Scott Alexander Siskind, the Psychiatrist? More to the point of the nature O'
consciousnesses is Stephon Alexander, the physicist at Brown University.
Home | Alexander Theory Lab (stephonalexanderlab.com)
The Autodidactic Universe - NASA/ADS (harvard.edu)
OR, physicist, Vitaly Vanchurin at U Minn/Duluth via his Neural net concept.
[2008.01540] The world as a neural network (arxiv.org)
♬ It's the Sky, Lord, It's the Sky!♪ (Me, a Clog-dancing). Take it, Brother
Penrose!
On Tuesday, January 23, 2024 at 04:37:01 PM EST, Brent Meeker
<[email protected]> wrote:
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.
--
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/2061878596.1201389.1706046645948%40mail.yahoo.com.
