Legg had perhaps that as his *only* purpose but, enroute, he accomplished something very important for other purposes:
Provide a semantic taxonomy so he could, to use Nick Szabo's idiom "reduce the argument surface". Discourse about "Consciousness", like "Intelligence", is so riddled with emotional valence that just providing a reasonable taxonomy, so people can avoid arguing with phantoms, is a very important contribution. Sadly, few participants in this "AGI" group have bothered to benefit from Legg's taxonomy, so they can't benefit from work founded upon it. As for Tononi's inconsistent premise, it isn't immediately apparent that a reasonably principled approach to something like Legg's taxonomy wouldn't yield -- at the very least -- a taxonomy of fallacies that would "reduce the argument surface". On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 8:53 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Wed, Nov 6, 2019, 8:24 PM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote: > > Has anyone pulled a Shane Legg on "consciousness"? >> >> https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 >> > > Here are a few possible definitions of consciousness. > 1. The mental state of wakefulness. The opposite of unconscious. > 2. Qualia. What thinking feels like. > 3. The property of agents that makes it unethical to harm them. > 4. The immortal soul that goes to heaven after death. > 5. The homunculus, or little person inside your head. > > Legg's 70 definitions of intelligence had the purpose of proposing a > mathematically rigorous definition for which theorems could be proved but > also one consistent with existing definitions. He defined it as the > expected reward over a universal (Solomonoff) distribution of environments. > This enabled Hutter to prove that there is no universal algorithm for > intelligence. > > I don't think there is any point in defining consciousness rigorously. > Tononi tried to do this (integrated information), but the resulting > conclusions were nonsense, as one would expect when starting with a false > or inconsistent premise. > >> *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + delivery > options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T252d8aea50d6d8f9-M652c06e385fcd6980ffbed4e> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T252d8aea50d6d8f9-M1c564629a4b1bb4a8ff15622 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
