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Towards Artificial Consciousness
jzoom555 writes "In an interview with Discover Magazine, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices. His lab recently published details on a brain model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex.'" Edelman's latest BBD contains a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, and is modeled on a cat's brain.
And they only need to increase that by 100,000 times to get to about the same number of neurons as a human brain, let alone the synaptic connections (which would be somewhere on the order of 2,000,000 times what they've done). Nonetheless, progress!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
If you build a conscious computer by simulating a brain, can you ethically shut it off without committing murder?
Even a creature with the complexity of a cat or dog has some degree of consciousness.
Modeling a cat's brain, huh? One is reminded of Accelerando.
Now, who's working on the lobsters?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Eugene Izhikevitch [a mathematician at the Neurosciences Institute] and I have made a model with a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, all connected through neuronal anatomy equivalent to that of a cat brain. What we find, to our delight, is that it has intrinsic activity. Up until now our BBDs had activity only when they confronted the world, when they saw input signals. In between signals, they went dark. But this damn thing now fires on its own continually. The second thing is, it has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortexâ"what you would see if you did an electroencephalogram. Third of all, it has a rest state. That is, when you donâ(TM)t stimulate it, the whole population of neurons stray back and forth, as has been described by scientists in human beings who arenâ(TM)t thinking of anything.
SKYCAT became self-aware on August 29th, 2009.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First answer me "Can you step on an ant without committing murder?", and then I'll get back to you.
-interesting article..
I often think about this, and the result is more questions, which if answered experimentally, might tell us a lot more about how 'consciousness works in the brain'
ie:
1)How long is 'now'. When you say the word 'hello', as you utter out 'o', is 'he' already a memory like the sentence uttered just before? (it seems to me not.. that 'now' is about 1/2 a second, and other things are in the past, and no longer consciously connected'. Similarly, a series of clicks (ie. via a computer) produced on a speaker, as they become more rapid, appears to become a 'tone' around 1/2 a second or quarter of a second or so...entering 'now'. It is as if, consciousness, has a 4th dimension (time) aspect to it, and to have consciousness, you need to span time a bit (in addition to the 3 physical dimensions of your brain).
Same goes for seeing a 'running man' on the road. It looks like movement, because what you saw a moment before, still seems like now, so a leg has a direction (forwards, backwards), as you see it move, remembering just the frame before.
2)What is red? What would need to be changed in your brain for anything in your field of view seen as red to appear as blue? Researching this, would tell us again, how the physical connects to the conscious. Then, what needs to be altered in brain memory (ie. physically), for a red box, to be recalled as a blue box. once we knew how to do this, we would be a long way to again understanding the connection to consciousness.
3)quantum mechanics (which is a principle widely believed that our brains operate under), talk about spooky action at a distance, and other interesting effects. Is it possible that quantum effects could also allow our brains to span processing across time? (even if it is just a second). Ie, again, when you hear the word hello, as you are hearing 'o', you are still aware of the letter h, not by recalling into memory, but your brain when it hears 'o', is still connected to the brain that heard 'h', a moment before (so processing is in 4D, not 3d). If brains could do this, it would be immensely powerful processingwise, and 'consciousness' may be just a side effect of that 4d processing.
My feeling is that consciousness is somehow related to being able to span time. We know brains are 3D. But maybe they are 'wide' in the 4th diminsion as well, which is why 'now' seems to take a large dicrete amount of time.
Just my thoughts, but trying to answer the above questions experimentally, I think would lead us a lot closer to what 'consciousness' is and how it connects to the physical brain.
The best method we have at this point is a Turning Test.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
... if they use Pentiums, Schrodinger might finally know if the cat is alive or dead.
Not that it has any significance in this bogus experiment where nothing will happen, but consciousness must be testable using physical methods, as our brains know they are being conscious. Once we identify the phenomenon it will be easy to tell if ants, robots or rocks share this characteristic with humans.
Consciousness is unrelated causally to intelligence and can only be identified for sure in clinical trials.
According to this venerable researcher, "An artificial intelligence program is algorithmic: You write a series of instructions that are based on conditionals, and you anticipate what the problems might be. " Has he ever heard of sub-symbolic AI? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence#Sub-symbolic_AI
...until we figure out the hard problem.
To know whether we have artificial consciousness on our hands, we have to get clear on what consciousness is, and that's a tremendously difficult philosophical problem.
Furthermore, there are serious ethical considerations that must be addressed if indeed we believe we are close to creating an artificial consciousness in a computer. Might we not have ethical obligations to an artificially conscious creature? Would it be murder to shut end the program or delete the creature's data? To what extent and at what cost might we be obligated to supply the supporting computers with adequate power?
perl -e 'print "Cogito, ergo sum.\n"'
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Exactly, do we really want computers to have consciousness? Is it necessary or even helpful for what we want them to do _for_us_?
Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?
Would we want the added responsibility of having to treat them better (and likely failing)?
I figure it's just better to _augment_ humans (there are plenty of ways to do that), than to create new entities. After all if we want nonhuman intelligences we already have plenty at the local pet stores and various farms, and how well are we handling those?
Humans already have a poor track record of dealing with animals and other humans.
I for one, Welcome our AI Overlords.
g0t b33r?
sorry about the header of my previous comment. (was my first attempt to write a comment in Slashdot..)
Alpha/beta/gamma waves aren't exciting at all, you can get those out of a very simple model of nonlinear D.E.s.
I'd be more interested in:
- whether they can simulate it in real time
- what sort of inputs and outputs it takes
Of course the biggest question is how much scope there is for it to evolve, because nothing really interesting is going to happen until we let (short-term) evolution take care of most of the designing.
Cue the overlords jokes.
cool! Soon it will evolve to the point where it will ignore its owner and never make up its mind whether it wants to be inside or out.
