I suppose the optimal approach to AGI has to involve some degree of
connectionism. But to find isomorphic structures to connectionist graphs
that are more efficient. Many things in nature cannot be evolved, for
example few if any animals have wheels. Evolved structures go so far until
probabilistic limits are hit. Are there structural, algorithmic and
mathematic systems that are more optimal than massively dense interconnected
graphs waiting to be discovered or, are they actually known but not applied
to engineered cognition and consciousness? I say yes. Has activation
dynamics been studied enough, - anyone have a literature reference?
Then main reason I take this approach is because of resource constraints.
I'm not saying that it's not worth building connectionist prototypes. In
fact I'm starting to think that way where I haven't before.
I agree on your description of consciousness. But it would be nice to have a
compact system, a minimized essence, that optimal consciousness engine if
one exists.
Computation is all that there is. But I often try to imagine something that
is not computation. It depends on different things, and goes into subatomic
physics, string theory, etc.. I think that there are aspects of computation
that we don't understand, and definitely things that I don't understand but
are known among well versed individuals.
John
_____________________________________________
From: Ed Porter [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2008 2:46 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [agi] CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN ARCHITECTURE OF
COMPUTATION
>JOHN ROSE ============>>
So you are saying that consciousness is activations in
response to patterns, including activation history.
ED PORTER ============>>
Yes. But I am also saying the following:
-EVERYTHING -- INCLUDING CONSCIOUSNESS --- IS NOTHING BUT
COMPUTATION
To those who say it is a cop out to say consciousness is
computation, I challenge you to describe any aspect of reality, either that
in the mind, or that described by current scientific understanding, that is
anything other than information and its computation (both of which I am
calling computation here).
Computation is all there is --- at least it is all we have
any evidence for believing there is. Physics is nothing but computation ---
and all science follows from the laws of physics, even if many aspects of
science relate to higher levels of organization that result from the
complexity of the computation of those physical laws.
The theory of cosmic inflation seems to imply that our
physical universe was created from an infinitesimally small extremely high
concentration of mass/energy --- such as that which might exist in a black
hole --- that suddenly had a phase transition that allowed a new, more
complex from of representation and computation to take place ---- causing it
to change from something that was, or approached, a singularity to something
approached the number of the particles in the know universe within a brief
period of time. Out of such computation the time, space, matter, and
energy of our know universe was created.
Just as the physical universe is created out of computation,
so is consciousness.
When you ask people to describe consciousness they tend to
do so in computational terms such as awareness, seeing, feeling. I have
never heard anybody describe any attribute of consciousness that involves
anything other than computing. (Except, perhaps for people who associated
religious attributes to consciousness, but all of those religious notions
arguably are manifestations of computation within some sort of believed
reality.)
-THE COMPUTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS MASSIVELY PARALLEL,
MASSIVELY RICH, MASSIVELY INTERCONNECTED
My model of consciousness is NOT Searle's Chinese room ---
instead it is more like a stadium with an audience of tens of billions of
agents, each acting somewhat like a Chinese rooms --- i.e., each with its
own library of specific information and each with its own input-output
function. If one imagines a football stadium with 100,000 seats --- to have
a number of input-output units, i.e., Chinese rooms, equal to the number of
neurons in the cortex, each of its 100,000 seats would have to have 300,000
neurons.
In the stadium of consciousness, the individual Chinese
rooms each directly communicate with hundreds or thousands of other rooms,
and they respond to collective electrical and chemical communication from
tens of millions or billions of neurons, including neuro-chemicals released
by the limbic system and EEG brain waves. They all operate in parallel.
Yet these billions of Chinese rooms are under a combination of decentralized
and centralized control that dynamically help control their activation
level, what is being communicated to them, and the preferential broadcast
tuning preferences of each of them. This enables those tens of billions of
Chinese rooms to behave as a dynamic collective entity, much as a fired up
crowd in a large stadium or arena can seem to have a life of its own.
-THE COMPLEXITY OF THE BRAIN'S COMPUTATION GIVES RISE TO
CONSCIOUSNESS MUCH AS THE COMPLEXITIES OF BIO-CHEMISTRY GIVE RISE TO LIFE
Consciousness is to computation, what life is to
bio-chemistry.
The reductionist attempt to deny that human consciousness
could result from computation with the argument of Searle's Chinese room is
just as stupid as saying bio-chemistry could not give rise to biological
life, because if one looks at any one very small section of space and time
what we see of bio-chemistry is nothing but a limited number of chemical
reactions --- something none of us would normally call "life."
A living organizism is something very different than a few
biochemical reactions, it is many billions, trillions, or trillions of
trillions of them operating simultaneously in a surprisingly organized
manner. Similarly the brain's 30 billion highly interconnected
simultaneously operating, highly interactive, Chinese rooms is something
very different than Searle's single Chinese room.
One of the most important paradigms in science is what the
Santa Fe institute calls "complexity". (When I refer to "complexity" herein
I mean this conception of complexity --- not the totally unrelated concept
of Richard Loosemore's (or RL) complexity, which caries a lot of additional
baggage.)
