On 07 Dec 2017, at 10:01, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 11:50 PM, Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 12/6/2017 1:46 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I suspect that this is perhaps why Brent want to refer to the
environment
for relating consciousness to the machine, and in Artificial
Intelligence,
some people defend the idea that (mundane) consciousness occur only when
the
environment contradicts a little bit the quasi automatic persistent
inference we do all the time.
That's Jeff Hawkins model of consciousness: one becomes conscious of
something when all lower, more specialized levels of the brain have found
it
not to match their predictions.
In that sort of model, how does matter "know" that it is being used to
run a forecasting algorithm? Surely it doesn't right?
Imagine a society which builds some objects. When everything go well, the
boss can sleep in his office. But then there is some accident or something
unusual. That is the time to wake up the boss. In this analogy,
consciousness is played by the (incorrigible) boss.
The only way this could work is if the forecasting algorithm and the
cascading effects of failing predictions have the side effect of
creating the "right" sort of interactions at a lower level that
trigger consciousness.
After a moment of panic, the sub-entities dare to awake the ultimate judge:
the one capable of "going out of the box" to take a (perhaps risky) decision
in absence of complete information, and to take on its shoulder the
responsibility.
Then I want to know what these interactions
are, and what if the "atom" of consciousness, what is the first
principle. Without this, I would say that such hypothesis are not even
wrong.
The sub-unities have specialized task, and does not need evolved forecasting
ability. You can think them as ants, when they do their usual jobs triggered
by the local pheromones left by their close neighbors. But if the nest is
attacked, or if some important food is missing, some species will needs some
order of the queen (ike to fight or to move away. Some societies can
delegate most of the power to the sub-unities, but in complex unknown
situation, if they have to make important decision, they will need a
centralization of the power, which can act much more quickly to convince the
whole society of some unusual option, like running away, closing the doors,
fighting the enemy, etc. That will happen when *many* ants complain on
something.
In this case, the role of consciousness is focusing the attention on what is
important (with respect to survival), and to speed-up planning, decision,
etc.
I am not sure this answer the question (we are in the "easy" part of the
problem here).
But you will help me by telling me what is missing. I am not sure we need to
dig on the difficult part of the consciousness problem here, which is handed
at a different level, and concerned with the fact that the boss/queen is
confined in his office/chamber and can never be sure if the ants panic is
genuine, or an illusion, and still decide ...
