Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.
Wow, that's a pretty strong response there, Matt. Friends of yours? If I were in control of such things, I wouldn't DARE walk out of a lab and announce results like that. So I have no fear of being the one to bring that type of criticism on myself. But, I'm just as vulnerable as any of us to having colleagues do it for (to) me. So, yeah. I have a problem with premature release, or announcement, of a technology that's associated with an industry in which I work. It's irresponsible science when scientists do it. It's irresponsible marketing (now, there's a redundant phrase for you) when company management does it. And, it's irresponsible for you to defend such practices. That stuff deserved to be mocked. Get over it. Cheers, Brad Matt Mahoney wrote: So here is another step toward AGI, a hard image classification problem solved with near human-level ability, and all I hear is criticism. Sheesh! I hope your own work is not attacked like this. I would understand if the researchers had proposed something stupid like using the software in court to distinguish adult and child pornography. Please try to distinguish between the research and the commentary by the reporters. A legitimate application could be estimating the average age plus or minus 2 months of a group of 1000 shoppers in a marketing study. In any case, machine surveillance is here to stay. Get used to it. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- On Thu, 10/2/08, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb. To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Thursday, October 2, 2008, 6:21 AM 2008/10/2 Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: It boasts a 50% recognition accuracy rate +/-5 years and an 80% recognition accuracy rate +/-10 years. Unless, of course, the subject is wearing a big floppy hat, makeup or has had Botox treatment recently. Or found his dad's Ronald Reagan mask. 'Nuf said. Yes. This kind of accuracy would not be good enough to enforce age related rules surrounding the buying of certain products, nor does it seem likely to me that refinements of the technique will give the needed accuracy. As you point out people have been trying to fool others about their age for millenia, and this trend is only going to complicate matters further. In future if De Grey gets his way this kind of recognition will be useless anyway. P.S. Oh, yeah, and the guy responsible for this project claims it doesn't violate anyone's privacy because it can't be used to identify individuals. Right. They don't say who sponsored this research, but I sincerely doubt it was the vending machine companies or purveyors of Internet porn. It's good to question the true motives behind something like this, and where the funding comes from. I do a lot of stuff with computer vision, and if someone came to me saying they wanted something to visually recognise the age of a person I'd tell them that they're probably wasting their time, and that indicators other than visual ones would be more likely to give a reliable result. --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
Hi, CMR (my proposal) has no centralized control (global brain). It is a competitive market in which information has negative value. The environment is a peer-to-peer network where peers receive messages in natural language, cache a copy, and route them to appropriate experts based on content. You seem to misunderstand the notion of a Global Brain, see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain It does not require centralized control, but is in fact more focused on emergent dynamical control mechanisms. I believe that CMR is initially friendly in the sense that a market is friendly. Which is to say: dangerous, volatile, hard to predict ... and often not friendly at all!!! A market is the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of its participants. It is fair, but not benevolent. I believe this is an extremely oversimplistic and dangerous view of economics ;-) Traditional economic theory which argues that free markets are optimally efficient, is based on a patently false assumption of infinitely rational economic actors.This assumption is **particularly** poor when the economic actors are largely **humans**, who are highly nonrational. As a single isolated example, note that in the US right now, many people are withdrawing their $$ from banks even if they have less than $100K in their accounts ... even though the government insures bank accounts up to $100K. What are they doing? Insuring themselves against a total collapse of the US economic system? If so they should be buying gold with their $$, but only a few of them are doing that. People are in large part emotional not rational actors, and for this reason pure free-markets involving humans are far from the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of a set of humans. Anyway a deep discussion of economics would likely be too big of a digression, though it may be pertinent insofar as it's a metaphor for the internal dynamics of an AGI ... (for instance Eric Baum, who is a fairly hardcore libertarian politically, is in favor of free markets as a model for credit assignment in AI systems ... and OpenCog/NCE contains an economic attention allocation component...) ben g --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.