The essence of the paradigm of complexity is that as the
number of interacting elements in a collection of certain types of elements
increases, there is a tendency for higher level and more diverse patterns of
organization and behavior to develop. Under the right conditions, as the
number of such elements increases, normally the richness and complexity of
the new levels of organization themselves also increase. E.g., as a general
rule, the larger the city, the more variety of organization and behaviors it
contains.
This same paradigm is reflected in computing. I have heard
it said by many computer geeks that with every increase by a power of ten in
computing power there are not only changes in degree but also changes in
kind of computation. If this is even partially true, imagine what new levels
and types of computation could be achieved by computers that had the
representational, computational, and intercommunication capacity of the
human mind.
My first digital computer was a four bit adder and
subtracter I built in the sixth grade from electromagnetic relays I built
myself. My first electronic computer was an IMSAI 8080 in 1977 that I
originally had to program a word at a time with front panel toggle switches.
Now I have a 3Ghz P4 PC.
I have seen computers go from merely being able to turn a
few flashlight bulbs on and off to now being able to generate awe inspiring
multi-dimensional sounds and video rendering of emotionally satisfying DVDs.
As the power of computers has grown in the last 50 years their ability to
provide our senses with experiences that increasingly occupy our
consciousness has grown to the point that --- for many seconds at a time
watching a DVD, or entering virtual worlds, can make us feel they have taken
us to a different time and place.
The computational power of the human brain has been
estimated by multiple people as being roughly 100TOpps/sec. This is roughly
100,000 times the power of the current average PC. But the brain is many
times more powerful than that in terms of opp to memory bandwidth and opp to
opp interconnect.
The human brain is powerful enough to dynamically generate
--- in response to its sensations and own internal activations --- the
informational bandwidth equivalent of roughly one million simultaneous
uncompressed 800x600 DVD channels.
It is this complex, self-reflecting computations, a million
times more informationally rich than an uncompressed DVD image, that
provides the sense of awareness, we humans call consciousness. This would
be a football stadium of consciousness in which each of its 100,000 seats
was interactively generating an information flow as complex as ten
uncompressed DVD images. That is one hell of a vibrant, collective
computation.
-COMPUTATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS SELF AWARE
The computation of our consciousness is self-aware because
its responds to itself.
We are aware of the roughly 1 uncompressed DVD bandwidth of
info/sec we get from our senses because we dynamically compute roughly
another one million times as much dynamic state in response to it, which
includes partial activations of a substantial number of all patterns and
episodic memories which relates to any portions of that input our
consciousness focuses on. This tremendously self aware dynamic activation
is consciousness.
On could argue that the feedback loop of a simple electronic
oscillator is thus self aware. But it does not have the billions or
trillions of feedback loops of the brain, many of which can be selectively
inhibited or dis-inhibited --- that gives rise --- through the paradigm of
complexity --- to the generation of higher levels of organization and
behavior which have no parallel in the individual simple feedback loop.
Differences in degree this large become massive differences in kind.
-CONSCIOUSNESS COMBINES BOTH COLLECTIVE AND MULTI-BILLION
CHANNELED COMPUTATIONS
People often state they sense a unity of consciousness, even
though their consciousness seems to be aware of multiple things at once.
This sense of unity results because human conscious appears
to result from a selection and broadcast of activation from roughly 30 to 50
concepts a second, where a concept can represent a not just one pattern, but
also a set of related pattern activations. The activation of each of these
concepts interacts with many if not all the concept and experience patterns
recorded as having including or having been associated with it in the past
--- and in doing so, changes the activation state of those patterns.
As successive concept are consciously activated, the
activation state reflects a high percent of all the relevant patterns that
directly or, in many cases, indirectly involve subcombinations of such
consciously broadcast concepts and their implications. As this composite
activation state transitions over time it reflects not only billions of
implications from the current activation being broadcast, but also history
of billions of implications reflecting the associations between the
implications of each of the consciously activated concepts. Thus, the
composite activation state of the system over time provides a web of
meaningful relatedness between multiple concepts that have been recently
broadcasts in the consciousness --- providing a sense of unified awareness
of these successive concepts and their relatedness.
-ATTENTION FOCUSING
J.G. Taylor has hypothesized that we are conscious of a
concept when our brain activates to various degrees many --- or all --- of
our memories --- both in repeated patterns and episodic memories --- with
which that conscious concept is associated in long or short term memory.
This makes sense. How better to explain awareness of a concept than to have
simultaneously subconscious activation many or all the relevant thing you
know about it.
This subconscious activation of millions or billions of
related patterns or implications enables simultaneous summing of important
similarities, important emotions, benefits and dangers, and most
importantly, and the relevancies of that concept in the current mental
context. Multiple of the more activated of these subconsciously activated
patterns may flicker at the edge of consciousness, a few may be sequentially
or concurrently selected into full consciousness.
But even if these subconscious implications of a conscious
concept may not be fully activated by the consciousness of the concept
itself, they may have an effect on the activation of concepts in response to
subsequent conscious concepts, effecting mood, non-verbalizable intuitive
feelings, and which concepts are selected for conscious activation in
response to subsequent conscious concepts.
