Stathis,
I think the question should reverse - I and every (most?) creature can
distinguish between a real and a virtual environment. How on earth can a
virtual creature make the same distinction? How can it have a body, or a
continuous sense of a body? How can it have a continous map of the world,
with a continuous physical sense of up/down, forward/back,
heaviness/lightness? And a fairly continuous sense of time passing? How can
it have a self? How can it have continuous (conflicting) emotions coursing
through its body? How can it also have a continuous sense of its energy and
muscles - of zest/apathy, strength/weakness, awakeness/tiredness? How can it
have a sense of its posture, and muscles tight or loose?
How can it continually use these complex body maps and models to map and
model other creatures - other humans, animals - other shapes and things -
and get a sense of their solidity/ speed/ etc? How can it have continuous
empathy for creatures around it and sense their moods and body states?
How BTW do computer visual systems visually interpret any ongoing physical
scene? My understanding is they still can't identify basic physical shapes
with any reasonable success rate. So how can they understand that a certain
object is falling to the floor, & not being pulled - or floating upwards, &
not being lifted? And so on and on for every physical interaction? My
(pretty ignorant) understanding is they can do none of these - and without a
body, I would think it unlikely that they will.
As I write all this, a central distinction re embodiment becomes clear -
yes, computers can have a "society of mind". What they standalone can't have
is a "society of body". And of course that society of body is even greater
and inseparable from the society of mind - a simply vast (ahem
"mind-blowing") organization.
BTW I'd be grateful if you & others would constructively & not just
defensively engage with these points. I'm obviously just starting to reach
for a systematic statement of the essential need for embodiment.
One part of that essential need, as I said, is that your body and your
sense of your self in that body provides your continuous set of maps and
models of the world around - which is what mirror neurons help establish.
So trying to exclude your body from your (or your AGI's) intelligence of the
world is like trying to do *science without geometry* - quite impossible.
And trying to exclude your body is also like trying to do *science without
art* - to see Stathis or let's say Brad Pitt/ Jennifer Aniston purely as a
set of formulae, mathematical formulae and verbal descriptions - and not the
living breathing complexly emotional and pyschological body/creature that is
progressively evident in a photo, a movie, a theatrical stage, the living
flesh in front of you.
The *grand illusion* here - shared by all of you - and this is crucial - is
that of the power of words and symbols. You are all religious believers
here - you basically are inheriters of :
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God..."
That's what's going on here. The grand illusion is that because words and
other symbols can POINT at everything, and NAME everything, they can
therefore conjure up everything - they ARE the things they point to.They ARE
God. And young children can literally have these illusions, whereas they are
merely implicit in AGI-ers' thinking.
Actually no - the word or name is not the object it refers to, the map is
not the territory. You have to have the real object to really know it. A
real flower, the real Stathis, the real Brad Pitt etc. The real world
around you. And your own real body in it.
And you need a real body not only to *know* that other body - but to *take
it to pieces* in all physical senses - to touch and feel how heavy, how
rough, how solid - and to do physical, scientific experiments on.
So a disembodied intelligence is like a *science that is theory without
experiment* - again an impossibility. That's how science *started* thanks to
Bacon - by insisting on the need for experiment. If you want to know
anything, you have to in some sense do scientific or quasi-scientific
physical experiments on it - your body acting on its body. That's how you
became proficient in AI - by doing physical embodied "experiments" with
computers. Had you tried to do it all from books, you would never have got
anywhere. That's how infants begin by fiddling and sucking etc with things
and only later naming and numbering them.
Sorry, disembodied AGI is simply an enormous illusion like any of the
hundreds of illusions in psychological experiments. Initially compelling but
look closely and its unreality becomes clear. Get real. Get physical.
Stathis: MT:
The latter. I'm arguing that a disembodied AGI has as much chance of
getting
to know, understand and be intelligent about the world as Tommy - a deaf,
dumb and blind and generally sense-less kid, that's totally autistic,
can't
play any physical game let alone a mean pin ball, and has a seriously
impaired sense of self , (what's the name for that condition?) - and all
that is even if the AGI *has* sensors. Think of a disembodied AGI as very
severely mentally and physically disabled from birth - you wouldn't do
that
to a child, why do it to a computer? It might be able to spout an
encyclopaedia, show you a zillion photographs, and calculate a storm but
it
wouldn't understand, or be able to imagine/ reimagine, anything.
How can you tell the difference between sensory input from a real
environment and that from a virtual environment?
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