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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

#101

Post by meric »

yarou wrote: post #92
pessimizer wrote: post #89

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.

> Consciousness is the state of being awake, hence able to react normally to sensory stimulation. And how'd you go about verifying that? I know that I'm conscious, but you could be a p-zombie. That means if I poke you with a toothpick, you will scream in agony (responding to stimulus), but that doesn't give me any information about whether or not you are conscious.

We're all p-zombies. When we get poked with toothpicks we will scream in agony, the thought of being poked with toothpicks will appear internally, and we will in turn react to that thought, the reaction based on our upbringing. We have our outer senses, sight, touch, and then our inner senses, that can sense the 'thoughts' that were triggered by outer sense stimulation. The thought is just another form of sensory stimulation, but it is internally generated, indirectly based on an external source. Our reaction to those thoughts depends on how we've seen other people react to similar situations, that have generated those thoughts in us.

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

#102

Post by language »

e12e wrote: post #90

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…

Also note that the situation doesn't seem like it can really be framed in terms of the usual: "an observer is investigating something which is distinct from herself." In this situation there is not a hard distinction between what we are and what we are trying to describe.

Consciousness appears (intuitively, on the surface) to be the thing which creates the possibility of describing consciousness. A description of consciousness must account for itself. A theory of consciousness must be written such that it writes itself.

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

#103

Post by DonaldFisk »

rspeer wrote: post #99

When Marvin Minsky described one perspective on consciousness as "hey, we don't understand consciousness, and we don't understand gravity, maybe consciousness is made of gravity", I thought he was just mocking the ever-popular idea that "maybe consciousness is made of quantum mechanics". I didn't know that there really was a prominent thinker who postulated gravity ( and quantum mechanics) as the place where subjecti…

I don't think anyone's seriously put forward the idea that consciousness and quantum mechanics are related because they're both mysterious, so that is a straw man. In any case, we do understand gravity and quantum mechanics pretty well, at least compared to consciousness.

The reason some people think QM and consciousness are related is that some interpretations of quantum mechanics requires a conscious observer to collapse the wave function and make the final measurement (e.g. by taking a reading from a measuring apparatus, or listening to someone else (who they can't be sure is conscious) telling you the measurement over lunch. I'm not familiar with Penrose's argument re gravity, but so far general relativity has resisted attempts to quantize it, so maybe he's saying that GR and QM must be incorporated into a more general theory yet to be worked out, like electricity and magnetism are incorporated into Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.

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

#104

Post by mablap »

bitL wrote: post #87

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 th…

Yes, absolutely. But that's the trick, we don't know :)

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

#105

Post by ArkyBeagle »

rspeer wrote: post #96
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That seems downright nuanced for Chomsky talking about language. Did he really say this? Chomsky considers language to be a thing that physically evolved in humans. Are eyes an emergent property?

"Did he really say this?" That is my interpretation of what he'd said - there's no obvious evolutionary/natural selection ... impetus to it. Doesn't that make it necessarily emergent?

Eyes on the front are common to nearly all predators. I think the contrast between octopus eyes and human eyes is used frequently to deduce that eyes are indeed emergent.

But we have nothing on the raptors.

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

#106

Post by language »

meric wrote: post #100
e12e wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many interesting lines of reasoning around this. The idea of Gaia as a concious system is one. If the earth thinks at the speed of one thought every year, or 100 years -- and perhaps communicates with other such beings -- how would we know? (I don't have strong feelings about concrete ideas about Gaia as a concious system, one way or the other -- other than that I find it an interesting idea, and a good sto…

A pair of conjoined twins can read each other's thoughts and see through each other's eyes. Are they two people, or one? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331769/Doctors-stun... A person has left and right hemispheres in their brain. Under some circumstances, losing one of these hemispheres will result in an almost normal functional human being. Imagine, with advances in biology and medicine, one day we can se…

I think the metaphor I would point to here is "whirlpools in a river." Movements of movements of movements ... ad infinitum.

Another interesting way of articulating this might be: "The universe splits itself into two parts - an observer and an observed."