I remember reading awhile back that certain Japanese vending machines dispensing adult-only materials actually employed such age-estimation software for a short time, but quickly pulled it after discovering that teens were thwarting it by holding magazine covers up to the camera. No floppy hat or Ronald Reagan mask necessary. On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 6:00 AM, Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Wow, that's a pretty strong response there, Matt. Friends of yours? If I were in control of such things, I wouldn't DARE walk out of a lab and announce results like that. So I have no fear of being the one to bring that type of criticism on myself. But, I'm just as vulnerable as any of us to having colleagues do it for (to) me. So, yeah. I have a problem with premature release, or announcement, of a technology that's associated with an industry in which I work. It's irresponsible science when scientists do it. It's irresponsible marketing (now, there's a redundant phrase for you) when company management does it. And, it's irresponsible for you to defend such practices. That stuff deserved to be mocked. Get over it. Cheers, Brad Matt Mahoney wrote: So here is another step toward AGI, a hard image classification problem solved with near human-level ability, and all I hear is criticism. Sheesh! I hope your own work is not attacked like this. I would understand if the researchers had proposed something stupid like using the software in court to distinguish adult and child pornography. Please try to distinguish between the research and the commentary by the reporters. A legitimate application could be estimating the average age plus or minus 2 months of a group of 1000 shoppers in a marketing study. In any case, machine surveillance is here to stay. Get used to it. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- On Thu, 10/2/08, Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Bob Mottram [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb. To: agi@v2.listbox.com Date: Thursday, October 2, 2008, 6:21 AM 2008/10/2 Brad Paulsen [EMAIL PROTECTED]: It boasts a 50% recognition accuracy rate +/-5 years and an 80% recognition accuracy rate +/-10 years. Unless, of course, the subject is wearing a big floppy hat, makeup or has had Botox treatment recently. Or found his dad's Ronald Reagan mask. 'Nuf said. Yes. This kind of accuracy would not be good enough to enforce age related rules surrounding the buying of certain products, nor does it seem likely to me that refinements of the technique will give the needed accuracy. As you point out people have been trying to fool others about their age for millenia, and this trend is only going to complicate matters further. In future if De Grey gets his way this kind of recognition will be useless anyway. P.S. Oh, yeah, and the guy responsible for this project claims it doesn't violate anyone's privacy because it can't be used to identify individuals. Right. They don't say who sponsored this research, but I sincerely doubt it was the vending machine companies or purveyors of Internet porn. It's good to question the true motives behind something like this, and where the funding comes from. I do a lot of stuff with computer vision, and if someone came to me saying they wanted something to visually recognise the age of a person I'd tell them that they're probably wasting their time, and that indicators other than visual ones would be more likely to give a reliable result. --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Testing, and a question....
Dear AGI folk, I am testing my registration on the system,, saying an inaugural 'hi' and seeking guidance in respect of potential submissions for a presentation spot at the next AGI conference. It is time for me to become more visible in AGI after 5 years of research and reprogramming my brain into the academic side of things My plans as a post-doc are to develop a novel chip technology. It will form the basis for what I have called 'A-Fauna'. I call it A-Fauna because it will act like biological organisms and take their place alongside natural fauna in a chosen ecological niche. Like tending a field as a benign 'artificial weed-killer'...they know and prefer their weeds...you get the idea. They are AGI robots that learn (are coached) to operate in a specific role and then are 'intellectually nobbled' (equivalent to biology), so their ability to handle novelty is specifically and especially curtailed. They will also be a whole bunch cheaper in that form...They are then deployed into that specific role and will be happy little campers. These creatures are different to typical mainstream AI fare because they cannot be taught how to learn. They are like us: they learn how to learn. As a result they can handle novelty better...a long story...Initially the A-Fauna is very small but potentially it could get to human level. The first part of the development is the initial proof of specific physics, which requires a key experiment. I can't wait to do this! The success of the experiment then leads to development and miniaturisation and eventual application into a prototype 'critter', which will then have to be proven to have P-consciousness (using the test in 3 below)anyway...that's the rough 'me' of it. I am in NICTA www.nicta.com.au Victoria Research Lab in the Life-Sciences theme. Department of Electrical/Electronic Eng, University of Melbourne Sothe AGI-09 basic topics to choose from are: 1) Empirical refutation of computationalism 2) Another thought experiment refutation of computationalism. The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room 3) An objective test for Phenomenal consciousness. 