On 5/15/2015 11:14 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
meekerdb wrote:
On 5/15/2015 10:29 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
The AI that I envisage will probably be based on a learning program of some sort, that
will have to learn in much the same way as an infant human learns. I doubt that we
will ever be able to create an AI that is essentially an intelligent adult human when
it is first turned on.
I agree with that, but once an AI is realized it will be possible to copy it. And if
it's digital it will be possible to implement it using different hardware. If it's not
digital, it will (in principle) be able to implement it arbitrarily closely with a
digital device. And we will have the same question - what is that makes that hardware
device conscious? I don't see any plausible answer except "Running the program it
instantiates."
But that does not imply that consciousness is itself a computation.
I didn't draw that conclusion. That's the conclusion Bruno wants to draw - or close to it
(he talks about consciousness supervening on an infinite number of computational threads).
There is not some subroutine in your AI the is labelled "this subroutine computes
consciousness". Consciousness is a function of the whole functioning system, not of some
particular feature.
Right. And the system includes the environment that the consciousness refers
to.
That is why I think identifying consciousness with computation is in fact adding some
additional magic to the machine.
I don't see that it's adding anything, magic or otherwise. As you say, any process can
regarded as a computation.
Consciousness arose in nature by a process of natural evolution. Proto-consciousness
gave some evolutionary advantage, so it grew and developed.
Yes, it seems like a natural extension of modeling one's surroundings as part of decision
making, to add yourself into the model in order to imagine yourself making different choices.
Nature did not at some point add the fact that it was a computation, and then it
suddenly become conscious. Consciousness is a computation only in the trivial sense that
any physical process can be regarded as a computation, or mapping taking some input to
some output. There is not some special, magical class of computations that are unique to
consciousness. Consciousness is an evolved bulk property, not just one specific feature
of that bulk.
But computation is also not just one specific feature of a process, it's a wholistic
concept. So I disagree that there is not some special class of programs that implement
consciousness; specifically those that model the device as part of it's own deicision
processes.
Brent
Bruce
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