On 1/23/2024 12:52 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Jan 23, 2024 at 3:38 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
//
/> Who wrote this? you, JC?/
No, Scott Alexander did, he's a pretty smart guy but I think he got
some things wrong. I did write this in the comments section:
"You say "If we’re lucky, consciousness is a basic feature of
information processing and anything smart enough to outcompete us will
be at least as conscious as we are" and I agree with you about that
because there is evidence that it is true. I know for a fact that
random mutation and natural selection managed to produce consciousness
at least once (me) and probably many billions of times, but Evolution
can't directly detect consciousness any better than I can, except in
myself, and it can't select for something it can't see, but evolution
can detect intelligent behavior. I could not function if I really
believed that solipsism was true, therefore I must take it as an
axiom, as a brute fact, that consciousness is the way data feels when
it is being processed intelligently.
You've written this before, but I slightly disagree with it. I think
Evolution can detect consciousness as directly or indirectly as
intelligence. Consciouness is imagining the world with you as an actor
within it. It's a kind of thinking necessary for planning, i.e. for an
advanced form of intelligence. The consciousness you talk about is just
awareness, perception; that's processing data.
You also say "consciousness seems very closely linked to brain waves
in humans" but how was that fact determined? It was observed that when
people behave intelligently their brain waves take a certain form and
when they don't behave intelligently the brain waves are different
than that. I'm sure you don't think that other people are conscious
when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or dead because when they
are in those conditions they are not behaving very intelligently.
As for the fear of paperclip maximizers, I think that's kind of silly.
It assumes the possibility of an intelligent entity having an
absolutely fixed goal they can never change, but such a thing is
impossible. In the 1930s Kurt Gödel prove that there are some things
that are true but have no proof and Alan Turing proved that there is
no way to know for certain if a given task is even possible. For
example, is it possible to prove or disprove that every even number
greater than two is the sum of two prime numbers? Nobody knows. If an
intelligent being was able to have goals that could never change it
would soon be caught in an infinite loop because sooner or later it
would attempt a task that was impossible, that's why Evolution
invented the very important emotion of boredom. Certainly human
beings don't have fix goals, not even the goal of self preservation,
and I don't see how an AI could either."
Good point.
Brent
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/051b7b4c-2f6d-42b0-b1a9-28fa82013088%40gmail.com.