4) A novel backpropagation mechanism in an excitable cell membrane/syncytium context. 1) and 2) are interesting because the implication is that if anyone doing AGI lifts their finger over a keyboard thinking they can be directly involved in programming anything to do with the eventual knowledge of the creature...they have already failed. I don't know whether the community has internalised this yet. BTW that makes 4 ways that computationalism has been shot. How dead does it have to get? :-) I am less interested in these than the others. 3) Is a special test which can be used to empirically test for P-consciousness in an embedded, embodied artificial agent. I need this test framework for my future AGI developments...one day I need to be able to point at at my AGI robot and claim it is having experiences of a certain type and to be believed. AGI needs a test like this to get scientific credibility. So you claim it's conscious?prove it!. This is problematic but I am reasonably sure I have worked out a way So it needs some attention (a paper is coming out sometime soon I hope. They told me it was accepted, anyway...). The test is double-blind/clinical style with 'wild-type' control and 'test subject'...BTW the computationalist contender (1/2 above) is quite validly tested but would operate as a sham/placebo control... because it is known they will always fail. Although anyone serious enough can offer it as a full contender. Funnily enough it also proves humans are conscious! In case you were wondering...humans are the wild-type control. 4) Is my main PhD topic. I submit this time next year. (I'd prefer to do this because I can get funded to go to the conference!). It reveals a neural adaptation mechanism that is completely missing from present neural models. It's based on molecular electrodynamics of the neural membrane. The effect then operates in the syncytium as a regulatory (synchrony) bias operating in quadrature with (and roughly independent of) the normal synaptic adaptation. I prefer 4) because of the funding but also because I'd much rather reveal it to the AGI community - because that is my future...but I will defer to preferences of the groupI can always cover 1,2,3 informally when I am there if there's any interestso...which of these (any) is of interest?...I'm not sure of the kinds of things you folk want to hear about. All comments are appreciated. regards to all, Colin Hales --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Testing, and a question....
In terms of a paper submission to AGI-09, I think that your option 4 would be of the most interest to the audience there. By and large it's not a philosophy of AI crowd so much as a how to build an AI crowd... I am also organizing a workshop on machine consciousness that will be in Hong Kong in June 09, following the major consciousness conference there ... for that workshop, your option 3 would be of great interest... ben On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Colin Hales [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Dear AGI folk, I am testing my registration on the system,, saying an inaugural 'hi' and seeking guidance in respect of potential submissions for a presentation spot at the next AGI conference. It is time for me to become more visible in AGI after 5 years of research and reprogramming my brain into the academic side of things My plans as a post-doc are to develop a novel chip technology. It will form the basis for what I have called 'A-Fauna'. I call it A-Fauna because it will act like biological organisms and take their place alongside natural fauna in a chosen ecological niche. Like tending a field as a benign 'artificial weed-killer'...they know and prefer their weeds...you get the idea. They are AGI robots that learn (are coached) to operate in a specific role and then are 'intellectually nobbled' (equivalent to biology), so their ability to handle novelty is specifically and especially curtailed. They will also be a whole bunch cheaper in that form...They are then deployed into that specific role and will be happy little campers. These creatures are different to typical mainstream AI fare because they cannot be taught how to learn. They are like us: they learn how to learn. As a result they can handle novelty better...a long story...Initially the A-Fauna is very small but potentially it could get to human level. The first part of the development is the initial proof of specific physics, which requires a key experiment. I can't wait to do this! The success of the experiment then leads to development and miniaturisation and eventual application into a prototype 'critter', which will then have to be proven to have P-consciousness (using the test in 3 below)anyway...that's the rough 'me' of it. I am in NICTA www.nicta.com.au Victoria Research Lab in the Life-Sciences theme. Department of Electrical/Electronic Eng, University of Melbourne Sothe AGI-09 basic topics to choose from are: 1) Empirical refutation of computationalism 2) Another thought experiment refutation of computationalism. The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room 3) An objective test for Phenomenal consciousness. 