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

#107

Post by e12e »

meric wrote: post #100
e12e wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many interesting lines of reasoning around this. The idea of Gaia as a concious system is one. If the earth thinks at the speed of one thought every year, or 100 years -- and perhaps communicates with other such beings -- how would we know? (I don't have strong feelings about concrete ideas about Gaia as a concious system, one way or the other -- other than that I find it an interesting idea, and a good sto…

A pair of conjoined twins can read each other's thoughts and see through each other's eyes. Are they two people, or one? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331769/Doctors-stun... A person has left and right hemispheres in their brain. Under some circumstances, losing one of these hemispheres will result in an almost normal functional human being. Imagine, with advances in biology and medicine, one day we can se…

When I was talking about part and whole, I was more thinking about a person really can become concious alone, or if being concious is also partially at least influenced by being part of a culture and group communication and so on. This also goes into if or how language is connected to thinking. Can we have language without having someone to communicate with (ever)? Can we become concious without communication and language? (I'm not saying we cannot, but that these are interesting questions to ask).

Also related to part and whole, and emergent systems, I was thinking about things like ant colonies - and how they might (or might not) relate to big organism that happens to be made out of cells with the same DNA, like us.

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

#108

Post by yarou »

meric wrote: post #101
yarou wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consciousness is the state of being awake, hence able to react normally to sensory stimulation. And how'd you go about verifying that? I know that I'm conscious, but you could be a p-zombie. That means if I poke you with a toothpick, you will scream in agony (responding to stimulus), but that doesn't give me any information about whether or not you are conscious.

We're all p-zombies. When we get poked with toothpicks we will scream in agony, the thought of being poked with toothpicks will appear internally, and we will in turn react to that thought, the reaction based on our upbringing. We have our outer senses, sight, touch, and then our inner senses, that can sense the 'thoughts' that were triggered by outer sense stimulation. The thought is just another form of sensory sti…

I'm not that comfortable with the hand wavy physicalist view that consciousness arises from the physical processes of the brain.

If that were the case, why can't I simply design an artificial brain, a cyber brain, and upload myself in 1000 bodies?

What really spoke to me in Aaronson's entire lecture is the whole quantum no-cloning restriction. Bell State can't help you either, because you can't violate causality.

Suppose for a second that you could violate the laws of physics in U', a universe where anything goes. You can even have free energy too, i.e. no increasing entropy. I would still argue that creating uncountably infinite copies of yourself will still yield only the original conscious, while the rest are merely simulations.

FWIW, I don't think "microtubules" is sufficient either, because that's equally hand-wavy and a restatement of ghost in the machine. At least that's how I parse it.

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

#109

Post by DonaldFisk »

freshhawk wrote: post #71
andyh2 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So then define "subjective experience" without "it's that thing we have" (which thing?) or using the word subjective. This feels to me like replacing one undefined term with another. Also Dennett has an excellent rebuttal to the concept of p-zombies (unconscious entities indistinguishable from conscious ones) imo.

And David Chalmers has an excellent rebuttal to Dennett's rebuttal. Different people take different sides, and I'm with Chalmers on this one.

The evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies is in your living room, if you have a television. You can see people on it and they behave intelligently. Are they conscious? Of course not, they're just red, green, and blue dots. Maybe we could make this a bit more realistic?

You're now in a very realistic virtual reality. Your character is conscious, because you are. So is the character being played by your friend over there (assuming he's not a p-zombie). But what about the characters next to you? Maybe Doug Lenat and Geoffrey Hinton collaborated and developed an AI as intelligent as a person, and that's what controls them. They can't be conscious, because they're just pixels like the dots on your flat-screen TV, so not conscious in the virtual reality, and they're not conscious in the real world either, because they're just software, which is an epiphenomenon, like wetness or tidiness. The computer which runs the VR, and the AIs, might be conscious but that would be a very different consciousness from yours. Maybe it senses voltage levels at its memory addresses, but it certainly wouldn't see you or the submachine gun you're carrying in the VR.

Maybe we already are in a virtual reality. Nick Bostrom thinks we might be. If it's sufficiently realistic, there might be no way to tell, and no way to tell whether everyone is conscious, or nobody is conscious except you.

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

#110

Post by maxander »

This was an unexpectedly interesting talk, considering that from the framing I expected it to consist of essentially "Penrose, everyone thinks the Godelian thing is stupid, please just stop." Instead we got a theory (very theoretical, but still interesting) relating consciousness to the cosmological boundaries of the universe.

If only I understood it! Does anyone else know how to interpret the sentence "in order for you to be unpredictable and unclonable, someone else’s ignorance of your causal antecedents would have to extend all the way back to ignorance about the initial state of the universe"? That and the following couple of paragraphs seem to establish something really interesting, but I haven't been able to follow it.

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