to fade away.

[FlamesAddiction]

I don't know if this is true, but someone told me that there are sceintists in Japan who are pretty close to making a "brain" that uses actual biological nerves to transmit signals. It's competely crazy. They also said that Sega was one of the main companies involved in it...

[peter12]

Originally Posted by troutman

Life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"

I'm not sure that I would go to Thomas Hobbes on the virtues of living a good life.

Not all technology is bad. After all, writing is a technology and it's the greatest and most precious thing we have stumbled across...

I am very sensitive to these notions of technology and progress that permeate our modern world. I believe in a soul and I explore this belief through the philosophical texts to the greatest extent of my ability. While things may get better for us in a material sense, the rush of our science to assert itself over our lives has made many of us forget what truly matters in life and that is... living a virtuous life.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by peter12

Possible or not, we should really be asking the question..."Are scientific advances benefiting us in any real way?"

Average lifespan increases. Infant mortality decreases. Immunization. Vision correction and other prosthetics.

Even if you reject the indirect benefits of science, any of the above are examples of direct benefits that are inarguable. Is it better to be alive or dead? Do humans prefer their babies to survive past infancy or not? Is it better to have plagues constantly winnowing the population or not? Do artificial limbs/hearing aids/glasses/vision surgeries improve the quality of life for the recipient or not?

[peter12]

Originally Posted by jammies

Average lifespan increases. Infant mortality decreases. Immunization. Vision correction and other prosthetics.

Even if you reject the indirect benefits of science, any of the above are examples of direct benefits that are inarguable. Is it better to be alive or dead? Do humans prefer their babies to survive past infancy or not? Is it better to have plagues constantly winnowing the population or not? Do artificial limbs/hearing aids/glasses/vision surgeries improve the quality of life for the recipient or not?

As a modern, I take all of these things for granted. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it robs us of our courage and makes us dependent on material convenience. I just finished reading Ravelstein by Saul Bellow which is a fictionalized memoir of his real-life friend Allan Bloom who died of AIDS in the early 1990s. This was before any real treatment of the disease was available and Bloom's diagnosis was a death sentence. The way in which Bloom, a philosopher, treated his demise was much different than the average bourgeois' attitude to their death.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by peter12

I'm not sure that I would go to Thomas Hobbes on the virtues of living a good life.

Not all technology is bad. After all, writing is a technology and it's the greatest and most precious thing we have stumbled across...

I am very sensitive to these notions of technology and progress that permeate our modern world. I believe in a soul and I explore this belief through the philosophical texts to the greatest extent of my ability. While things may get better for us in a material sense, the rush of our science to assert itself over our lives has made many of us forget what truly matters in life and that is... living a virtuous life.

I know of no tangible evidence that we have souls.

Our brains are biological computers.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by troutman

I know of no tangible evidence that we have souls.

Our brains are biological computers.

I can't really argue with this kind of reductionism, but this view of human nature is palty at best. I move more and more towards the position that we moderns know far less that pertains to ourselves than some who came before us.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by peter12

I can't really argue with this kind of reductionism, but this view of human nature is palty at best. I move more and more towards the position that we moderns know far less that pertains to ourselves than some who came before us.

I love your posts (you give me lots to think about), but I wish you would leave out jargon like "reductionism". I suspect very few of us know what you mean. What is palty?

Were there souls before humans had sentience?

[peter12]

Originally Posted by troutman

I love your posts (you give me lots to think about), but I wish you would leave our jargon like "reductionism". I suspect very few of us know what you mean. What is palty?

Were there souls before humans had sentience?

Haha, sorry. One of the worst things anyone interested in political philosophy can do is resort to jargon, it's one of the things we do to hide our own ignorance.

And palty should read paltry. Once again, my fault.

The question of sentience and the soul is interesting. Primarily, we are now concerned with cognition, a word that has come to replace reason or intelligence. Is it just the size of our cerebral cortex which makes us rise above the apes and other creatures into the complexity of the cultural and political world? That, no doubt, has something to do with it, but when we examine the absolute wonder (and glory) of human civilization, it makes sense to move beyond a simply biological view into a philosophical view.

Like dogs, we can fight over women/bones/food/etc..., but unlike dogs, we exhibit far greater degrees of courage, we swear vengeance, we write songs about our passion. We are wonderfully complex. This is what I mean by a soul, in our modern language we would call it culture. But basically I mean the ways in which human beings interrelate and interact with one another.

[CaptainCrunch]

Until they can download my conciousness into a 35 foot tall killbot named floyd, this isn't something that we should be spending money on.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by peter12

While things may get better for us in a material sense, the rush of our science to assert itself over our lives has made many of
us forget what truly matters in life and that is... living a virtuous life.

