Re: People, Machines, and Manipulations
Dear Eugen, Has any thought been made among the AI community as to how to prevent the constructed AI from being Solipsists? How does one AI deal with the existence of other AI? Don't they have the same Turing Test problem, but even more accutely given the thesis of hardware independence? Kindest regards, Stephen - Original Message - From: "Eugen Leitl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Lee Corbin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 5:26 AM Subject: Re: People, Machines, and Manipulations On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 03:51:46PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > An instantiated program is much more than a sequence of > bytes -- it also has state. Most programs do not have much > state, but some (AI, specifically) are completely dominated > by state. Well, so are people. I am actually in a state of bewilderment at People have lots of state, and interestingly the current electrochemical activity (the spatiotemporal pattern of spiking) is only a minor part of it. The pattern of a person is readily regenerated from a flat-EEG lacune, so the state is encoded as neuranatomy, not as electrochemical activity of the neuroanatomy. At the very least, we still consider those the same person. the present moment at how you are using some words :-) It's not entirely my fault, the common use of words like "program" to describe activity of a physical object (a person) is somewhat misleading. Very unusual choice for meanings of words. On your usage, the chess program... oops, there isn't a single chess program! I A chess program pressed on a CD is a single program, regardless how many copies are pressed (provided, no errors occur). Multiple instances of a chess program running perfectly synchronized are still one program, compared bit by bit at the same clock tick (very fast very large systems run into hairy relativistic issues, in regards to clocks and comparisons). Once they're allowed to deviate, they become distinct individuals. Now this is quite silly in case of a chess program, because it doesn't represent a very complex world. It is rather close to a genetically homogenous population of C. elegans, which are all very close to being the same archetypal worm, since their neuronal connectivity is genetically determined. If you have a behaving complex animal it has to represent a lot of information about itself, and its environment. mean to say that on your usage of terms, after the chess software (if I may) plays 1. e4 it becomes a different program after I reply 2. Nf3. I better avoid using the word "program" if we are to communicate! We have to settle for somewhat cumbersome but more precise terms like individuals (a static frame snapshot of the state), and a similiarity metric over the space of individuals, and evolution trajectories over the state space of individuals (several subsequent static frame snapshots). If you look at a molecular dynamics program dumping trajectory frames it's exactly the same. Hopefully, I can refer to what I want as a Turing Machine, and you won't pull the rug out from under me by saying that each time it goes into a new state, it's a different Turing Machine. Yes, and no. The device is the same, but it encodes different individuals depending on state of its tape. The computer is the same, but it can run quite a large number of different programs. > Biology doesn't make a clean distinction between software and hardware. > I agree there is similarity/homology between me-former and me-today, > but that similarity is difficult to measure at a low level. > Synchronizing > spatially separate discrete systems and make measurements on bit vectors > is > something relatively simple, at least in gedanken. Yes. So what do you think about the possibility of uploading? That is, transferring your entire intelligence and values from its present biological substrate to a silicon-based one. Do you Silicon doesn't compute very well, so I would prefer a more generic "in machina" to an "in silico" (which is about to become as archaic as in "in relais" or "in tubus vacuo"). consider it possible that technology from the year 3000 (were it somehow applied to where you are at this moment) could transform No problem, assuming cryonics works. you into a robot who didn't know that the transformation had taken place, and yet you would then consist of a system where there was a clean distinction between hardware and software? Absolutely (though there are considerable difficulties present in mapping a scanned slab of neuroanatomy voxels to a slab of computing molecules; this involves automatic feature extraction and hierarchical model building by machine learning, and is quite beyond the state of the art in modelling). The hardware is simple enough (a molecular electronic
Re: People, Machines, and Manipulations
On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 03:51:46PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote: > > An instantiated program is much more than a sequence of > > bytes -- it also has state. Most programs do not have much > > state, but some (AI, specifically) are completely dominated > > by state. > > Well, so are people. I am actually in a state of bewilderment at People have lots of state, and interestingly the current electrochemical activity (the spatiotemporal pattern of spiking) is only a minor part of it. The pattern of a person is readily regenerated from a flat-EEG lacune, so the state is encoded as neuranatomy, not as electrochemical activity of the neuroanatomy. At the very least, we still consider those the same person. > the present moment at how you are using some words :-) It's not entirely my fault, the common use of words like "program" to describe activity of a physical object (a person) is somewhat misleading. > Very unusual choice for meanings of words. On your usage, the > chess program... oops, there isn't a single chess program! I A chess program pressed on a CD is a single program, regardless how many copies are pressed (provided, no errors occur). Multiple instances of a chess program running perfectly synchronized are still one program, compared bit by bit at the same clock tick (very fast very large systems run into hairy relativistic issues, in regards to clocks and comparisons). Once they're allowed to deviate, they become distinct individuals. Now this is quite silly in case of a chess program, because it doesn't represent a very complex world. It is rather close to a genetically homogenous population of C. elegans, which are all very close to being the same archetypal worm, since their neuronal connectivity is genetically determined. If you have a behaving complex animal it has to represent a lot of information about itself, and its environment. > mean to say that on your usage of terms, after the chess > software (if I may) plays 1. e4 it becomes a different program > after I reply 2. Nf3. I better avoid using the word "program" > if we are to communicate! We have to settle for somewhat cumbersome but more precise terms like individuals (a static frame snapshot of the state), and a similiarity metric over the space of individuals, and evolution trajectories over the state space of individuals (several subsequent static frame snapshots). If you look at a molecular dynamics program dumping trajectory frames it's exactly the same. > Hopefully, I can refer to what I want as a Turing Machine, and > you won't pull the rug out from under me by saying that each > time it goes into a new state, it's a different Turing Machine. Yes, and no. The device is the same, but it encodes different individuals depending on state of its tape. The computer is the same, but it can run quite a large number of different programs. > > Biology doesn't make a clean distinction between software and hardware. > > I agree there is similarity/homology between me-former and me-today, > > but that similarity is difficult to measure at a low level. Synchronizing > > spatially separate discrete systems and make measurements on bit vectors is > > something relatively simple, at least in gedanken. > > Yes. So what do you think about the possibility of uploading? > That is, transferring your entire intelligence and values from > its present biological substrate to a silicon-based one. Do you Silicon doesn't compute very well, so I would prefer a more generic "in machina" to an "in silico" (which is about to become as archaic as in "in relais" or "in tubus vacuo"). > consider it possible that technology from the year 3000 (were it > somehow applied to where you are at this moment) could transform No problem, assuming cryonics works. > you into a robot who didn't know that the transformation had > taken place, and yet you would then consist of a system where > there was a clean distinction between hardware and software? Absolutely (though there are considerable difficulties present in mapping a scanned slab of neuroanatomy voxels to a slab of computing molecules; this involves automatic feature extraction and hierarchical model building by machine learning, and is quite beyond the state of the art in modelling). The hardware is simple enough (a molecular electronics/spintronics CA would suffice, and probably be even optimal, though you'd probably need a mole of switches for a low-level simulation of a human primate), but there is going to be an awful lot of state. For all practical purposes you can consider a person a very, very large bit vector, making only sense in the right computational context, of course. -- Eugen* Leitl http://leitl.org";>leitl __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature