Ben Goertzel wrote:
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 ;-)
I also found my feeling about -08 as slightly coloured by first hand
experience from an attendee who came away with the impression I put.
I'll try and bolt down my paranioa at tad...
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.
Good, although I'll be vigorously adding non-COMP approaches to the mix,
and trusting that is OK
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
ouch 10MB safely squirreled away under GforGoertzel, thank goodness for
the uni bandwidth.. :-)
I think I rest my case. You cannot see a physical mechanism or a role. I
can.
Inventing/adopting a whole mental rationale that avoids the problem
based on an assumption about a 'received view' is not something I can
do...I have a real physical process I can point to objectively, and a
perspective from which it makes perfect sense that it be responsible for
a first person perspective of the kind we receive.........and I
can't/won't talk it away just because 'Ben said so', even when the
'category error' stick, is wielded. That old rubric excuse for an
argument doesn't scare me a bit ... :-) Consciousness is a problem for
a reason, and that reason is mostly us thinking our 'categories' are right.
Interestingly, my model, if you stand back and squint a bit, can be
interpreted as having an 'as-if pan-psychism was real' appearance. Only
an appearance tho. It's not real.
Anyway... let's just let my story unfold, eh? It's a big one, so it'll
take a while. Fun to be had!
Thanks for the 'Hidden Pattern' link... I shall digest it.
cheers
colin
-------------------------------------------
agi
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