Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose

If you were talking about humanoid robots in the physical world, you'd have a point, but in a VR, NPCs exist in much the same way images of people exist on your TV screen. They're not really there. They also exist in the form of data on the computer running the VR, but data can't be conscious either, as it's entirely passive, like words in a book the computer can read from and write to.

>> AI research is not really focused on creating systems that consume resources to do nothing but reproduce.

Yeah, here's a little paper I had to peruse lately for a uni assignment (on neural networks, of all things):

Bio-Benchmarking of Electronic Nose Sensors [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....]

It's a comparison of a Metal Oxide "electronic nose" and the olfactory receptors of a ...fruit fly. Results: the MOx sensors are nowhere near the fly's antennae in discriminatory power. The insect's neural system seems to be extremely fine-tuned to discriminate between an impossibly broad range of odourants, with overlapping signals in odorant space. The MOx sensors are rubbish at discriminating between the different odours for exactly that reason (that the odours blend with each other and leave you with so much noise). The MOx receptors even get damaged if the odorant signal is too strong. The fruit fly? It doesn't care.

Here's a bit from the paper, that's really enlightening:

We also note that the nature of the fly's broad and overlapping sensor fields would seem to require sophisticated and powerful neural processing for classification of odorant signals. There is anatomical, experimental and computational evidence that the insect does have such a system dedicated to olfaction [22], [23]. In contrast, it is known that the chemosensory system of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, has very few interneurons and synapses between sensory and effector units [24], [25]. Given its deficit in neural processing power, we expect that the nematode approaches one-to-one matching between chemoreceptors and odorants, with less reliance on combinatorial processing than the fly. This would imply that nematode chemoreceptors have very tight tuning curves compared with either fly ORs or MOx sensors and may account for the remarkably large number of chemoreceptor genes identified in the C. elegans genome [26]. Whilst replicating the nematode model in an electronic nose may theoretically be feasible, it would present daunting engineering challenges to develop and deploy a very large number of tightly tuned and independent sensors.

So much about "systems that consume resources to do nothing but reproduce".

Oh yeah, AI is too interested in them, yes indeedy-oh. If we could make _one_ measly computer that could find its way around the real world with the purposefulness and accuracy of a mere nematode worm, we would be happy. No, scratch the "we". _I_ would be happy. The mother of AI they'd call me, you know? It'd be Nobel this and Turing award that and oh, here's a honorary readership to add to your collection, ma'am.

I mean you have to be joking, right? We're not interested in reproducing the cognitive abilities of biological systems? That's like, the definition of AI.

> They're not really there.

In what way can you prove you are "really there" in a way that a simulated entity is not? Fundamentally, your matter could very well be a mathematical construct -- see the Mathematical Universe hypothesis, for instance.

> They also exist in the form of data on the computer running the VR, but data can't be conscious either, as it's entirely passive, like words in a book the computer can read from and write to.

Except they're not, because the NPCs respond intelligently to you and their environment, both of which are always changing, so they aren't anything like passive, unchanging data. No one is claiming that data that isn't changing is conscious, but NPCs don't consist of unchanging data. So they could very well be conscious, and you haven't presented an argument why such intelligent responses would not require consciousness, you've merely been asserting it.

And it's not like you don't state that consciousness can't be a computation, because you've said that the game system as a whole might be conscious. So if we agree to assume for the sake of argument that consciousness is a computation, then it will be a particular kind of computation with a certain property, like how sorting algorithms sort their input.

Which means any algorithm that has this property produces consciousness. Furthermore, personality differences and sensory input from their environment would just be parameters to such an algorithm. And if game AI needs this consciousness property to make believably intelligent characters, which is what we've been discussing, then each of the NPCs will run this algorithm with their own personality and environment configurations, and each of them will be conscious.

The best I can infer about your argument is that these computations don't have access to "real" senses, but this point is entirely irrelevant. All AI senses will reduce to a set of numbers anyway, which means even if the "sensory" inputs we hook them up to are entirely simulated, this makes no difference to the consciousness algorithm. Consciousness would be a logical property, so you can't simultaneously accept that the game system could have consciousness, but the individual NPCs would not.

> My consciousness, however, is "really there".

You didn't answer the question. You can be sure your consciousness exists, and you grant existence to other conscious people no doubt, but you seem certain that AI consciousness is not in a game of AI NPCs that are just as intelligent as humans, yet provide no justification for that.

> Or are you saying that the book is somehow conscious of understanding Chinese simply because there's space in it where the man takes notes?

I'm saying that your attempt to define a "locus" where consciousness resides is futile. A CPU is not a person, even though a person can act like a CPU.

You're effectively asking which line in a sorting algorithm actually does the sorting. All of it does the sorting, and all of the program+scratch memory that produces intelligent behaviour, would produce consciousness as well. The CPU is completely incidental. If you compile your program for a completely different architecture, or take a snapshot and restore it on another computer, the consciousness moves with the program, it does not stay with the CPU on which it was originally running.

We haven't met, but I think the same way as the guy who you replied. Being a FL is a bit of oversimplification, but the general idea might be an accurate description of what goes on in your brain.