4) A novel backpropagation mechanism in an excitable cell membrane/syncytium context. 1) and 2) are interesting because the implication is that if anyone doing AGI lifts their finger over a keyboard thinking they can be directly involved in programming anything to do with the eventual knowledge of the creature...they have already failed. I don't know whether the community has internalised this yet. BTW that makes 4 ways that computationalism has been shot. How dead does it have to get? :-) I am less interested in these than the others. 3) Is a special test which can be used to empirically test for P-consciousness in an embedded, embodied artificial agent. I need this test framework for my future AGI developments...one day I need to be able to point at at my AGI robot and claim it is having experiences of a certain type and to be believed. AGI needs a test like this to get scientific credibility. So you claim it's conscious?prove it!. This is problematic but I am reasonably sure I have worked out a way So it needs some attention (a paper is coming out sometime soon I hope. They told me it was accepted, anyway...). The test is double-blind/clinical style with 'wild-type' control and 'test subject'...BTW the computationalist contender (1/2 above) is quite validly tested but would operate as a sham/placebo control... because it is known they will always fail. Although anyone serious enough can offer it as a full contender. Funnily enough it also proves humans are conscious! In case you were wondering...humans are the wild-type control. 4) Is my main PhD topic. I submit this time next year. (I'd prefer to do this because I can get funded to go to the conference!). It reveals a neural adaptation mechanism that is completely missing from present neural models. It's based on molecular electrodynamics of the neural membrane. The effect then operates in the syncytium as a regulatory (synchrony) bias operating in quadrature with (and roughly independent of) the normal synaptic adaptation. I prefer 4) because of the funding but also because I'd much rather reveal it to the AGI community - because that is my future...but I will defer to preferences of the groupI can always cover 1,2,3 informally when I am there if there's any interestso...which of
Re: [agi] I Can't Be In Two Places At Once.
yah, I discuss this in chapter 2 of The Hidden Pattern ;-) ... the short of it is: the self-model of such a mind will be radically different than that of a current human, because we create our self-models largely by analogy to our physical organisms ... intelligences w/o fixed physical embodiment will still have self-models but they will be less grounded in body metaphors ... hence radically different we can explore this different analytically, but it's hard for us to grok empathically... a hint of this is seen in the statement my son Zeb (who plays too many videogames) made: i don't like the real world as much as videogames because in the real world I always have first person view and can never switch to third person one would suspect that minds w/o fixed embodiment would have more explicitly contextualized inference, rather than so often positioning all their inferences/ideas within one default context ... for starters... ben On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: The foundation of the human mind and system is that we can only be in one place at once, and can only be directly, fully conscious of that place. Our world picture, which we and, I think, AI/AGI tend to take for granted, is an extraordinary triumph over that limitation - our ability to conceive of the earth and universe around us, and of societies around us, projecting ourselves outward in space, and forward and backward in time. All animals are similarly based in the here and now. But,if only in principle, networked computers [or robots] offer the possibility for a conscious entity to be distributed and in several places at once, seeing and interacting with the world simultaneously from many POV's. Has anyone thought about how this would change the nature of identity and intelligence? --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Testing, and a question....
Colin: 1) Empirical refutation of computationalism... .. interesting because the implication is that if anyone doing AGI lifts their finger over a keyboard thinking they can be directly involved in programming anything to do with the eventual knowledge of the creature...they have already failed. I don't know whether the community has internalised this yet. Colin, I'm sure Ben is right, but I'd be interested to hear the essence of your empirical refutation. Please externalise it so we can internalise it :) --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] I Can't Be In Two Places At Once.
