Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by teraflop » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 3:44 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #76

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...

You linked to the migration of a single operating system kernel. That is very different from reproducing the running state of an entire distributed system . Migrating a single kernel is not easy, but straight-forward: you have access to all of the relevant pieces (in memory process state, and state on disks) in one place. With a distributed system, that is not so, since the the running state of a distributed system w…

You might be interested in the Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm, which can do what you describe without stopping the system's execution.

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

#112

Post by rspeer » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 4:12 AM UTC

DonaldFisk wrote: post #103

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 co…

It's a straw man, sure. It's an exaggeration about people being willingly baffled by physics.

May I ask, where did you get the part about "conscious observer"? Yes, there's a thing in QM about observation collapsing the wave function, and there's disagreement on what that actually means. But I can't imagine that an interpretation promoted by actual physicists would use a squishy term like "conscious" in their hard science.

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

#113

Post by scott_s » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 4:26 AM UTC

teraflop wrote: post #111

scott_s wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You linked to the migration of a single operating system kernel. That is very different from reproducing the running state of an entire distributed system . Migrating a single kernel is not easy, but straight-forward: you have access to all of the relevant pieces (in memory process state, and state on disks) in one place. With a distributed system, that is not so, since the the running state of a distributed system w…

You might be interested in the Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm, which can do what you describe without stopping the system's execution.

I'm aware of such things, and in fact I work on a system that supports something very similar. (Paper to be published by my colleagues in the industry track of VLDB.) But that is a logical snapshot. Through a clever protocol, and assuming some characteristics of your transport, you can save a state across your system that is logically consistent. That is, if you restored to this logical state, the distributed application can resume from that point, and maintain integrity. You may, however, lose information from your system that was computed after you took your snapshot. The state is logically consistent, but unlikely to be representative of any actual point in time.

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

#114

Post by rspeer » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 4:29 AM UTC

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #105

rspeer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's just, calling language emergent sounds close to the view that you have to whisper furtively when you get too close to MIT: that maybe there was no evolutionary event that created language at all, it's just a really good meme[1] that makes use of other faculties that already existed in the human brain.

Maybe universal grammar isn't a physical fact about the possible ways the human brain can communicate, it's just that if we observe 6,000 variations on an idea with the same[2] origin and try hard enough to sum them up, we'll succeed.

[1] In the original sense.

[2] Or similar origins. Maybe language is a good enough idea to arise multiple times and converge, much like eyes. And I'm not sure whether to count things like Nicaraguan Sign Language as a separate origin of language.

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

#115

Post by meric » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:06 AM UTC

yarou wrote: post #108

meric wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sup…

Let's not violate the laws of physics and go back to the fundamental laws of nature.

We know:

1. Entropy is always increasing.

2. Life is negative entropy gatherer. (It decreases it's own entropy by increasing the entropy of its surroundings, to live.)

3. If we plot all living organisms by their negative entropy, it corresponds roughly to their awareness. The more negative entropy, the more awareness, the more "conscious".

Hypothesis:

Grandparent commenter said Consciousness is the state of being awake, hence able to react normally to sensory stimulation.

Entropy is information, the more entropy the more information there is to process.

Awareness and consciousness is the ability to process information. The more negative entropy the bigger the ability to process information.

Entropy and consciousness are two sides of the same coin. Consciousness, awareness, is negative entropy.

As another commenter said[1]: "The universe splits itself into two parts - an observer and an observed."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11827988

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

#116

Post by SubiculumCode » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:11 AM UTC

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…

This is the field of meta-cognition in cognitive psychology

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

#117

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 5:41 AM UTC

> And so my friends predict that we might face choices like, do we want to ban or tightly control AI research, because it could lead to our sidelining or extermination? Ironically, a skeptical view, like Penrose’s, would suggest that AI research can proceed full speed ahead, because there’s not such a danger!

I don't think runaway general AIs must be conscious in order to be a danger, but that might depend on specific definitions of consciousness.

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

#118

Post by mh-cx » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 6:05 AM UTC

Xcelerate wrote: post #94

mh-cx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a definition, but my very personal take on what conciousness is: Evolution has brought about creatures that are more successful (in regard to survival and reproduction), the more predictive power they have about their environment[1]. One could say, the better a species can simulate it's environment, the more likely it will continue to exist and be part of the ongoing evolution. Our brains are of course als…

> Conciousness is the process of simulation of reality. The "better" the simulation or the more complete and closer to "reality" it is (whatever that means) - the higher the form of conciousness. So would you say that a supercomputer in the process of calculating the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron to 12 digits of accuracy is a higher form of consciousness than we are? After all, it is performing a much be…

No, because it only simulates a very small part of reality. For example it could never estimate the weather for the next 2 hours by looking at a formation of heavy clouds.

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

#119

Post by teraflop » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 6:27 AM UTC

scott_s wrote: post #113

teraflop wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be interested in the Chandy-Lamport snapshot algorithm, which can do what you describe without stopping the system's execution.

I'm aware of such things, and in fact I work on a system that supports something very similar. (Paper to be published by my colleagues in the industry track of VLDB.) But that is a logical snapshot. Through a clever protocol, and assuming some characteristics of your transport, you can save a state across your system that is logically consistent. That is, if you restored to this logical state, the distributed applica…

Strictly speaking you're correct -- a distributed snapshot doesn't capture the state of the system at a single instant. But there's a sense in which the nondeterminism introduced by the snapshot is no worse than the nondeterminism that is intrinsic to a distributed system.

To be more precise: any "possible outcome" of the snapshot was also possible at some point during the original execution. And likewise, any "impossible outcome" of the snapshot was also ruled out at some point in the original. So if viewed from the outside, the fact that you took and restored a snapshot is indistinguishable from the normal situation of having an asynchronous network. It can't cause the system to exhibit any behaviors that weren't otherwise allowable.

(Apologies if I'm just restating what you already know; other readers may not be aware of it. This might be the same property that you're calling "integrity".)

This is reminiscent of one of Scott Aaronson's comments from the original article. If quantum effects are significant in the brain, then it's impossible -- even in principle -- to "perfectly" copy it such that the original and the copy are guaranteed to behave identically. But if the original and the copy are statistically indistinguishable, it amounts to the same thing.

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

#120

Post by hackney » Fri, Jun 03, 2016, 6:33 AM UTC

God that was long. wew I think it all boils down to literally putting too much attention into physical objects. Can it be done? Of course there are actually many examples and none of the resulting objects were healthy to be around, and for obvious reason. Consciousness is meant to explore the universe and the "idea" that suddenly we should step backwards into a robot (my office), after a million years of evolution is absolutely and perfectly ludicrous to even suggest. You want your self driving cars and self cleaning kitchens. A machine can never replace a partner or ally, or child for that matter. Ultimately if you want to create a conscious being it would have to be on the scale of a planet in order to achieve what we are talking about.