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Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

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Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#51

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Zikes wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

This puts a fun spin on the teleportation/cloning thought experiment.

What do you think all the shimmery stuff on the Star Trek TOS transporter was?

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#52

Post by tim333 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #33
andrewla wrote: post #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…

That said, I feel that we are extremely far away from producing a computer-based consciousness Views of distance to the production of "conscious" machines are likely all over the place because there aren't really any clear ideas about what consciousness is and why it's important. * Is it one state of mind that represents another state of mind? We trivially can construct computers with states which reflect each other.…

>there aren't really any clear ideas about what consciousness is and why it's important.

I personally feel fairly clear on that though I may be wrong. It is I think awareness in the central part of the brain that beings in data from other parts and can think about it. For example if you walk across the room you don't normally have conscious awareness of your leg movements because that happens with more simple neural networks but you can focus your consciousness on that if you want to analyse or modify your walk.

There are probably different levels of consciousness as you go from say humans to dogs to mice to flies etc. and it's a bit up to the individual what you call what. Modern AI systems are probably somewhere between flies and dogs. I'll give you that to get to the human level will take a while.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#53

Post by c54 »

gpderetta wrote: post #47

The most interesting definition I have seen of consciousness is [1] "the mind thinking about the mind thinking", i.e. some sort of meta-level "diagnostic process". What I find interesting is that this definition supports awareness and an the existence of an 'I', but doesn't imply any sort of control or direct influence on the unconscious mind for which there seem to be experimental evidence against. Instead the resul…

So do we not mean "conscious" as the opposite of "unconscious"?

As in it's possible to knock out a dog - rendering it unconscious. But when it wakes back up it's not going to think about the fact that it's a dog (as far as we know).

So what's the name for a dog's normal not-unconscious waking state?

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#54

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Zikes wrote: post #34
Animats wrote: post #27

I'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.

I always assumed that AI consciousness would be an emergent property, not a feature we would (or even could) effectively develop towards.

Chomsky shrugs that human consciousness - or at least language; good luck separating those - is an emergent property.

So yeah.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#55

Post by visarga »

willismichael wrote: post #7
sharemywin wrote: post #2

The only thing I could argue is a speed component. Something would need to work at a reasonable operating speed for humans to judge it as conscious. If an answer took ten years to get back I doubt anyone would call it conscious.

It's possible that some form of life exists that operates on a significantly different time scale than we do, let's say it takes 10,000 years just to communicate a greeting, or a microsecond to do the same. We likely wouldn't recognize it as conscious (or even life), and it possibly wouldn't recognize us either.

If the whole ecosystem of our planet would be a sentient entity, thinking slowly over the eons, then the human species would be a thought in its head.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#56

Post by andrewla »

andyh2 wrote: post #42
joe_the_user wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, I feel that we are extremely far away from producing a computer-based consciousness Views of distance to the production of "conscious" machines are likely all over the place because there aren't really any clear ideas about what consciousness is and why it's important. * Is it one state of mind that represents another state of mind? We trivially can construct computers with states which reflect each other.…

I believe the broadest consensus defines consciousness as having a subjective experience. What's unclear, and some deem impossible, is how we can externally detect consciousness. A machine could act and respond in a manner indistinguishable from humans but still be unconscious.

Ugh... replacing one vague and undefined word with three vague and undefined words (I'm including "having" because that's a hard one to nail down in context).

    function i_am_conscious(x) { return x + Math.random(); }
This function has a subjective experience.

To avoid any discussion of consciousness becoming a discussion of the meaning of the word "consciousness" we have to accept that consciousness (like everything else in the real world) is not a boolean property, but rather a subjective "I know it when I see it" sort of thing. Or in Bayesian terms, it's a weighted evaluation of evidence against a vast array of mostly unknown priors.

That's why I think it will sneak up on us; there will be systems that some very small group of people (mostly crazy) think are conscious, then systems that a slightly larger group of people (maybe more crazy, maybe less) think are conscious, until one day You wake up and realize that You are one of the crazy people.

But directed attempts to satisfy some definition of "consciousness" in a system will just result in a counterexample to that definition.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#57

Post by tim333 »

gpderetta wrote: post #47

The most interesting definition I have seen of consciousness is [1] "the mind thinking about the mind thinking", i.e. some sort of meta-level "diagnostic process". What I find interesting is that this definition supports awareness and an the existence of an 'I', but doesn't imply any sort of control or direct influence on the unconscious mind for which there seem to be experimental evidence against. Instead the resul…

Thinking about thinking might be a bit over demanding - we still tend to consider people conscious when they are reading HN for example. People definitely can think about thinking though so a system wouldn't be human level if it couldn't so that.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#58

Post by donuteaters »

spdegabrielle wrote: post #38

To quote @worrydream "Worrying about sentient AI as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightning"

There are plenty of people panicking about climate change... Perhaps other people are allowed to think about other things. Or would you replace ALL of scientific study with the single topic you consider most important?

In 20 years or so, if it turns out that all of the dire predictions were significantly overblown, would you at least have the courtesy to blush in embarrassment for the current alarmism?

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#59

Post by ThomPete »

Computers won't become conscious anymore than the person in Searles chinese room understand chinese or the individual neuron in my brain understand the thoughts it's passing along.

But the system which the computer is a part of though might create consciousness.

I think a lot of our problems with thinking about consciousness is that we think of it as a thing that exist some specific place rather than as a component in a feedback loop.

What we fundamentally are, are pattern recognizing feedback loops, on top of pattern recognizing feedback loops.

Re: Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

#60

Post by ArkyBeagle »

sickbeard wrote: post #8

My 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.

The question is - how explicitly? You, for example, can take a course in movie criticism and change how you see movies by applying patterns you are given there.

It's a question of are there meta-patterns and meta-meta patterns.

I've done things where a minimal set of rules in a filter led to very mildly emergent phenomena in control systems. I didn't tell it what the answers were; I told it how to find the answer ( this is much less impressive than it sounds - think of a filter into basically a running average ) .

I joked that this was AI, but I'm not sure I was really joking because it's a difficult question. In the end, it was just a (perhaps unnecessarily complex) feedback leg. But it worked when nothing else would - but once you find the thing you're looking for, you tend to stop looking.

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