The only testable natural phenomenon that is critically dependent on consciousness is the human scientist.
In the PCT testers and robot designers have no clue what is inside the test rig and the presentation of evidence is designed to be what we humans get: Abstract regularities that are encoded degenerately in the environment. Degeneracy: 1. Same peripheral sensing, different P-consciousness. Or 2. Different Peripheral sensing, same P-consciousness. This is what humans have. There is vastly more information in the P-conscious perceptual fields than there is in our sensing. Once the test is passed, then we get to argue about the relevance (or not) of the test subject physics and its part in the origins of P-consciousness. I have done my best to ensure that everything required of the test subject amounts to an act of scientific behaviour. That's as good as it gets. To resolve what the test is telling us, or not, requires us to do the test. This makes the AGI program scientific where previously is has not been. Yes I agree there's logical issues everywhere here. Failing the test does not mean that the test subject isn't conscious. ... For example. The PCT is a route to a solution, not the perfect answer. Without it the AGI project will never be science and never progress as a viable aspect of neuroscience ... Which is what it actually is ... It is not.and never should have been computer science. I am trying to normalize the AGI project as science. So.... Yes shortcomings abound. We just deal with them. In real science the ultimate arbiter is nature. The incorporation of a science of a 1st perspective is a major shift in science practice. We have to start somewhere. Cheers Colin Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Aaron Hosford<mailto:[email protected]> Sent: 15/01/2015 3:20 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; Colin Geoffrey Hales<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [agi] Consciousness 101 Right, as I said, my proposed mechanism still leaves open the fundamental nature of first person experience. But by looking at attention, we can narrow down to some extent what actually needs to be explained by a theory of consciousness. This is why I brought to your attention that the internal test we use for the ability to access information fails to distinguish between actual access and the mere ability to do so. This reduces the question of consciousness down from, "How do we experience multiple integrated streams of information at the nexus of consciousness?" to, "How do we consciously experience something?" The larger question reduces to this more basic one because the larger question can be identified as the result of an interaction between attention and consciousness, rather than being due solely to consciousness. So how do you propose to study the existence of consciousness itself as a physical property? I am in agreement with you that it is real and must necessarily be a result of physics, but given that it is only observable by the observer itself and that the ability/tendency of an observer to report consciousness is not necessarily indicative of the presence of consciousness, I fail to see how such a phenomenon is accessible to scientific study. On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 9:00 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Aaron, The role of attention is as important as you surmise. Clearly analysis of biological attention systems (which is currently a hot topic in the science of consciousness) reveals a lot about P-consciousness in the way the brain attends to/suppresses contents of P-consciousness, and how it impacts novelty detection (erroneous or not) and subsequent learning. It is deeply involved in innattentional blindness and change blindness (where are my damned car keys!?) Pathologies of the attention system sit at the heart of various mental disorders. All good. But the attention system does not _explain_ P-consciousness. Think of attention as looking through a filter at, say, a movie. The filter (attention) does not create or explain the movie. You have to have the movie before the filter is meaningful. Likewise you must have P-consciousness so you can then decide what part of it to attend to or suppress (erroneously or not). Generating P-consciousness itself is a physics problem. To explore it first requires the physics to be replicated. _Then_ we can go nuts on ‘attention’ as a higher-order architectural facet of learning grounded in P-consciousness. So while the attention system can be argued as an important part of intelligence and behaviour, it cannot be argued (with what we know so far) to have any role in originating P-consciousness. So my lack of attention to attention, so to speak :P , is merely a matter of priorities in reverse-engineering P-consciousness-grounded learning hardware. Cheers Colin From: Aaron Hosford [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Wednesday, 14 January 2015 10:51 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>; Colin Geoffrey Hales Subject: Re: [agi] Consciousness 101 Colin, This is the first I have read of your book. I am impressed. We have very similar perspectives regarding subjectivity/objectivity, but you have taken the time to put it into very clear language that elucidates the inherently