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Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

scottaaronson.com

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

#121

Post by marlag »

If we managed to model exactly how a rat thinks, behaves and we create a little fury rat robot that runs around being all rat-like, doing all things real rats do to the degree that the robot is accepted by the local rat community, is that not a system that would be considered equal in complexity to a rat?

Do we have enough information to create a rat? I think so. Is that an A.I.? To be rat-like you have to be able to adopt to new environments, learn new things.

Could we also model in the same way a human baby? Ok, that's perhaps a bit too hard. What if we try to create a model of a mongoloid baby. It would still be considered intelligent, right? Is it an A.I.?

Why does a system need conciousness in order to be able to dominate its environment? To me, clonable robotic rats would be as much of an inconvenience as real rats are.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

mh-cx wrote: post #118
Xcelerate wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by vectorpush »

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…

Perhaps the supercomputer does experience a kind of proto-consciousness.

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

#124

Post by mh-cx »

mh-cx wrote: post #118
Xcelerate wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Dreaming is really an interesting case. I'm not sure if I'd agree that it's a weak form of consciousness. It's maybe just some sort of play that the simulator does when it's not used for the outside world. It wildly tries out new things. If you consider that it has a whole physical and cultural universe at it's disposal, it's not really a surprise that this playing creates very bizarre stories sometimes.

By doing so we may check for complex cross connections and gain new insights. Actually I vividly remember waking up from dreams and suddenly realizing that I have a crush on a girl. I didn't really the day before (or was not aware of it) but during dreaming my brain seemed to say "I've checked all information that we have about this specimen and my simulations so far look promising!"

I sometimes also dream of deceased persons. The brain maybe again and again tries to make sense of this deeply unsettling experience and to somehow integrate that unexplainable into the simulation.

(BTW sorry for misspelling consciousness all the time in my post above - it was a little too late here)

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

#125

Post by Strilanc »

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…

That's introspection. It's distinct from the hard problem of consciousness.

Consider that it's not difficult to make computer programs that introspect. A quine is a trivial example. But since people argue over whether computer programs can be conscious, and it's dead obvious that some computer programs introspect (i.e. operate on their own source code or perform diagnostics on their own state), I think it's clear that people have more than just introspection in mind when they say "consciousness".

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

#126

Post by Strilanc »

rspeer wrote: post #112
DonaldFisk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

'Consciousness-causes-collapse' is also known as the 'Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation' [1]. Yes, THAT Von Neumann.

It's got no explanatory power over other interpretations, obviously. But actual physicists demonstrably used squishy terms like "conscious" when talking about their hard science. Embarrassing, but true.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

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

#127

Post by mh-cx »

vectorpush wrote: post #123
Xcelerate wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Perhaps the supercomputer does experience a kind of proto-consciousness.

Right, as far as I understand it that's also close to how Tononi's and Koch's Integrated Information Theory[1] try to explain conscious phenomena. In their parlance the computer would have a low value of phi.

I was surprised that this theory is not even mentioned in the article, even though Aaronson has quite some opinion on it.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory

[2] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

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

#128

Post by di4na »

maxander wrote: post #110

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…

The idea seems quite simple. If you want to be able to tell that you can't decide what the person is doing, you need to lack something about his previous state.

Which means that even if you know everything that happened between the initial state of the universe and now, you still can't predict that person decision. So you would have to ignore some things about the whole initial state of the universe.

Because the only possible things that can explain you not being able to predict that person are : 1) The decision is completely non causal... Which destroy a lot of things, because a non causal decision having impact would destroy the chain of causality. 2) Or! There is something in the initial state of the universe that you can't know. Hence the person acts are unpredictable but still causal.

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

#130

Post by naasking »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #109
freshhawk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Y…

> 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.

I don't see how that constitutes evidence for the conceivability of p-zombies. They're obviously distinguishable from conscious entities with a simple test: ask a TV person a question.

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