meekerdb wrote:
On 5/16/2015 4:44 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 2:48 PM, Bruce Kellett
So you think that Darwinian evolution produced intelligent zombies,
and then computationalism infused consciousness?
No. What I am saying is that consciousness is not a plausible target
for gradual evolution for the following reasons:
1) There is no evolutionary advantage to it, intelligent zombies
could do equally well. Every single behaviour that each one of us
has, as seen for the outside, could be performed by intelligent zombies;
Do you find it an advantage to be conscious in your everyday life? Do
you really think that your partner and/or children are zombies?
I think the obvious inference is that one way to gain intelligence is to
become conscious. But being conscious isn't just one all-or-nothing
ability. There's being aware of the environment...being aware of
oneself...being able to model oneself in an environment, including a
social environment in which you model other beings as aware and similar
to yourself. I think there can be different kinds of awareness just as
there are different modes of perception. Whether intelligence at the
human level could be realized without the kind of self-modeling implicit
in consciousness seems doubtful, but it might be possible in some
radically different kind of AI. That wouldn't necessarily mean it
wasn't conscious, but only that it might be conscious=self-aware in such
a different way we'd have a hard time recognizing it. For example, most
of our memories are reconstructions as opposed to faithful recordings.
If there were an AI that had enormously greater memory capacity, it
might make a lot more intelligent decisions just by repeating some
remembered action (Big Blue played chess sort of like this as compared
to a human player).
Yes. If you take an evolutionary perspective there are clearly degrees
of consciosuness and degrees of intelligence. I think you are right that
full human intelligence without consciousness, the inner narrative,
and subconscious activity, is essentially impossible. I don't find the
idea of philosophical zombies very likely. Also, things that make for
'intelligent' behaviour in humans are often no more than heuristics,
rough rules of thumb. But if one is to reflect on these heuristics, and
improve them according to experience, one must be conscious, and have
that inner narrative, emotions, values, goals, etc. Zombies wouldn't
have any of this, so would not appear adaptable or intelligent to us.
2) There is no known mechanism of conscious generation that can be
climbed.
If consciousness is just a matter of self-modeling, then it is an
advantage that would show up in intelligence of decisions and natural
selection could act on it.
For example, we understand how neurons are computational units, how
connecting neurons creates a computer, how more neurons and more
connections create a more powerful computer and so on. Evolution can
climb this stuff. There is no equivalent known mechanism for
consciousness.
This is the tired old creationist crap saying that the eye is too
complicated to be explained by evolution; the bacterium's flagellum is
too complicated...; the ...... is too complicated .....
At bottom, it is just an argument from ignorance. You do not happen to
know a mechanism whereby consciousness could develop from simpler
forms. But that does not in any way mean that such is not possible.
Creationist anti-intellectualism yet again....
I don't know if intelligent zombies are possible. Maybe consciousness
necessarily supervenes on the stuff necessary for that level of
intelligence. But who knows where consciousness stops supervening?
Maybe stuff that is not biologically evolved is already conscious.
Maybe stars are conscious. Who knows? How could we know?
I see it as an engineering question. When we can reliably create AIs
that act intelligently and appear as conscious as other human beings and
we can create AIs that have more or less humor, guilt, ego,... Then we
will have understood it.
I agree. The only way we will ever finally understand intelligence and
consciousness is to build it -- the engineering problem.
Bruce
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