subjective nature of so-called objectivity in a way I am not sure I could have done. At the risk of overlooking things you may have already covered in the chapters of your book that I have not yet read, I would suggest that you consider looking deeper at the attentional aspects of P-consciousness (section 3.4.2) and their relationship with novelty (section 3.4.1) for clues as to some of the underlying mechanisms of consciousness. Consider our internal experiential model of reality, which is constructed by the brain from sensory data, and the fact that conscious awareness seems to be called into effect by the presence of novelty in that model. I would posit that conscious awareness consists of the application of some specific mental module, whose purpose is to deal with novel situations (most likely through simulation and combinatoric analysis), to the internal model of reality. A feeling of conscious awareness could be induced by the ability of this mental module to call up components of the model as needed. So while we may feel that we are simultaneously consciously aware of everything we see, hear, feel, think, etc., this could in fact be an inherent self-deception -- a trick of the mind -- because we lack the ability to effectively monitor our access to that internal model, and so lacking this introspective capability, we cannot be aware of limitations placed upon our own consciousness that prevent us from immediate conscious awareness of multiple simultaneous sensory streams. In other words, our feeling of simultaneous awareness may come from the fact that the only test we have available to us internally for awareness of a piece of information is the attempt to access that information, and this test fails to distinguish between actual access and the mere ability to do so. This effect could also introduce temporal effects such as latent experience of simultaneity; for example, while it may take several seconds to process a rapid succession of events, we may nonetheless be able to consciously analyze those events in their precise timing and feel as though we had consciously experienced them in real time, provided their temporal relationships are recorded in the model. If all that the mental module which produces the experience of P-consciousness can do is access and modify a mental model, then the only things we can be aware of are things that we can store and access in that model, which prevents us from being directly aware of the internal mechanisms at work in the interaction between the consciousness module and the model it utilizes. Differences in the "size" or "degree" of phenomenal consciousness across species, which seems to be a somewhat universal intuition among those who take the time to analyze the nature of conscious experience, can be explained in terms of the model's complexity level and/or the consciousness module's effectiveness at organizing and interacting with that model. This proposed mechanism still leaves open the fundamental nature of first person experience, but its attempt to gain explanatory traction may nonetheless be a valuable step forward and may yield some experimentally falsifiable hypotheses regarding the nature of experiential consciousness. On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 3:07 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi, Please read my Chapter 3 to see what consciousness is. Attached. There is a mountain of information traceable in the references. It takes a while for the idea of it to become solid. “First person” is the key. You have to think of it as the physics of ‘being’ matter. Not ‘looking at’ matter or making any abstraction whatever. A completely dumb inert piece of matter could have a 1st person perspective (e.g. a complex and vivid visual scene) and it would be conscious. Just unable to behave in any way. When you dream you are conscious (have a 1st person perspective). You are just not awake. Regards Colin From: Piaget Modeler via AGI [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Wednesday, 14 January 2015 4:19 AM To: AGI Subject: [agi] Consciousness 101 I believe consciousness is just an ascription made to a first party, by a second party. There is an experience that the second party has, lets call it "the grasp of consciousness", but how can the second party know that the first party also has it. It's like seeing colors, or eating chocolate. How does the second party know that the first party's experience of "red" or "the taste of chocolate" is the same as her own? The second party assumes it is the same and ascribes that experience to the first party. But we know that people, particularly men and women perceive colors differently, and that colors do not really exist, they are a phenomenon of how we perceive liight. And I'll never know what chocolate tastes like to you, only how I perceive the taste of chocolate. Suppose the first party is a robot and the second party is a human. If the experience does not occur by the same means can it be called the same thing? Or is defining things as conscious or not simply a matter of re-definition? Finally, is consciousness a prerequisite for anything important? Is it anything more than an ascription? Is consciousness useful for anything? Kindly enlighten... 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