-SELECTIVE BROADCASTING
Attention focusing and broadcasting are closely related.
Broadcasts could be performed by mechanisms such as, selective thalamic
dis-inhabitation through the cortico -basil ganglia-thalamic feedback loop,
synchronization, substantially cortex wide radial waves of dis-inhibition
from the thalamic reticular nucleus, or from massive spreading activation in
which the strength of the broadcast is a function of the number of
activations that take place over multiple generations of spreading
activation from a given node or group of nodes.
Some believe people believe that conscious involves a rapid
sequence of conscious broadcasts. Many believe that broadcasts of
successive conscious concepts can take place at about 30 to 40 concepts a
second, with the possibility that the same concept may be broadcast
repeatedly, such as to repeatedly broadcast it the activations associate
with it change.
-COLLECTIVE BROADCASTING
This can include EEG waves; communication through changes in
neuro-chemical soup in one or more parts of the brain (such as those that
can be quickly transmitted by the limbic system); the activation of large
patterns of activation in unison (such as by synchronies); and collective
activations of all the elements of complex patterns.
-COLLECTIVE CALCULATIONS
This includes intuitive summations of activations from many
sources that result from a given context of activation, for example the
summation of various types of emotions that get activated by a situation.
It also includes max operations that find which of competing patterns has
the highest net activation coming from many sources of activation and
inhibition, such as estimates of cost and benefit, for selection in a winner
or k-winner take all situation, of which physical, mental, or perceptual,
behavior to take.
-SUBCONSCIOUS
The subconscious is a vital part of consciousness.
According to J.G. Taylor it is the massive activation of
concepts and emotions in the subconscious relating to a conscious concept,
that provides and fleshes out the sense of awareness of the conscious
concept.
It is in the computation of the subconscious in which
massively parallel pattern activation, assembly, and matching can take
place. It is from these that collective emotional response can be
selectively summed --- contending pattern matching or behavior candidates
can be competitively selected --- and patterns and behaviors can be selected
for broadcast in the consciousness.
-CONSCIOUSNESS COMES IN DIFFERENT DEGREES AND MODES
There are multiple modes and degrees of consciousness, such
as different degrees of arousal or different types of emotional states. You
are conscious during dreams, particularly if you are part awake. In fact, I
have read that different parts of your brain can fall asleep at different
times, giving rise to some strange states of consciousness.
I think the degree of attention given to various concepts of
which we conscious vary tremendously, from those we are only slightly
conscious of to those that leave an intends and enduring memory.
If one has a Novamente-like spreading activation model of
intelligence, such an intelligence could have many different degrees of
activation associated with a concept, that could correspond to differing
levels of consciousness, and it could simultaneously broadcast multiple
different conscious concepts.
-MASSIVE EXPERIENTIAL MEMORY
The human consciousness involves a complex activation state
that varies both rapidly and slowly over time, in which the activation
patterns are largely created out of learned experiential patterns.
It has been estimated by many that the brain probably stores
the equivalent of roughly 10TBytes of information. (This not as measures by
how many bits it would take a hypothetical turning machine with infinite
resources to represent such information in an optimally compressed form, but
rather as measured in terms of how much computer memory would be required to
store it in an operationally efficient manner.) I think this estimate is
within one or two order of magnitude of being sufficient for computers to
have human level intelligence.
10TBytes is enough information to store 10K bytes per second
for a 31 year life time. Of course the amount of memory stored per second
varies tremendously depending on importance and recency. Since much of this
information would be in the form of learned repeated patterns in
hierarchical memory, such a representation would allow very efficient
representation. It would because there would be a vocabulary of tens of
millions of hierarchical patterns, each of which could represent complex
invariant patterns memories, which when remembered in a given context would
tend to dynamically assume the hierarchical activation most appropriate for
that context.
>JOHN ROSE============>>
Do you have a non-connectionist view of consciousness? Just
curious.
ED PORTER ============>>
I consider myself to be a connectionist in roughly the same
way Ben considers Novamente to be connectionist.
This is to say my theories have many connectionist aspects,
but they not are limited by some of the restrictions associated with more
narrow interpretations of connectionism.
For example, any system that uses natural language words
would have symbols. Some people think a system with symbols is not
connectionist. But the same people consider the brain to be connectionist,
despite the fact it uses words, which are symbols. I think you can make a
system that mixes traditional programmer taught symbols, and automatically
learned patterns by the experiential knowledge learned about the
relationships between these two types of knowledge.
In the type of artificial brains I image there would be many
automatically learned patterns associated with what I call sub-concepts,
i.e., concepts that relate to things which we humans would usually only be
conscious of as part of the activation of larger patterns.
I favor an architecture in which the vast majority of the
patterns in the system are learned automatically, and a symbol's meaning is
defined by what it is connected to by links. I tend to think in terms of
semantic nets having a very small number of pre-defined link-types (such as
say less than 10) --- something that is not very dis-similar from
Novamente's hypergraphs.
-----Original Message-----
From: John G. Rose [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2008 12:36 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [agi] CONSCIOUSNESS AS AN ARCHITECTURE OF
COMPUTATION
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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