Hi Ed,
So you are saying that consciousness is activations in response to patterns,
including activation history.
Do you have a non-connectionist view of consciousness? Just curious.
John
_____________________________________________
From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 9:54 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [agi] CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN ARCHITECTURE OF
COMPUTATION
Matt makes some good points below.
Qualia are a key aspect of consciousness. But consciousness
probably comes in many different forms and degrees. It is not clear
episodic memory is essential to all consciousness, but it plays a large part
in ours. I do think consciousness require a state space with a temporal
dimension. It would be very different than our own if it did not have a
memory of temporal patterns.
I CONCEIVE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE SENSE OF AWARENESS OF
SENSATIONS, EMOTIONS, MEMORIES, AND THOUGHTS MY MIND EXPERIENCES --- and
that other humans also claim to experience.
I THINK CONSCIOUSNESS RESULTS FROM THE NATURE --- AND
COMPLEXITY OF --- COMPUTATION WITHIN THE HUMAN MIND --- THAT IT IS NOT AN
INCONSEQUENTIAL SIDE EFFECT --- BUT RATHER A KEY FUNCTIONAL ATTRIBUTE OF
COMPUTATION WITHIN THE BRAIN.
I BELIEVE CONSCIOUSNESS RESULTS FROM A MENTAL ARCHITECTURE
SOMETHING LIKE B. J. BARRS' THEORY OF THE THEATER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. The
analogy to a theater is only partial --- but valuable.
IT SUGGEST THE MIND IS LIKE A THEATER FULL OF AGENTS ---
EACH WITH INTERNAL STATE AND DESIGNED TO RESPOND TO CERTAIN PATTERNS
RECEIVED BY IT IN CERTAIN WAYS. THE THEATER HAS A MECHANISM FOR SELECTING
WHICH OF THEM GET TO BROADCAST AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT BY SOMETHING ANALOGOUS TO
SELECTIVE SPOT LIGHTS --- OR SELECTIVE LINKS BETWEEN DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS
OF MICROPHONES AND SPEAKERS. TO MAKE THE ANALOGY BETTER, THE AGENTS SHOULD
ALSO BE CONNECTED WITH SOMETHING LIKE INSTANT MESSAGING.
The analogy assumes human consciousness results from the
behavior of a theater of millions or billions of agents that transmit and
respond to broadcast patterns, including temporal patterns, spread through
significant portions of the brain. The agents have state information that
reflect not only what is currently being broadcast to them, but also what
has been broadcast to them before, and more private communications they are
receiving, or have received, reflecting the state of directly connected
agents.
There is machinery --- such as the cortical - basil ganglia
- thalamic feedback loop --- for selecting which patterns get broadcast and
when, based on measures such as degree of match, importance, fit or
importance within context, or surprise. Some of the patterns activated in
response to broadcasts can themselves be selected for successive conscious
broadcast in a stream of consciousness manner. The broadcasts vary in the
number of elements they reach, but we humans are probably only directly
"conscious of" broadcasts that reach a relatively large number of other
elements, either directly or indirectly. This broadcast normally result in
mullti-hop spreading activations. The spreading activation and the
activation of responsive patterns are modulated by the context of
co-occuring and prior activation patterns --- and by attention allocating
mechanisms.
CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT JUST WHAT IS BROADCAST --- BUT ALSO THE
TOTALITY OF ACTIVATION IN RESPONSE TO IT --- as sensed by intuitive
qualia-like and emotional experiential responses --- and as sensed by
individual subconscious activations that pre-dispose the later conscious or
subconscious activation of related patterns or transmission.
OUR INTUITIVE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE SOMEWHAT LIKE CROWD
RESPONSES IN A THEATER. They tend to sum the emotional associations of many
different agents to what is being, and has been, broadcast into one
composite emotional sensation stream --- even though that composite can
include activations of differing emotion patterns, corresponding to the boos
and cheers of a crowd.
Listen to radio of a crowd during an exciting situation in
an important playoff, or world series, game. You will get a feeling for the
sense of the stadium's (a type of theater's) crowd as a dynamic, living,
collective spirit. You can hear the difference between a pop ball and a
ground drive --- between a home run, a pop fowl, and a pop out --- and you
can hear group chants --- that often start in the unconscious of the crowd
and then build up so until they are heard in its consciousness --- or that
are driven by the stadiums organ. You can hear all this from the crowd's
collective voice. You can sense its collective mind.
The mind's theater is probably something like a caucus
meeting, because apparently it can be divided up into differing
sub-theaters. This is indicated by the fact that synchronies --- which
appear to be associated with at least certain kinds of conscious experience
--- can be dynamically wired between different neural sub-populations in the
mind depending on the particular mental function being performed. There is
also evidence that other types of broadcast spread selected information
throughout much of the cortex, such as by the waves of decreased inhibition
that radiate out from selected points to almost all of the thalamic
reticular nucleus, which controls inhibition from most of the thalamus to
the cortex.
