Hi, My main impression of the AGI-08 forum was one of over-dominance by > singularity-obsessed and COMP thinking, which must have freaked me out a > bit. >
This again is completely off-base ;-) COMP, yes ... Singularity, no. The Singularity was not a theme of AGI-08 and the vast majority of participant researchers are not seriously into Singularitarianism, futurism, and so forth. There was a post-conference workshop on the Future of AGI, which about half of the conference attendees attended, at which the Singularity and related issues were discussed, among other issues. For instance, the opening talk at the workshop was given by Natasha Vita-More, who so far as I know is not a Singularitarian per se, though an excellent futurist. And one of the more vocal folks in the discussions in the workshop was Selmer Bringsjord, who believes COMP is false and has a different theory of intelligence than you or me, tied into his interest in Christian philosophy. > The only reason for not connecting consciousness with AGI is a situation > where one can see no mechanism or role for it. > Seeing a "mechanism or role" for consciousness requires a specific theory of consciousness that not everybody holds --- and as you surely know, not even everyone in the machine consciousness community holds. Personally I view the first-person, second-person and third-person views as different perspectives on the universe, so I think it's a category error to talk about "mechanisms of consciousness" ... though one can talk about "mechanisms that are correlated with particularly intense consciousness", for example. See my presentation from the Nokia workshop on Machine Consciousness in August ... where I was the only admitted panpsychist ;-) http://goertzel.org/NokiaMachineConsciousness.ppt -- Ben ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
