On 10/9/2018 9:45 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Tuesday, October 9, 2018 at 8:16:59 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 7:54 PM Pierz <pie...@gmail.com
<javascript:>> wrote:
>/I refuse to accept that "axiom", and I also do not feel
compelled to embrace solipsism./
You are able to function is the world so you must have some method
of deciding when something is conscious and when it is not, if its
not intelligent behavior what is it?
>///I think it is entirely possible - and indeed sensible - to
believe that some entities that behave "intelligently", like
the chess app on my iPhone, are insentient./
I don't know what the quotation marks in the above means but if
something acts intelligently then it is sensible to say it has
some degree of sentience.
> /Whereas some entities that behave unintelligently (like
Donald Trump (sorry, I really shouldn't)) are sentient./
I admit it's a imperfect tool but it's all we've got and all we'll
ever have so we just have to make good with what we have. A
failure to act intelligently does not necessarily mean its
non-sentient, perhaps both a rock and Donald Trump are really
brilliant but are just pretending to be stupid. If so then both
are conscious and both are very good actors.
> /The absence of an objective test for third-party sentience
does not force one into solipsism. It may point to 1) a
problem with your ontology (qualia aren't "real")/
That means nothing. I detect qualia from direct experience and
that outranks everything, it even outranks the scientific method;
so if qualia isn't real then nothing is real which would be
equivalent to everything being real which is equivalent to "real"
having no meaning because meaning needs contrast.
> /or 2) a deficient state of knowledge wth respect to the
(pre) conditions of consciousness./
I don't know what that means either.
> Seeing as you have no theory of consciousness at all,
Yes I do. My theory is that consciousness is the way data feels
when it is being processed and that is a brute fact, meaning it
terminates a chain of "why is that?" questions.
> /statements like "you have no alternative but to..." don't
have much force. There are plenty of alternatives,/
Name one! I ask once more, in you everyday life when you're not
being philosophical you must have some method of determining when
something is conscious, if its not intelligent behavior what on
earth is it?
> a refusal to engage it as a problem, in spite of the
increasingly widespread acceptance among scientists that it
/is /a real problem, and possibly the biggest problem of all
in our current state of knowledge
I think intelligence implies consciousness but consciousness does
not necessarily imply intelligence, so the problem I want answered
is abut how intelligence works not consciousness.
John K Clark
One could look at it that way. In terms of biological evolution, what
has turned out to be intelligent beings (us!) are also conscious
beings. When we started making computers and programming languages and
such (inventing a field called Artificial Intelligence), it got a
little confusing. Is IBM Watson
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer) ] "intelligent"?
Some might say yes, others, no. There are some AI scientists (or SI -
Synthetic Intelligence, to contrast with AI
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_intelligence ] who say to
make truly intelligent artifacts they must be conscious.
So the question remains no matter how one parses intelligence and
consciousness: How do you make a conscious robot?
I'm obviously not sure, but here's an idea of how consciousness might
occur based on Jeff Hawkins ideas in his book “On Intelligence”. I
refer to the intuition pump of an AI Mars Rover:
The sensors of the MR would define the current status, both internal and
external. This goes into a predictor that estimates how the current
status will change if there's no change in the current plan. The
prediction from the previous cycle is compared to the new current
status. If there's not significant difference, it's “Ho Hum” and action
proceeds as planned. But if the comparison shows a deviation from
expectation That is something to take note of. It's noted in long-term
memory which is a searchable database which can be used to learn from.
And it initiates a need to update the plan. So what rises to the level
of consciousness is something that is surprising and may need a change
of plan. And if you ask the MR what happened, it will refer to it's
long term memory to give an account based on what it saw as significant
Brent
P.S. That rainbow pyramid thing is a hierarchy of values per Maslow
that are used in evaluating a plan.
This comports with the idea that conscious thought is a kind of
post-hoc commentary on what you're thinking, and explanation you can
tell yourself and other people. Remember that one of the criticisms of
neural nets is that they don't explain themselves. That means if you
want an explanation from an ANN it has to be a separate function which
can also be implemented by some more NN. But then you have no guarantee
that the explanation is the real one.
Brent
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