-----Original Message----- From: j.k. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 2:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] Did this message get completely lost?
On 06/01/2008 09:29 PM,, John G. Rose wrote: >> From: j.k. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> On 06/01/2008 03:42 PM, John G. Rose wrote: >> >>> A rock is conscious. >>> >> Okay, I'll bite. How are rocks conscious under Josh's definition or any >> other non-LSD-tripping-or-batshit-crazy definition? >> >> > > The way you phrase your question indicates your knuckle-dragging predisposition making it difficult to responsibly expend an effort in attempt to satisfy your - piqued inquisitive biting action. > > Yes, my tone was overly harsh, and I apologize for that. It was more indicative of my frustration with the common practice on this list of spouting nonsense like "rocks are conscious" *without explaining what is meant* by such an ostensibly ludicrous statement or *giving any kind of a justification whatsoever*. This sort of intellectual sloppiness seriously lowers the quality of the list and makes it difficult to find the occasionally really insightful content. [Ed Porter] ============================== For a long winded and less than crystal clear explanation of consciousness that explains among other things how a rock could be considered conscious I cut and paste my Thu 5/29/2008 11:54 PM post. I have preceeded and followed by "*############*" the discussion that explains how all of physical reality can be considered conscious. The basic idea of rock consciousness is that there is no aspect of consciousness we can describe that other than a type of self-aware computation, and that since all of physical reality is a computation in which computing elements such as particles, atoms, and molecules are arguably aware of --- in the sense of computing in response to --- their surrounding particles and elements, and since they effect what is around them, such computations involve feedback from each element to itself. This arguably is a degree or type of consciousness --- although it would not have most of the attributes we so value in our own consciousness. Ed Porter ============================== 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 ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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