On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:27 AM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > Human science is critically dependent on consciousness.
In chapter 12 you reject the Turing test and some stronger variants as a test for consciousness. Then you propose a test based on doing science. In your test, a robot has to learn a rule or pattern to get a reward. Then it is tested again in a different environment to see if it can apply the rule that it learned. If I understand you correctly, then passing this test implies that the robot is P-conscious. This seems like a standard machine learning problem. I have written such programs without the robotic capabilities in data compression programs. A program has to learn rules of nature that describe data about the environment. The data might be English text, an image, audio, DNA, or some other description of a natural phenomena. A good model will successfully predict the symbols in the description string and demonstrate this capability by encoding them using fewer bits for the more likely outcomes. Furthermore, it will demonstrate that it can apply the rules that it learned to a new environment. Given two strings x and y, it demonstrates this by C(x + y) < C(x) + C(y), where C() is the compressed size. The compressor takes what it learned from x and applies it to improve its ability to predict y. Most compression algorithms will do this on many types of data. I know you don't believe that a program like zip or rar or 7zip is conscious. But then again, you wrote a whole book and have not been able to define P-consciousness. You simply assert that it is necessary to do science. I don't see how you can make an assertion without being able to even give a precise statement of your assertion. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
