rob levy wrote: > I am secondarily motivated by the fact that (considerations of morality or > amorality aside) AGI is inevitable, though it is far from being a forgone > conclusion that powerful general thinking machines will have a first-hand > subjective relationship to a world, as living creatures do-- and therefore it > is vital that we do as well as possible in understanding what makes systems > conscious. A zombie machine intelligence "singularity" is something I would > refer to rather as a "holocaust", even if no one were directly killed, > assuming these entities could ultimately prevail over the previous forms of > life on our planet.
What do you mean by "conscious"? If your brain were removed and replaced by a functionally equivalent computer that simulated your behavior (presumably a zombie), how would you be any different? Why would it matter? -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ________________________________ From: rob levy <[email protected]> To: agi <[email protected]> Sent: Mon, June 21, 2010 11:53:29 AM Subject: [agi] Fwd: AGI question Hi I'm new to this list, but I've been thinking about consciousness, cognition and AI for about half of my life (I'm 32 years old). As is probably the case for many of us here, my interests began with direct recognition of the depth and wonder of varieties of phenomenological experiences-- and attempting to comprehend how these constellations of significance fit in with a larger picture of what we can reliably know about the natural world. I am secondarily motivated by the fact that (considerations of morality or amorality aside) AGI is inevitable, though it is far from being a forgone conclusion that powerful general thinking machines will have a first-hand subjective relationship to a world, as living creatures do-- and therefore it is vital that we do as well as possible in understanding what makes systems conscious. A zombie machine intelligence "singularity" is something I would refer to rather as a "holocaust", even if no one were directly killed, assuming these entities could ultimately prevail over the previous forms of life on our planet. I'm sure I'm not the only one on this list who sees a behavioral/ecological level of analysis as the most likely correct level at which to study perception and cognition, and perception as being a kind of active relationship between an organism and an environment. Having thoroughly convinced my self of a non-dualist, embodied, externalist perspective on cognition, I turn to the nature of life itself (and possibly even physics but maybe that level will not be necessary) to make sense of the nature of subjectivity. I like Bohm's or Bateson's panpsychism about systems as wholes, and significance as informational distinctions (which it would be natural to understand as being the basis of subjective experience), but this is descriptive rather than explanatory. I am not a biologist, but I am increasingly interested in finding answers to what it is about living organisms that gives them a unity such that something "is something to" the system as a whole. The line of investigation that theoretical biologists like Robert Rosen and other NLDS/chaos people have pursued is interesting, but I am unfamiliar with related work that might have made more progress on the system-level properties that give life its characteristic unity and system-level responsiveness. To me, this seems the most likely candidate for a paradigm shift that would produce AGI. In contrast I'm not particularly convinced that modeling a brain is a good way to get AGI, although I'd guess we could learn a few more things about the coordination of complex behavior if we could really understand them. Another way to put this is that obviously evolutionary computation would be more than just boring hill-climbing if we knew what an organism even IS (perhaps in a more precise computational sense). If we can know what an organism is then it should be (maybe) trivial to model concepts, consciousness, and high level semantics to the umpteenth degree, or at least this would be a major hurtle I think. Even assuming a solution to the problem posed above, there is still plenty of room for "other minds" skepticism in non-living entities implemented on questionably foreign mediums but there would be a lot more reason to sleep well that the science/technology is leading in a direction in which questions about subjectivity could be meaningfully investigated. Rob agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- 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=8660244-6e7fb59c Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
