The Many Worlds hypothesis provides a partial answer to some issues of consciousness, via kind of solipsism: "I am the only mind which exists: in my fold of the Many Worlds complex". This reconciles the problem of why everyone's consciousness is pinned to oneself: what causes your consciousness to be confined to yourself and inaccessible to me and vice versa. Basically, there is no hidden context variable for that; in fact, the universe in which you're conscious is devoid of my consciousness. (Plain solipsism consists of denying that there is any other consciousness anywhere, which is very different, and has entirely different ethical/moral implications.) The hypothesis is essentially that the subjective phenomenon of consciousness is something of which a single instance arises in any universe. That's okay; we have multiple parallel universes, and therefore multiple instances of consciousness. A variation on the Anthropic Principle then explains why "you are you and not someone else". (If you were someone else, you might still be asking that question---as that someone else.)
Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
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Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#22> Look, clearly we’re machines governed by the laws of physics. We’re computers made of meat, as Marvin Minsky put it.
This really seem inescapable to me. The remaining arguments all seem like smokescreens. Being able to copy computer programs? Reproducing the running state of even a moderately complex distributed system is effectively impossible, so this argument bothers me not at all.
Even if there is some quantum gravitational aspect of human consciousness, the idea that you'd be able to distinguish between that and a reasonable computational approximation of it seems far-fetched at best.
That said, I feel that we are extremely far away from producing a computer-based consciousness. Even human consciousness needs a couple of years of full-speed processing to reach the point at which it could even vaguely be considered conscious by adult standards. Most likely 5-10 years after we give up on the notion of creating an AI we'll discover that we created one 15 years ago but just haven't yet been able to recognize it as an emergent property of a hugely complex system.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#23The question isn't "can" but "should". Should we, assuming we could, create conscious (conscious meaning being self-aware and having the ability to learn) machines? There have been hundreds of books, movies, games - about this issue and all, come to the same conclusion... NO.
I'm not sure they've concluded it's a bad idea, more that the machines and us living happily ever after makes for a dull movie.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers are close to that. The neural net image backward inference is similar. They take bits of imagery and try to retrofit it in 'meaningful' ways, blending both source and target image. Also genetic programming can model swapping and blending traits.
Meh, not really, the computer doesn't understand the images it's mixing, it's just using some clever algorithms to piece together an image. It has no awareness of the images you're giving it. I couldn't give it an image of a narwhal and an image of a horse and expect it to give me a unicorn.
> Meh, not really, the computer doesn't understand the images it's mixing,
That's 100% wrong. It does create abstract representations and it can imagine back. For example, there is this neural net that can do "woman + glasses = woman wearing glasses" on images, without any tags. It can combine concepts and generate new images. There is also another one that can "dream" images of bedrooms. It can even interpolate 10 intermediary bedrooms between any two images, and they look very good.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers are close to that. The neural net image backward inference is similar. They take bits of imagery and try to retrofit it in 'meaningful' ways, blending both source and target image. Also genetic programming can model swapping and blending traits.
Meh, not really, the computer doesn't understand the images it's mixing, it's just using some clever algorithms to piece together an image. It has no awareness of the images you're giving it. I couldn't give it an image of a narwhal and an image of a horse and expect it to give me a unicorn.
> I couldn't give it an image of a narwhal and an image of a horse and expect it to give me a unicorn.
You absolutely could with a generative adversarial network and the right training dataset. They can interpolate between images in a semantic way, and add and subtract components of the semantic representation. While it's not narwhals and horses, here's an example of using images of men with and without glasses along with a woman without glasses to generate a woman with glasses: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Newmu/dcgan_code/master/im...
More results here: https://github.com/Newmu/dcgan_code And note that this field is advancing so rapidly that these results have already been improved on despite being only six months old.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computers are close to that. The neural net image backward inference is similar. They take bits of imagery and try to retrofit it in 'meaningful' ways, blending both source and target image. Also genetic programming can model swapping and blending traits.
If you're referring to backprop, no. It's an open research question to characterize what/how a neural net is learning during backprop (aside from trivial statements like "optimizing a nonconvex function" etc.)
The proof is in the pudding. If it is useful.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#27I've suggested before that AI focus on animal-level AI (operating in the real world) for a while and STFU about "consciousness". Blithering about consciousness doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
Penrose is strange. He once sued a toilet-paper manufacturer for supposedly copying his Penrose non-repeating tiling scheme for the embossing pattern on their toilet paper. He lost.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#28> Look, clearly we’re machines governed by the laws of physics. We’re computers made of meat, as Marvin Minsky put it. This really seem inescapable to me. The remaining arguments all seem like smokescreens. Being able to copy computer programs? Reproducing the running state of even a moderately complex distributed system is effectively impossible, so this argument bothers me not at all. Even if there is some quantum…
"Reproducing the running state of even a moderately complex distributed system is effectively impossible, so this argument bothers me not at all."
That's a feature of the Xen hypervisor.[1] You can even migrate a process from one machine to another without stopping it.
[1] http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/Chapter_9:_Xen_Mig...
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#29My definition of conscious is being aware of what you are doing and influencing it. Can a computer running a file server realize it is only storing pirated movies and stop it it without being explicitly programmed to do so? A conscious computer could.
> Can a computer running a file server realize it is only storing pirated movies and stop it it without being explicitly programmed to do so? A conscious computer could.
Can a person from 1975 know your hard drive was full of pirated content? Probably he knows no title from your library, so he could not assume one way or another. It's as if specific "programming" was missing from him, or people from 1975 aren't passing your consciousness test.
Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that GP's definition is lacking. That is, he only kicked the can. Now he has to define "being aware."
It does not need to be defined. "Being aware" can be observed externally (by us) from an attempt by the entity to independently influence whatever state the entity was in.
So to be aware, it is sufficient for the entity to attempt to influence its state? Is a sunflower aware? It tracks the sun. You're just pushing the difficulty into the word "independently" now.