I think either way - computers or robots - a distributed entity has to be looking at the world from different POV's more or less simultaneously, even if rapidly switching. My immediate intuitive response is that that would make the entity much less self-ish -much more open to merging or uniting with others. The idea of a distributed entity may well have the power to change our ideas about God/ the divine force/principle , I suspect our ideas are directly or indirectly v. located. Even if we, say, think about God or the force being everywhere, it's hard not to think of that being the same force spread out. But the idea of a distributed entity IMO opens up the possibility of an entity with a highly multiple personality - and perhaps also might make it possible to see all humans, say, and/or animals as one - an idea which has always given me, personally, a headache. Ben:yah, I discuss this in chapter 2 of The Hidden Pattern ;-) ... the short of it is: the self-model of such a mind will be radically different than that of a current human, because we create our self-models largely by analogy to our physical organisms ... intelligences w/o fixed physical embodiment will still have self-models but they will be less grounded in body metaphors ... hence radically different we can explore this different analytically, but it's hard for us to grok empathically... a hint of this is seen in the statement my son Zeb (who plays too many videogames) made: i don't like the real world as much as videogames because in the real world I always have first person view and can never switch to third person one would suspect that minds w/o fixed embodiment would have more explicitly contextualized inference, rather than so often positioning all their inferences/ideas within one default context ... for starters... ben On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 8:43 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The foundation of the human mind and system is that we can only be in one place at once, and can only be directly, fully conscious of that place. Our world picture, which we and, I think, AI/AGI tend to take for granted, is an extraordinary triumph over that limitation - our ability to conceive of the earth and universe around us, and of societies around us, projecting ourselves outward in space, and forward and backward in time. All animals are similarly based in the here and now. But,if only in principle, networked computers [or robots] offer the possibility for a conscious entity to be distributed and in several places at once, seeing and interacting with the world simultaneously from many POV's. Has anyone thought about how this would change the nature of identity and intelligence? --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC Director of Research, SIAI [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome - Dr Samuel Johnson -- agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] Testing, and a question....
Hi Ben, Excellent. #4 it is. I'll proceed on that basis. I can't get funding unless I present...and the timing is perfect for my PhD, so I'll be working towards that. Hong Kong sounds good. I assume it's the Toward a Science of Consciousness 2009 I'll chase it up. I didn't realise it was in Hong Kong. The last one I went to was Tucson. 2006. It was a hoot. I wonder if Dave Chalmers will do the 'end of consciousness' party and blues-slam. :-) We'll see. Consider me 'applied for' as a workshop. I'll do the applications ASAP. regards, Colin Hales Ben Goertzel wrote: In terms of a paper submission to AGI-09, I think that your option 4 would be of the most interest to the audience there. By and large it's not a philosophy of AI crowd so much as a how to build an AI crowd... I am also organizing a workshop on machine consciousness that will be in Hong Kong in June 09, following the major consciousness conference there ... for that workshop, your option 3 would be of great interest... ben On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 5:01 PM, Colin Hales [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear AGI folk, I am testing my registration on the system,, saying an inaugural 'hi' and seeking guidance in respect of potential submissions for a presentation spot at the next AGI conference. It is time for me to become more visible in AGI after 5 years of research and reprogramming my brain into the academic side of things My plans as a post-doc are to develop a novel chip technology. It will form the basis for what I have called 'A-Fauna'. I call it A-Fauna because it will act like biological organisms and take their place alongside natural fauna in a chosen ecological niche. Like tending a field as a benign 'artificial weed-killer'...they know and prefer their weeds...you get the idea. They are AGI robots that learn (are coached) to operate in a specific role and then are 'intellectually nobbled' (equivalent to biology), so their ability to handle novelty is specifically and especially curtailed. They will also be a whole bunch cheaper in that form...They are then deployed into that specific role and will be happy little campers. These creatures are different to typical mainstream AI fare because they cannot be taught how to learn. They are like us: they learn how to learn. As a result they can handle novelty better...a long story...Initially the A-Fauna is very small but potentially it could get to human level. The first part of the development is the initial proof of specific physics, which requires a key experiment. I can't wait to do this! The success of the experiment then leads to development and miniaturisation and eventual application into a prototype 'critter', which will then have to be proven to have P-consciousness (using the test in 3 below)anyway...that's the rough 'me' of it. I am in NICTA www.nicta.com.au http://www.nicta.com.au Victoria Research Lab in the Life-Sciences theme. Department of Electrical/Electronic Eng, University of Melbourne Sothe AGI-09 basic topics to choose from are: 1) Empirical refutation of computationalism 2) Another thought experiment refutation of computationalism. The Totally Blind Zombie Homunculus Room 3) An objective test for Phenomenal consciousness. 4) A novel backpropagation mechanism in an excitable cell membrane/syncytium context. 1) and 2) are interesting because the implication is that if anyone doing AGI lifts their finger over a keyboard thinking they can be directly involved in programming anything to do with the eventual knowledge of the creature...they have already failed. I don't know whether the community has internalised this yet. BTW that makes 4 ways that computationalism has been shot. How dead does it have to get? :-) I am less interested in these than the others. 3) Is a special test which can be used to empirically test for P-consciousness in an embedded, embodied artificial agent. I need this test framework for my future AGI developments...one day I need to be able to point at at my AGI robot and claim it is having experiences of a certain type and to be believed. AGI needs a test like this to get scientific credibility. So you claim it's conscious?prove it!. This is problematic but I am reasonably sure I have worked out a way So it needs some attention (a paper is coming out sometime soon I hope. They told me it was accepted, anyway...). The test is double-blind/clinical style with 'wild-type' control and 'test subject'...BTW the computationalist contender (1/2 above) is quite validly tested but would operate as a sham/placebo control... because it is known they will always fail. Although anyone serious enough can offer it as a full contender. Funnily enough
Re: Risks of competitive message routing (was Re: [agi] Let's face it, this is just dumb.)
