Colin, I skimmed your chapter 3. Thanks for providing it. It is a good effort. I disagree with several assumptions and provisional definitions you've made,but I see your point of view. Moreover, I did like the fact that you included excerpts from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, so that made the chapter very worthwhile. All the best, ~PM From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [agi] Consciousness 101 Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 22:52:34 +0000
-----Original Message----- From: Matt Mahoney via AGI [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, 15 January 2015 7:56 AM To: AGI Subject: Re: [agi] Consciousness 101 On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 10:00 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > But the attention system does not _explain_ P-consciousness. What we commonly call consciousness is the writing of our thoughts and perceptions into episodic memory. Episodic memory is the learned associations of events with a time or place. P-consciousness is the association of feelings (positive or negative reinforcement) with these events. Colin What science has been studying for 25 years, is in Chapter 3. I attach it again. It is not what you say above. A completely behaviourally inert chunk of matter X could, from the perspective of being that matter X, be having an exquisitely complex and vivid visual scene of what is around it. No associations. No memory. No attention. No feelings. Nothing else. Just visual P-consciousness physics. Whatever that physics is, we have it in the brain. Somehow. You do not need any memory to have P-consciousness. Watch the early part of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9kE3Ne7as . 2 minutes in. You need to deal with this, Matt. The data is in. It’s real and we have to do the science. > Generating P-consciousness itself is a physics problem. Just like everything else that happens in the brain, right? Colin No. It is completely unique in science and in the entire history of science: a 1st person perspective. It means that science itself is actually required to change. That is what my book is about, more than the cockup in computer-based AGI. But I don't expect this argument to go any further. You are right that we don't have AGI after 60 years of trying. But we do have self driving cars, automatic language translation, face recognition, and a lot of other things that used to be considered AI until we solved them. Maybe that is because we didn't worry about whether the solutions were "conscious". -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] Colin Quite right. All sorts of good stuff started as an attack on AGI and ended up as narrow-AI outcomes. Brilliant outcomes. Bring it on. .....and it also delivered no AGI and no account of consciousness. And yes this argument can go no further! J You’ve chosen your approach. Fine. Let it enter the Chapter 12 PCT test in a robot and compete with other robots to sort it out. For all we know every computer on earth could, from a first person perspective, be in a state of ecstatic bliss or the searing agony of being on fire or ear-bursting auditory tinnitus hell. You don’t know. I suspect not... I don’t _scientifically_ know. And nobody will ever know how to design those outcomes away or design them in _and_ know what’s lost/gained _and_ prove it, unless we in the AGI community deal with consciousness scientifically based on the only actual example we have: us, scientists. What has been going on for 60+ years is not science except insofar as it has failed to support a hypothesis that consciousness is eliminable/non-existent, for 60+ years. This was done accidentally. Not by design by anyone. Folk started pointing at computers and using the phrase “electronic brain” in the 1950s. The misdirection began there. Cheers Colin AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- 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