It's much easier to live a virtuous life in a condition of plenty rather than a condition of want.

Do you think that the abolition of slavery had nothing to do with machine technology being able to replace forced labour? Is it merely coincidence that official corruption of the State is far less prevalent in modern democracies that have access to technologies of communication, information retrieval, and surveillance that were not available in the past? Or that the insane are treated instead of cast out with no reference to the advances in our understanding of mental illness?

The essential nature of people has not changed over the millennia, what has changed is the societies around them, and the one main engine of change in societies has been the advance of technology, whether that be military technology like the stirrup or cannon, or civil technology like vaccines or railroads. That we do not go to the coloseum to watch gladiators fight, nor crucify disobedient slaves, nor expose babies on hillsides to die, is not merely coincidental with our having much better technologies than the Romans. That evil doctrines such as Nazism or Communism are enabled by technology to perform atrocities the ancients could not imagine obscures the fact that such are seen as aberrations in modern times, whereas people like Hitler or Stalin would have fit right into the ruling elites of elder times and been celebrated for their useful ruthlessness.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by jammies

It's much easier to live a virtuous life in a condition of plenty rather than a condition of want.

Do you think that the abolition of slavery had nothing to do with machine technology being able to replace forced labour? Is it merely coincidence that official corruption of the State is far less prevalent in modern democracies that have access to technologies of communication, information retrieval, and surveillance that were not available in the past? Or that the insane are treated instead of cast out with no reference to the advances in our understanding of mental illness?

The essential nature of people has not changed over the millennia, what has changed is the societies around them, and the one main engine of change in societies has been the advance of technology, whether that be military technology like the stirrup or cannon, or civil technology like vaccines or railroads. That we do not go to the coloseum to watch gladiators fight, nor crucify disobedient slaves, nor expose babies on hillsides to die, is not merely coincidental with our having much better technologies than the Romans. That evil doctrines such as Nazism or Communism are enabled by technology to perform atrocities the ancients could not imagine obscures the fact that such are seen as aberrations in modern times, whereas people like Hitler or Stalin would have fit right into the ruling elites of elder times and been celebrated for their useful ruthlessness.

What is a condition of plenty? The average person lives like an absolute king with convenience far superior to actual Kings 100 years ago. Yet, we have men like Plato and Aristotle teaching the way in which we may live lives of virtue over 2000 years ago.

Has our society progressed any more than the Romans or has our cruelty merely taken on a different form? We now engage well over half the world's population as wage slaves in the game of capitalism, there are genocides being performed with Stone Age technology in the Sudan and humanity aborts millions of fetuses every year.

Modern political science has been largely ineffective at recognizing the political cancers of the last century. Noam Chomsky, Fouceault and the French radicals wholeheartedly endorsed the doctrine of the Khmer Rouge. Martin Heiddegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, endorsed the Nazis.

Meanwhile, as Leo Strauss has demonstrated, we can see a full awareness of the tyrannical being in the Ancient's works, with Hiero by Xenophon being the greatest example. Furthermore, if you read Tacitus (a historian, not a philosopher) you read well-documented accounts of the Imperial atrocities of Tiberius and Nero.

The essence of good or evil never changes, maybe only our capacities. With trains and schedules, the Nazis slaughtered millions of Jews. Who knows what we will discover next?

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by jammies

Yet it's not clear that our minds do anything different; unlike digital computers, which are general-purpose machines theoretically capable of adapting and running any algorithm, our minds have many special-purpose modules that are tuned to interpret specific classes of algorithms, but so far no one has found any evidence to prove there is a difference in kind between brains and computers, as well as in what specializations are available. To make an analogy, most personal computers use a specialized module - the video card - to process graphics for on-screen display because such a module is far better at its specialized task than the computer's main CPU, but that doesn't mean the CPU couldn't do the same job through emulation, it just can't do it nearly as fast. So IF the mind is merely a conglomeration of specialized meat machines, then you can either try to mimic it with a sufficiently powerful digital computer that can model all the functions of these specialized machines internally, or build specialized computers that mimic each function of the brain and then network them in the same way the brain is networked.

