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Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

frc.ri.cmu.edu

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Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#51

Post by psyc »

monadai wrote: post #34
erikpukinskis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how many people speak about AGI as if it's even a theoretically plausible thing. It's about as plausible and well substantiated as the Christian God. Which isn't to say it's impossible, but just that it's almost entirely an article of faith. There are a few anecdotes which maybe hint at its possibility. But nothing even approaching a rational explanation of how it might be built. Also, the model of cogni…

At this point, it seems there is no manner of detailing that will convince people that it's plausible. I'm honestly unaware as to why people can't fathom it. It's a systems issue. If you want to resolve a systems issue, you need people who have worked on complex systems. Having done the research myself, having the computational models in front of me, and currently developing iterative capability levels, I can assure…

I just wanted to back you up, because I have a funny feeling you'll be criticized (common for frontierspeople) and I was thinking a lot about this very thing just yesterday. I've been a computer scientist for 25 years, and I've always tried to approach everything on the most basic terms of information, transformation, and IO. I revisit this fundamental way of conceptualizing daily, no matter what problem I'm working on.

Like you, I can't fathom what the objection is to AGI. A human body is complex, but human behavior is simply not that complex in the grand scheme. I have never encountered or thought of any theoretical difficulty with an algorithm mimicking human behavior, or the behavior of a vastly more intelligent sci-fi AI for that matter.

I don't care whether AGI has internal subjective experience. At least, I don't care beyond circular philosophical musing. I certainly don't care as regards the construction of AI, because it has no bearing on the construction of AI for the forseeable future.

AGI is going to sneak up on everybody incrementally, and intelligent people will still be arguing about whether it's possible, even while it happens.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#52

Post by goatlover »

unfunco wrote: post #48
goatlover wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are simulations just as real? Or are they only culturally real? A simulation of the weather only makes sense when you have humans around to interpret the output from displays. Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. It's not even really that. It's a lot of electrons moving about. A bunch of electrons aren't a simplification of the weather. It's only because human culture has computing devices that simulatio…

> It's a lot of electrons moving about The actual weather is also a lot of electrons moving about.

Sure, in part, but we don't consider weather systems to be running simulations.

Although Jaron Lanier wrote a paper on treating a meteor shower as a simulated computer running simulated minds to make a point about consciousness.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#54

Post by bbctol »

fiatjaf wrote: post #21

> The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis. Why?

Depending on your definition of "outside the physical world," it's at best untestable. You can explain consciousness by saying it comes from a massless, noninteracting, odorless, tasteless... etc. but that explanation doesn't really help. So far, lots of other things that were previously explained by non-physical whims of God have had at least partially reductive explanations in science; a lot of people hope that consciousness will yield the same. It still may be possible that consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, but with no way to test, prove, or expand on that, scientists would rather not close the book there.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#55

Post by eternalban »

yarrel wrote: post #53
eternalban wrote: post #13

The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning meaning . Meaning and consciousness are very much related. A simulation is only dealing with form .

Meaning is formless?

I subscribe to the school of thought that asserts that meaning is the product of the act of reading form.

So we consider the space of meaning and each point in that space can map to a multiplicity of (possibly similar or possibly entirely distinct) forms. The mapping function is the sentient actor extracting/projecting meaning from[/to] form.

Example: ဖခင်, predak, پدر, 父亲, father.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#56

Post by simonh »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #39
simonh wrote: post #31

My main problem with the simulated world argument is complexity. Take the Billiard Ball example[0]. This means to accurately simulate the universe you can't really get away with approximations. Under close enough scrutiny discrepancies in the simulation are discernible, and we can scrutinize it at the subatomic level. But to simulate the observable universe, how big would your computer need to be? How slowly would th…

I absolutely agree. But... the quantum mechanical "it doesn't really have a state until you observe it" could make sense as the simulation optimizing by skipping the parts that nobody can see.

Except if that were the case the quantum system could have a determined state, it just doesn't. But the Kochen-Specker theorem[0] proves that it cannot have a determined state. Quite possibly in any universe, though I'm not sure if that's been proven yet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theorem

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#57

Post by goatlover »

bbctol wrote: post #54
fiatjaf wrote: post #21

> The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis. Why?

Depending on your definition of "outside the physical world," it's at best untestable. You can explain consciousness by saying it comes from a massless, noninteracting, odorless, tasteless... etc. but that explanation doesn't really help. So far, lots of other things that were previously explained by non-physical whims of God have had at least partially reductive explanations in science; a lot of people hope that con…

The modern philosophical argument against a scientific explanation of consciousness is that science is an objective, third person pursuit, abstracting away from subjective, first person. If so, you can't hope to explain the subjective in terms of the objective.

There is no need to invoke the spiritual or supernatural to see that consciousness is a problem for science.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#58

Post by hackinthebochs »

goatlover wrote: post #50
hackinthebochs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine lack?

All of it. It has no idea that it's playing a board game, or even what a board game is. That it's even playing Go is a human interpretation of what the machine is doing. Granted, we gave it that interpretation in the form of software instructions. But to the machine, it makes no difference.

Within the context of Go there is no board game, its just sets of possible states and transitions between valid states. Any feature of the game Go is encoded within this state space. The "meaning" of pieces, moves, captures, win, loss, etc are all encoded here. The go playing machine may not capture these concepts explicitly at a high level, but I'm not sure that's an important distinction.

Concepts like board games, people, ancient Chinese culture, etc are all external to Go.

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#59

Post by [deleted] »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #41
XorNot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already run simulators of our universe with vastly lower resolution then reality, and they do tell us useful things about it.

Sure, but that isn't simonh's point. Those simulations aren't very good. There's nobody living in those simulations that thinks that they're alive, let alone that is capable of creating a working computer out of the material in that simulation.

[deleted]

Re: Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)

#60

Post by hackinthebochs »

eternalban wrote: post #47
hackinthebochs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine lack?

Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine require ? (Entire point here was to refute -- in the general case -- the notion that "meaning is critical to decision making".)

A go playing machine certainly has to have some equivalent representation of "piece", "move", "capture", etc. These concepts have meaning within the context of Go as a set of valid board states and transitions. Understanding these fundamental features of the game is required for proper decision making within this context.
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