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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

#81

Post by kirrent »

ThomPete wrote: post #59

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 i…

You may say that, but I've literally never met anyone who thought that consciousness in a computer might arise in any other way than how you've described.

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

#82

Post by dekhn »

petra wrote: post #41
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…

There are already some AI systems with basic forms of consciousness at [1]. I wonder to what human mental age they are equal to ? [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/automaton-robots-b...

I wouldn't call that a basic form of consciousness.

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

#84

Post by CardenB »

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…

What you're referring to about NNs fed into one another sounds similar to generative adversarial nets. They are indeed able to optimise but they're very effective. Though far from consciousness.

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

#85

Post by gpderetta »

CardenB wrote: post #84
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…

What you're referring to about NNs fed into one another sounds similar to generative adversarial nets. They are indeed able to optimise but they're very effective. Though far from consciousness.

From some quick googling, they don't seem what I have in mind. The nets are still trained one from the output of the other or from external data. I want a net to be fed with the internal state of another net. But maybe it doesn't make sense.

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

#86

Post by ThomPete »

kirrent wrote: post #81
ThomPete wrote: post #59

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 i…

You may say that, but I've literally never met anyone who thought that consciousness in a computer might arise in any other way than how you've described.

Well Searle is a good example of one who would claim something along those lines.

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

#87

Post by bitL »

Could we be missing something fundamental in our understanding of the world? Like when nobody knew radioactivity until 20th century and until then it was all green-glowing magic deep down in the mines?

Currently the paradigm of our epoch is to look at everything as a computing problem. Before it was hydraulics, then electricity etc. Maybe in 100 years our successors will be dealing with a more complete picture and their children will be laughing at schools that we thought consciousness was related to computing?

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

#88

Post by theoh »

jbob2000 wrote: post #5

One thing Julian Jaynes discusses in his book Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (highly recommend, but a hard read) is that consciousness is comprised of a number of different qualities, one being excerptification - the ability to take a number of indiscriminate ideas/memories/images and string together a narrative. For example, I can take the idea of a narwhal horn and the idea of a hors…

J.C.R. Licklider, father of the Internet, thought analogy tests were a strong indication of intelligence. Hoeflin's difficult IQ tests also used analogies, but it actually now seems like a bad way to measure intelligence in a multicultural setting (for example "Jekyll : Hyde :: Eloi : ?" is a particularly pointless test of having "read" two particular mainstream books in English.)

Excerptification, as you describe it, sounds like a game of analogies. AI is not far from solving this kind of problem, as long as it is expressed symbolically.

Here's a paper discussing one AGI system, implemented in Haskell, that might be appropriate for work with analogy problems that require "imagination" as well as raw "perception":

Claes Strannegård; Rickard von Haugwitz; Johan Wessberg; Balkenius Christian (2013). "A Cognitive Architecture Based on Dual Process Theory" http://gup.ub.gu.se/publication/178583

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

#89

Post by pessimizer »

Consciousness is a word searching for a meaning. It's telling that this entire thread is people explaining their own personal definition of this reification that we use to separate ourselves from the animals.

Consciousness is the state of being awake, hence able to react normally to sensory stimulation. Computers are nothing but consciousness, unless they're freeing memory.

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

#90

Post by e12e »

My initial thought about this is to reformulate the question as: "Can humans become conscious?". I don't think most people would claim that sperm and egg cells are concious. I also don't expect many people to argue that all humans come from joining these two, non-concious elements. Most (but maybe not all!) would probably agree that that embryo, consisting of a handful of cells, is not concious.

Yet, we interact with people all the time, and at least some of those we consider to be concious. So, by definition the answer to the question is yes. But I think that exploring why that is so, can also shed some light on what we mean by "being concious", how one might demonstrate that something is (or isn't) concious -- and how much of being concious relates to being able to relate to other that we consider to be concious as well.

If we could (and was willing) to raise a child without any human contact, what would such a thing become? Would it really become something we would call human? Concious?

I think that going down this line of questioning, we'll find some ideas about emergent systems, part-whole relations and in general a lot of complexity.

I think it also hard to claim that if we can merge a sperm and egg cell, and create a new concious system, that we couldn't be able to create some artificial (meaning, constructed by us, not "found" in nature) system that develops into being concious.

INMHO, the controversy isn't if an artificial construct can become concious, but what conciousness is, and how we know it's there.

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