On Fri, Oct 16, 2026 at 6:49 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote:
> > ... > > Anyway, it is not clear to me why you would define consciousness this way. > What purpose does it serve? > To quote Shane Legg's Singularity Summit presentation on measures of machine intelligence: https://youtu.be/0ghzG14dT-w?t=1155 "I've given you an equation that even if you HATE my definition, you have to accept the fact that I've actually defined it formally and said exactly what I mean. I think that's a very good start. At least we can argue on that basis." (applause) Use "operationally" in place of "formally", and accept that Ed May hasn't been a PhD advisor to anyone like Shane Legg who could write a thesis that would undoubtedly survey "definitions" of "consciousness" much better than anyone heretofore has bothered with, thence to provide a taxonomy of such definitions into which something like the operational definition I've proposed can reside and maybe we can start to have a collegial discourse. As to the "purpose" such an operational definition might serve, how about this: Finding a place for the very concept of "purpose" itself in our discourse, in that the so-called "time-reversibility" of the laws of physics may embody what the Greeks called "Telos" for "final cause" -- rather than the folks endlessly yammering about "AI Alignment" are, themselves, "conscious" of at present. https://web.archive.org/web/20150925072222/http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/bi/EtterPubs.htm Etter was the colleague I mentioned previously who also arrived early with Solomonoff at the 1956 Dartmouth summer workshop, but because his family was independently wealthy, never had to genuflect to what Pirsig called "The Church of Reason" and its travesty of Newton's yeoman farmer homestead with The Church's "tenure" as the path to independent thought as the foundation of scientific revolutions -- independent thought once you'd been brainwashed and effectively castrated. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T2784bbfe524b0b93-M5589ae00eae3f5b07fab21ac Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