I think the difference isn't in how modules are specialized, it's in how they're reused. We've evolved beyond being strictly programmatic: the parts of our mind that we would use in analyzing a chess game might also be useful in planning out how to cook dinner, or in anticipating the best route to work in the morning. A computer might have thousands of individual programs that are all extremely well designed and powerful programs, but to me, a computer would only be said to have thinking ability when any part of any program can be used by any other program, and when the machine can create new programs for itself on the fly. I have no doubt that such a machine is possible, but programming a really powerful chess computer or a drumming computer or a language/syntax analyzer solves a very specific problem, but doesn't get any closer to the solution to the larger question. Which is why I think the Turing test is interesting, but largely irrelevant to the question of conscience.

[troutman]

Could an AI evolve over time without our intervention, like our own brains evolved?

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by troutman

Could an AI evolve over time without our intervention, like our own brains evolved?

Good question. My answer is yes and no. It's easy to make a program that can self replicate, mutate, and evolve through the process of natural selection. But that program will always hit against the limits of the hardware that it is contained within, and that hardware is one of the things holding the machine back right now. A computer that could truly evolve would need to be completely self-replicating, in terms of both hardware and software. Or at least have access to the systems necessary to replicate itself (let's say, a completely automated computer production facility). Even then, it's limited by what that facility can reproduce, unless the facility has everything it needs to self-replicate. Which is more likely to be the sort of hive self-replication that we'd be likely to see.

However, the advantage that a hypothetical truly self-replicating machine would have is that it would be able to move beyond the randomness of evolution and make only those mutations that it knows would be beneficial.

[Bob]

For the mind to be impossible to model digitally, it seems there must be one of two things true about it: it processes on the quantum level, or there is a non-material component to it. I think it's Roger Penrose that argues the former, but from what I remember of his book about it, he was singularly unconvincing (although that doesn't mean he's wrong, he just might have the details wrong while the central idea is correct). The latter is of course the province of the religious, and might be summed up as "machines cannot have a soul."

Indeed, there has to be something inherently non-deterministic in there for it to be impossible, and so far I'm not aware of anything that qualifies. The continual progress of knowledge should eventually fill in the gaps to a sufficient degree. It also doesn't make sense for consciousness to only be possible using a set of chemical and physical reactions contained in biomass, while a mathematical attempt would suffer from some sort of inherent limitation. I find it unlikely from an evolutionary standpoint that brains evolved to such a large size and then suddenly went "boink" on some quantum level giving rise to consciousness. A sufficiently detailed implementation of the inner workings of the brain should in theory have no problem duplicating all of the behaviour, the "soul" included. Obviously gaining the understanding of how it works is a monumental challenge, but not insurmountable.

Of course, the extension of this is two-fold:

First, the obvious immortality potential. I won't add anything other than I think this is many many years away (easily 100+).

Second, perhaps more troubling to some, you have no free will. I could make a computer model of your brain (i.e. "you"), sync it up, feed it the same inputs (sights, sounds, etc), and get exactly the same response you made in reality. So your "free will" decision to go buy pizza on a whim is based on: the state of your brain, the inputs it receives, and the structure ("programming"), and not anything metaphysical or otherwise unhindered by physics. That may fall under a "possible, but not practical" limitation, but in theory it's possible.

[yads]

Originally Posted by jammies

That was actually good advice!



How so? I can see how consciousness might be an illusion (there is considerable evidence that our consciousness is nothing more than a post-facto observer of workings of the real and hidden "mind"), but how is mind a silly notion?



Yet it's not clear that our minds do anything different; unlike digital computers, which are general-purpose machines theoretically capable of adapting and running any algorithm, our minds have many special-purpose modules that are tuned to interpret specific classes of algorithms, but so far no one has found any evidence to prove there is a difference in kind between brains and computers, as well as in what specializations are available. To make an analogy, most personal computers use a specialized module - the video card - to process graphics for on-screen display because such a module is far better at its specialized task than the computer's main CPU, but that doesn't mean the CPU couldn't do the same job through emulation, it just can't do it nearly as fast. So IF the mind is merely a conglomeration of specialized meat machines, then you can either try to mimic it with a sufficiently powerful digital computer that can model all the functions of these specialized machines internally, or build specialized computers that mimic each function of the brain and then network them in the same way the brain is networked.

For the mind to be impossible to model digitally, it seems there must be one of two things true about it: it processes on the quantum level, or there is a non-material component to it. I think it's Roger Penrose that argues the former, but from what I remember of his book about it, he was singularly unconvincing (although that doesn't mean he's wrong, he just might have the details wrong while the central idea is correct). The latter is of course the province of the religious, and might be summed up as "machines cannot have a soul."

Well our minds are different. Some problems like pattern recognition and speech processing are easily solved by our brains, but are very difficult problems for computers to solve. Is it just because we don't have a full understanding of the way our brains function or something more, I don't know.