Sensory inputs would be inputs into sub-populations of the
theater, which would process them through a succession of hierarchically and
laterally connected sub-populations by relatively local communication, and
activations in such populations would only enter consciousness if
activations in response to them within some one or more levels of these
sub-populations were selected for wider broadcast.
THE SENSE OF AWARENESS WE ASSOCIATE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS
RESULTS FROM THE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF SYNAPSES THAT FIRE IN RESPONSE TO
EACH OF THE ROUGHLY 40 HERTZ GAMMA-WAVE ACTIVATION CYCLES OFTEN ASSOCIATED
WITH CONSCIOUS RELATED BROADCASTS --- FIRINGS THAT ACTIVATE MILLIONS OR
BILLIONS OF PATTERNS TO VARIOUS DEGREES.
THIS MEANS THE SYSTEM IS WATCHING --- I.E., RECURSIVELY
RESPONDING TO --- ITS OWN COMPUTATION, with an informational bandwidth equal
to tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous uncompressed HDTV channels
--- bandwidth dynamically generated in response to dynamically selected
portions of itself by dynamically select portions of the equivalent of
roughly hundreds of trillions of computations a second --- computations that
respond to massive, instantaneous broadcasts and collective summations ---
while at the same time responding to billions of instantaneous, individual,
highly non-linear distinctions.
THIS SELF-REFLECTIVE COMPUTATION --- THAT HAS BOTH MASSIVE
UNITIES AND DISTINCTIONS --- AND STORES A DYNAMIC HISTORY OF ACTIVATIONS ---
REPLACES THE HOMUNCULUS AS THE SOURCE OF OUR PERCEPTION OF A UNIFIED
AWARENESS OF MULTIPLE EXPERIENCES,
JUST AS THERE IS NO EVIDENCE PHYSICAL REALITY IS ANYTHING
OTHER THAN COMPUTATION --- SIMILARLY --- THERE IS NO EVIDENCE CONSCIOUSNESS
IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPUTATION.
JUST AS THE NATURE OF PHYSICAL REALITY IS DETERMINED BY THE
ARCHITECTURE OF ITS COMPUTATION (THE LAWS OF PHYSICS) --- SIMILARLY --- THE
NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS DETERMINED BY THE ARCHITECTURE OF ITS
COMPUTATION.
There is no reason to believe consciousness does not come in
many different forms and degrees. We humans sense different degrees and
types of consciousness, depending on whether or not we are asleep, awake,
dreaming, meditating, concentrating, or how aroused we are, or what
chemicals we may have taken into our bodies.
There is no reason to believe that many lower animals ---
such as primates, pigs, dogs, perhaps birds, and perhaps even insects ---
are without any form and degree of consciousness. In fact, it is arguable
that consciousness as we normally use the word to describe our own sense of
self awareness is just a special kind and degree of the computation of
physical reality itself --- and that all of reality is conscious to some
degree. The rate and complexity of quantum mechanical and chemical
computations of the atoms and molecules within a lowly worm are probably
many billions of times more complex than the logical computer computations
within the first human level AGIs.
But presumably whatever "consciousness" pervades most of
physical reality --- including our lowly worm --- lacks many of attributes
of human consciousness that we value most --- which define the type of
consciousness we normally mean when we use the word.
I think within a few decades many AGI's will have
computations with many of the characteristics we humans attribute to our own
consciousnesses --- and that those characteristics will be very useful to
those AGIs.
I DON'T KNOW IF CONSCIOUSNESS IS NECESSARY FOR HUMAN LEVEL
AGI --- BUT I THINK SOMETHING WITH MANY OF THE ATTRIBUTES OF HUMAN
CONSCIOUSNESS IS ESSENTIAL FOR ANY AGI TO HAVE AN ARCHITECTURE OF THOUGHT
THAT FUNCTIONS LIKE OUR OWN.
Ed Porter
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:58 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [agi] Consciousness vs. Intelligence
What many people call consciousness is qualia, that which
distinguishes
you from a philosophical zombie,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-zombie
There is no test for consciousness in this sense, but humans
universally
believe that they are conscious, and this belief is
testable. Just ask
someone. Do you really feel pain, or do you just behave as
if you feel
it?
The belief in experiencing qualia is what I call recursive
episodic
memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall a time
sequence of
events in the correct order. These events could include
earlier acts of
recall. For example, earlier today I recalled how yesterday
a tune was
playing in my head that I heard the day before (and so on).
You probably do not remember any events that happened before
you were 3
years old. You were clearly learning then, but it was not
in episodic
memory. A person without a hippocampus lacks episodic
memory. He could
learn new skills but wouldn't remember the lessons.
Episodic memory has
been demonstrated in birds, but we do not know if it is
recursive.
I don't know if recursive episodic memory is necessary for
intelligence.
When I need to come up with an algorithm when writing
software, it is
useful to go through the steps in my head and then be able
to recall my
thought process. It is also useful for databases to log
read-only
transactions. It is useful for computers to copy recently
read data to
cache.
However, recursive episodic memory could also be an artifact
of the
brain's memory management system. Long term memory is
written at a
constant rate (about 2 bits per second, according to
Landauer). During
quiet times, it has to write something.
-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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agi
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