Hi folk, My (Chapter 12 PCT) test is ‘consciousness-agnostic’ as far as test subjects are concerned. It only demands full embodiment. Can I suggest that no matter what your attitude to consciousness is, that the PCT (or whatever it evolves into) be considered as a way to bring science to this community that will attract science funding (eventually)?
I also note that until we actually build something that has consciousness by physics replication nobody can proclaim to actually know anything solid about it except that the physics of it does not exist in any computational substrate that exists at present. I also note that the only real example of human level general intelligence, natural general intelligence (NGI)! , has consciousness and that we are currently using it to conduct this discussion and that science is critically dependent on it, whatever it is. Empirical fact .... get over it! I also note that some of the attitudes here, to computing as an AGI and the consciousness/intelligence relation, are a bit like climate deniers. That is there’s merely evidence-less opinion masquerading as a science outcome. The reasons for this preference/opinion I can’t claim to understand. It is invariant to evidence in a way that I find quite disturbing. What is it about modern life that fosters this kind of thing? That causes shootings in Paris?Some people would rather be self-assured that they absolutely ‘know’ garbage rather than admit to not knowing something. Some sort of ignorance phobia? So strange. Scientists know that when you realise you don’t know something you’re a long way towards a solution. I’ll try not to go Rumsfeldian here. Being wrong is a job requirement for a scientist. Let yourself be wrong and you’ll get to what is right by wrongness attrition! You can only be wrong so many times in a row. But if you never try to make yourself wrong you’ll never know whether you are right or not. Like climate change and its deniers, the consciousness basis of intelligence will roll over the backs of the deniers, leaving its tread-marks on a bewildered sub-group of denialists’ backs. Thomas Kuhn recognised this sub-group. Ernst Mach died in denial of electrons. They get old and become irrelevant, and are ultimately regarded as having left science. Their preferences become a religion. Their community a cult. BTW Did you know the science of consciousness recently became a ‘generational’ activity? Roughly 25. It started around 1990. An entire generation of scientists has inhabited it. They think they are studying something real and very very important. That community knows _exactly_ what it is studying. They also know they don’t know what it is. Just like fire was, long ago. To know what you’re studying does not mean you know what it is. That is science. That is not being done in the computer-only-centric part of the AGI community. Which seems dominant even now after 60+ years of failure. What the existing computer-based-AGI community has been doing for 60+ years is examine a hypothesis that consciousness is irrelevant. This is being done in a way that is not actually science and none of the practitioners get that. The science-of-consciousness community will be the community that solves the AGI problem. That community will have an explanation as to why the 60+ years of computer-based-AGI failure has happened and could have been predicted. With the consciousness understanding in place, then we’ll be able to design AGI from a perspective of explicitly choosing to include consciousness or not, by design, and by knowing what its presence or absence does to the resulting artificial intelligence. Only then will the ethics issues make sense. Signing off for now. 2015 beckons. Dammit I said I wouldn’t ramble. Sorry. Cheers Colin ------------------------------------------- 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
