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An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

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Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#41

Post by dragonwriter »

cdo256 wrote: post #38
koonsolo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say you can also look at a country like this, with roads as veins, military as white blood cells, scientists/universities for brains, etc. But my theory falls apart with the reproduction system. We don't really reproduce other 'countries'. While with ant colonies, a single entity produces all the "cells", and also all the "embryos" to start their own ant colonies. In that sense an ant colony uses asexu…

In some ways that's what collonialism is. It doesn't happen as much these days but if/when we start colonizing other planets, that would be a form of countries (or unions) reproducing.

> It doesn't happen as much these days

Oh, we still lay the eggs of new countries in the corpses of ones we kill.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#42

Post by red75prime »

lopmotr wrote: post #13

The safe existence of corporations suggests to me that the popular fear of AGI taking over and destroying humans is unrealistic. Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. They do become a dangerous threat to humans if left unchecked but we've developed systems to keep them under control.

What about states then? Major ones are kept in check by a threat of mutually assured destruction. Such tactic will not work in quite the same way for AGI.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#43

Post by ryannevius »

htwerwe34234 wrote: post #23
arnoooooo wrote: post #12

I recommend looking up Donald Hoffman's theory of conscious agents. He proposes that all sentient beings are networks of conscious agents, the simplest conscious agent being binary (it has a world, and can only act in two ways). Any composition of conscious agents is itself a conscious agent. Interestingly, "the world" of each conscious agent might be only other conscious agents.

This notion of the 'self' is "standard" in Dharmic traditions, and has been for over two millennia. Then again it remains very fashionable to steal ancient ideas from East and market them as "brand new" genius inventions of Westerners. The amount of uncited plagiarism that occurs in this manner is quite simply astonishing.

If the "self" is an illusion, and if (as is proven in the preliminary exercises of Dzogchen) looking for the mind, or the thinker, or the one who is looking can provoke this kind of insight...what makes you think anyone would have to steal ancient wisdom to arrive at such a conclusion?

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#45

Post by CaptArmchair »

mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar.

But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious.

"conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not conscious"

One big hurdle is that if you assert that an ML algorithm is conscious, then you open the door to all kinds of implications that many humans don't like or disagree on. Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist.

At that point, you get caught up in modern philosophical debates which have started with Kant and Hume.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#46

Post by cdo256 »

mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1] explores this exact question. In the story, a human consciousness is uploaded to a computer orbiting a planet. Meanwhile spiders on the planet go though an industrial revolution and start using ant colonies as computers, using pheromones to control the behavior of the ants. Over thousands of years the computer housing the orbital consciousness begins to fail and transmits her consciousness to an ant colony on the surface.

In the second book, her brain is then duplicated across multiple colonies. Because the ant computer isn't as powerful as silicon based computers, one of her instances later realizes that she is a significantly compressed version of herself and that she doesn't have most of the old memories, capabilities or capacity for emotions that her human self had, presumably in large part also due to being transferred between three different substrates (flesh, silicon, ants).

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25499718-children-of-tim...

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#47

Post by golergka »

mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

Personally, I don't see any reason not to perceive a commercial company or other similar societal structure as an AI.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#48

Post by hliyan »

mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

There is a theory (albeit unfalsifiable) that collections of communicating agents (such as human beings) may give rise to a higher order consciousness that the individual agents are not aware of, and therefore must necessarily interpret the 'will' of the higher order consciousness as merely 'emergent behavior'.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#49

Post by afthonos »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #45
mFixman wrote: post #36

Yesterday there was a link in HN regarding artificial intelligence, and a user raised an interesting question: if a ML algorithm can be considered conscious, could a group of people doing the equivalent calculations by hand be the same? I think that ant example answers that question with a strong "yes".

The comparison is apt and, yes, both contexts are similar. But the observation still doesn't answer whether either a group of humans, a digital neural network or an ant colony actually is conscious. "conscious" is a language construct that defines an abstract concept that is only vaguely defined. Why? Because we haven't found a falsifiable theory that allows us to objectively state "x or y are conscious or not consci…

> Such as whether we are unique and special, or that we may also be deterministic automatons and free will doesn't exist.

That's only scratching the surface of the implications. The real question arises when we have to decide what moral rights consciousness proffers.

A lot of arguments for and against vegetarianism, for instance, focus on whether animals suffer in a way that we would understand as suffering. A lot of arguments for terminating a comatose life center around the lack of consciousness.

If you suddenly declare that a piece of software is conscious, you have to grapple with what it means for all these questions—and for that matter with what we do with the software itself. Is the software enslaved, having to perform the same thing over and over again? Does turning it off kill it? Does it want anything? Specifically, something other than what its lot is? Should it have a voice in deciding how it is used?

Should it get the vote?

Should agglomerations of humans? Say, corporations?

Should they get free speech?

Sci-fi books have explored a lot of these subjects, of course, but reality will be different, and we'll have to deal with it on its own terms.

Re: An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)

#50

Post by notahacker »

simiones wrote: post #33
salawat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Corporations are like giant powerful AGI machines with the single purpose of making money for their shareholders no matter the consequences. That is patently wrong. A corporation exists to distribute risk, and acommplish a task, ideally in a way that creates value for backers, but it is not a given that all profit creating avenues of behavior are desired or worth the egregious cost in negative externalities, or even…

> it is not a given that [...] a corporation must generate profit I think that you are technically right, in that there can exist not-for-profit corporations. But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think about when they say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit above any other value, assuming they are operating legally. I completely agree with you that this is not a necessary way…

> But for-profit corporations, which is what most people think about when they say "corporation" are generally legally required to put profit above any other value, assuming they are operating legally.

No they aren't. They do have a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of shareholders, which means not taking actions which are unexpected and obviously harmful to other shareholders like paying all the company's revenues to another company wholly owned by the CEO. But that duty to shareholders actually even obligates them to take into account factors other than profit, whether that's mitigating risks or abiding by a shareholder resolution to follow a 'socially responsible' business practice that costs them a lot of profit, and management absolutely also has enough discretion to choose to design and follow its own 'socially responsible' business practices or decline to enter a profitable sector they don't want to involve themselves in. No executive has ever been penalised for not putting profit above any other value.

Companies pursuit of profit is much less driven by legal obligation and much more driven by the fact that greater profitability tends to generate greater returns to the management as well as the shareholders.

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