Trent,
No, it is not easy to implement. I am talking about the type of awareness that we humans have when we say we are "conscious" of something. Some of the studies we have on the neural correlates of consciousness indicate humans only report being consciously aware of things that receive considerable coordinated attention from the brain, and, thus, which receive an extremely complex level of computation. And this coordinated complexity is occurring as controlled spreading activation in a self organized hierarchical memory of patterns learned from sensed and felt experience, in such a manner as to provide not only attention to, but also extensive contextually relevant grounding for, the concepts involved. This grounding provides a sense of meaning and depth to our awareness. A reasonably high level of awareness of a single concept involves the sending and receiving and potential summing of many billions or trillions of messages. At any instant, the short term dynamic state of the brain would probably require many terabytes to represent in current computer hardware. Creating such a massively parallel, contextually grounded, self-focusing, dynamic, state remembering, self-aware complex is not a trivial task, and would not take place in any current software that I know of, to the extent required for a human level of conscious awareness. I think such a human-level sense of awareness could be created out of Novemente-like components, if running on a machine with massive memory (say roughly 100TBytes) , massive opps/sec (say 1000Topp/sec) , and massive interconnect (say an effective whole machine x-sectional bandwidth of 1T 64byte payload msgs/sec, a total x-sectional bandwidth across regions 1/1000 the size of the system of 30T Msg/sec, and the ability to access cache lines within a distance of 1/100,000th of the machine about 300T times a second). Such a machine could probably be profitable built and sold for under $3M in 10 years (and perhaps much less than that), if they were sold in a quantity of, say, 1000 machines per year. But as I have said, it is conceivable, much more or much less hardware would be required, or even that a different type of computing would be required such as some type of quantum computing, in order to produce human-like consciousness. I doubt it quantum computing will be required, but it is certainly possible. In fifty years, humankind will probably know for sure. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Trent Waddington [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 6:19 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: FW: [agi] A paper that actually does solve the problem of consciousness--correction On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 9:03 AM, Ed Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think a good enough definition to get started with is that which we humans > feel our minds are directly aware of, including awareness of senses, > emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. (This would include much of what > Richard was discussing in his paper.) Much of scientific discovery searches > for things of which it has only partial descriptions, often ones much less > complete than that which I have just given. So basically you're just saying that "consciousness" is what the programming language people call "reflection". Sounds pretty easy to implement. Trent ------------------------------------------- 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/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- 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=120640061-aded06 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