--- On Fri, 10/3/08, Ben Goertzel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You seem to misunderstand the notion of a Global Brain, see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/GBRAIFAQ.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_brain You are right. That is exactly what I am proposing. I believe that CMR is initially friendly in the sense that a market is friendly. Which is to say: dangerous, volatile, hard to predict ... and often not friendly at all!!! I am open to alternative suggestions. A market is the most efficient way to satisfy the collective goals of its participants. It is fair, but not benevolent. I believe this is an extremely oversimplistic and dangerous view of economics ;-) Traditional economic theory which argues that free markets are optimally efficient, is based on a patently false assumption of infinitely rational economic actors. This assumption is **particularly** poor when the economic actors are largely **humans**, who are highly nonrational. I think that CMR will make markets more rational. Humans will have more access to information, which will enable them to make more rational decisions. I believe that AGI will result in pervasive public surveillance of everyone. All of your movements, communication, and financial transactions will be public and instantly accessible to anyone. We will demand it, and AGI will make it cheap. Sure you could have secrets, but nobody will hire you, loan you money, or buy or sell you anything without knowing everything about you. Anyway a deep discussion of economics would likely be too big of a digression, though it may be pertinent insofar as it's a metaphor for the internal dynamics of an AGI ... (for instance Eric Baum, who is a fairly hardcore libertarian politically, is in favor of free markets as a model for credit assignment in AI systems ... and OpenCog/NCE contains an economic attention allocation component...) Economics is not a metaphor, but is central to the design of distributed AGI. There are hard problems that need to be solved. Economic systems have positive feedback loops such as speculative investment that are unstable and can crash. AGI and instant communication can lead to events where most of the world's wealth can disappear in a wave of panic selling traveling at the speed of light. I don't believe that competition for resources and a market where information has negative value has positive feedback loops, but it is something that needs to be studied. My concern is that trust networks are unstable. They may lead to monopolies, and rare but catastrophic failures when a peer with high reputation decides to cheat. This is not just a problem for CMR, but any AGI where knowledge comes from many people. How do you know which information to trust? -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
Re: [agi] COMP = false
Hi Mike, I can give the highly abridged flow of the argument: !) It refutes COMP , where COMP = Turing machine-style abstract symbol manipulation. In particular the 'digital computer' as we know it. 2) The refutation happens in one highly specific circumstance. In being false in that circumstance it is false as a general claim. 3) The circumstances: If COMP is true then it should be able to implement an artificial scientist with the following faculties: (a) scientific behaviour (goal-delivery of a 'law of nature', an abstraction BEHIND the appearances of the distal natural world, not merely the report of what is there), (b) scientific observation based on the visual scene, (c) scientific behaviour in an encounter with radical novelty. (This is what humans do) The argument's empirical knowledge is: 1) The visual scene is visual phenomenal consciousness. A highly specified occipital lobe deliverable. 2) In the context of a scientific act, scientific evidence is 'contents of phenomenal consciousness'. You can't do science without it. In the context of this scientific act, visual P-consciousness and scientific evidence are identities. P-consciousness is necessary but on its own is not sufficient. Extra behaviours are needed, but these are a secondary consideration here. NOTE: Do not confuse scientific observation with the scientific measurement, which is a collection of causality located in the distal external natural world. (Scientific measurement is not the same thing as scientific evidence, in this context). The necessary feature of a visual scene is that it operate whilst faithfully inheriting the actual causality of the distal natural world. You cannot acquire a law of nature without this basic need being met. 3) Basic physics says that it is impossible for a brain to create a visual scene using only the inputs acquired by the peripheral stimulus received at the retina. This is due to fundamentals of quantum degeneracy. Basically there are an infinite number of distal external worlds that can deliver the exact same photon impact. The transduction that occurs in