On Wed, Jan 14, 2015 at 5:52 PM, Colin Geoffrey Hales via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i9kE3Ne7as
Christof Koch seems to give 4 different definitions of consciousness at different points in the video. In order: 1. "What it's like", distinct from the mental state of being awake. 2. Ability to respond to sensory input in a way that you would expect a human to react, independent of brain defects or injury such as the lack of a hippocampus (long term memory), emotions, language (aphasia), ability to move (locked in syndrome), etc. 3. Tononi's integrated information (phi), which Koch interprets as the maximum increase in complexity (in bits) of the system over all possible partitions. (The interpretation is important because Tononi does not rigorously define phi. Maguire et. al. show that under a reasonable information-theoretic interpretation that phi is not computable. http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0126 ). 4. Ability to pass a "what is wrong with this picture" test, in which pictures depict common objects that don't belong together (for example, a man standing sideways in mid air). I think that by P-consciousness you mean something like (1). But since we can't test this directly, we normally use something like (2) (which Koch seems to imply without directly stating it). That is, consciousness means acting like a human. This is why we devise tests like (4), by picking something that is easy for humans but hard for machines. You seem to have this approach, because "doing science" (identifying the problem, researching related work, designing the experiment, analyzing the results, and publishing a peer reviewed paper) seems to require a lot of skills that only humans possess. Likewise, Koch's test requires vision, language, and a common sense model of the world, which are all hard problems for machines. Google seems to have nearly solved the problem, although the error rate is still higher than human level. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4555.pdf What I don't understand is how you express so much confidence that consciousness is the magic key to solving AGI, and yet the conclusion of your book is that you are totally befuddled by it. If I showed you an optical illusion like http://miltonious.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Optical-illusions-miltonious-lines-parallel.jpg you could easily accept that the lines are really parallel by measuring them with a ruler. You could accept a neural explanation for the illusion, that the neurons in your visual cortex that detect lines at various orientations mutually inhibit each other to make the intersection angles appear larger. You would not insist on some new unknown kind of physics that is distorting the ruler because your eyes never lie. Yet when I offer a neural explanation for the sensation of "what it's like" (reinforcement of sensory perception), that is exactly what you are doing. -- -- 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