the retinal rod/cones is entirely a result of protein isomerisation. All information about distal origins is irretievably gone. An impacting photon could have come across the room or across the galaxy. There is no information about origins in the transduced data in the retina. That established, you are then faced with a paradox: (i) (3) says a visual scene is impossible. (ii) Yet the brain makes one. (iii) To make the scene some kind of access to distal spatial relations must be acquired as input data in addition to that from the retina. (iv) There are only 2 places that can come from... (a) via matter (which we already have - retinal impact at the boundary that is the agent periphery) (b) via space (at the boundary of the matter of the brain with space, the biggest boundary by far). So, the conclusion is that the brain MUST acquire the necessary data via the spatial boundary route. You don't have to know how. You just have no other choice. There is no third party in there to add the necessary data and the distal world is unknown. There is literally nowhere else for the data to come from. Matter and Space exhaust the list of options. (There is alway magical intervention ... but I leave that to the space cadets.) That's probably the main novelty for the reader to to encounter. But we are not done yet. Next empirical fact: (v) When you create a turing-COMP substrate the interface with space is completely destroyed and replaced with the randomised machinations of the matter of the computer manipulating a model of the distal world. All actual relationships with the real distal external world are destroyed. In that circumstance the COMP substrate is implementing the science of an encounter with a model, not an encounter with the actual distal natural world. No amount of computation can make up for that loss, because you are in a circumstance of an intrinsically unknown distal natural world, (the novelty of an act of scientific observation). . = COMP is false. == OK. There are subtleties here. The refutation is, in effect, a result of saying you can't do it (replace a scientist with a computer) because you can't simulate inputs. It is just the the nature of 'inputs' has been traditionally impoverished by assumption born merely of cross-disciplinary blindness.. Not enough quantum mechanics or electrodynamics is done by those exposed to 'COMP' principles. This result, at first appearance, says you can't simulate a scientist. But you can! If you already know what is out there in the natural world then you can simulate a scientific act. But you don't - by definition - you are doing science to find out! So it's not that you can't simulate a scientist, it is just that in order to do it you already have to know everything, so you don't want to ... it's
AW: [agi] I Can't Be In Two Places At Once.
1. We feel ourselves not exactly at a single point in space. Instead, we identify ourselves with our body which consist of several parts and which are already at different points in space. Your eye is not at the same place as your hand. I think this is a proof that a distributed AGI will not need to have a complete different conscious state for a model of its position in space than we already have. 2.But to a certain degree you are of course right that we have a map of our environment and we know our position (which is not a point because of 1) in this map. In the brain of a rat there are neurons which each represent a position of the environment. Researches could predict the position of the rat only by looking into the rat's brain. 3. I think it is extremely important, that we give an AGI no bias about space and time as we seem to have. Our intuitive understanding of space and time is useful for our life on earth but it is completely wrong as we know from theory of relativity and quantum physics. -Matthias Heger -Ursprüngliche Nachricht- Von: Mike Tintner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: Samstag, 4. Oktober 2008 02:44 An: agi@v2.listbox.com Betreff: [agi] I Can't Be In Two Places At Once. The foundation of the human mind and system is that we can only be in one place at once, and can only be directly, fully conscious of that place. Our world picture, which we and, I think, AI/AGI tend to take for granted, is an extraordinary triumph over that limitation - our ability to conceive of the earth and universe around us, and of societies around us, projecting ourselves outward in space, and forward and backward in time. All animals are similarly based in the here and now. But,if only in principle, networked computers [or robots] offer the possibility for a conscious entity to be distributed and in several places at once, seeing and interacting with the world simultaneously from many POV's. Has anyone thought about how this would change the nature of identity and intelligence? --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com --- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