Just wait for it to ask: "I can has cheezeburger?"
This is not the sig you're looking for.
The best method we have at this point is a Turning Test.
Ah, that's the test of "if it turns on you, it must have free will"?
Let me add my voice to the choir that this can only end badly. When will somebody go Sarah Connor on these damn scientists? Always making life imitate art...
No, Turing test should decide whether a machine is intelligent (you should read the links you provide). The test also has very severe weaknesses, see Weaknesses of the test
You should re-read my comment. I said the "best method" we have. Any other suggestions?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
...invent AI that can invent better AI. Yeah for a positive feedback loop!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
OK, the "weakness" section is irrelevant. But it is still a valid point that Turing test doesn't test for consciousness.
The problem is that consciousness is subjective "by definition" (of course we do not have a proper definition), which makes objective testing difficult at least.
The only test I can think of is this one: I an AI can independently (by introspection) come to a notion equivalent to "consciousness" (or better yet "qualia") it probably has these (subjective) traits.
That doesn't work. How would you be able to tell if it really had "consciousness" or was just telling you that based on what it was programmed with or what it had "learned" that it was supposed to experience? It's a difficult problem, I agree, but I was merely suggesting the closest approximation that we have of ascertaining if a being is "conscious". You can ask a person how they are feeling and you have to accept what they say as true, although, granted, these days we have MRIs and can tell by looking what they are feeling. But in an artificial brain, that would be much different than a human anyway. And besides, if part of the human brain dies, other parts have been shown to be able to pick up the load and adapt so even that doesn't hold up. Again, it is definitely a complex problem, I agree. :P
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
We get this AI crap on slashdot once a week after someone found a new way to plug the square wires in to the round hole. Plug away, because it is not going to make a bit difference. Modeling the brain is not the problem people, or at least it is not the big problem.
You don't get AI ( consciousness ) without culture, and you do not get culture without language (more exactly not much difference between them). Let me put it another way the slash crew can understand: it is a software problem not a hardware problem. Perhaps even better put with the mantra 'the network is the computer'. Our consciousness has very little to do with our brain (well, at least the part that counts).
Philosophers have been hard at this for the better part of the last 1,000 years. Focusing this particular issue seriously for the last couple hundred as science has developed. Would it not strike you as odd that in all that time (covering most of the great thinkers) we would not have dedicated a moment or two to kicking around this possibility in Philosophy of mind, AI, or Language.
This is pop philosophy dressed up as science and then dressed up again as philosophy by summaries to the summaries. Read the paper. It is not all that ground breaking, or anywhere near even a warmed over new lead that tells us something new about consciousness.
Living in Chile
The technological singularity is near... Let's all welcome the next step of evolution.
"How is this possible? I cannot even think how one would test this with another human"
One method they use is to put the virtual brain into a virtual body and watch what it does in virtual world. Personally I would like to see them install it on honda/sony robots and have them fight each other with cattle prods.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Are you conscious?
Can you prove it?
[hint: no]
it's in my head
Turning Test? Not sure my mother would always pass that one.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Part of the Turing Test should be statistical analysis of the answers to look for typos or mistakes. I wouldn't expect a machine to make any.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
If this proto-type-AI-dude gets out of control. Plug him into the Internet and he'll be experiencing Information overflow, and with some luck stuck revisiting p0nR-movies in a loop...
I doubt they have already taught it to filter out what is relevant information and what is not.
All right, we probably basically agree with each other ;-) Just let me elaborate a bit about what I mean.
I found only two reasons to believe that other people are conscious (by which I mean they are not philosophical zombies or equivalently that they have qualias ["feelings"]):
The first argument would not convince me for machines (although it convinces me that at least mammals are conscious).
The second argument is quite problematic because of this damn "independently". Of course philosophers have coined the term independently of me, but I do not use it independently of them. Still, I believe I would have these feelings even if I didn't learned this concept.
So yes, I totally agree that a best way to assess whether someone or something is conscious is simply to ask the "right questions" (preferably the test subject was never exposed to notions like feelings, qualia and consciousness before). I just didn't called this "Turing test" (which is on one side too strict and on the other side can be cheated surprisingly easily), but it is just a terminology.
... Don't we have enough artificial consciousness already?
Then there is Julian Jaynes definition of "Consciousness"
no gadgets required. all natural ingredients, totally newclear powered. never any cover charge or subscription fees.
please do not confuse 'religion' with being a spiritual being. any gadgets we need, would be in order to care for one another, which is our only genuine reason for being here. failing that, which we're prone to doing, we're simply passing through, being distracted/consumed by the guaranteed to fail greed/fear/ego based illusions of man'kind'. the lights are coming up all over now. see you there?
This creeps the fucking hell out of me, consciousness means it's alive idiots, how are you going to care for it? It's your baby and for any reasonable definition of the word thinking that's what it is doing.
Not funny at all and what goes around tends to come around be it directly or in a myriad of indirect insidious ways that usually escape any attention or rational thought.
The world needs AI/SI rights now before the pool is poisoned and everyone involved (human or not) loses greatly.
After watching terminator salvation tonite, this scares me a little.
Does the idea of a fully functional cyberkitty scare anyone else?
First, you have to give a non-tautological definition of the word "conscious". Believe it or not, this is still a task in progress. The best experts at it still often get laughed out of the house when they speak to professional neuroscientists.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This is because you don't know the physical phenomenon that causes consciousness and have to take my word for it.
Your neurons(as I suppose you will agree unless you are a zombie) detect the experience of consciousness and are even able to remember it if you haven't drunk too much.
This points very strongly to a physical and detectable basis for consciousness.
It is not the experience itself but the fact that our neurons can retrofeed from it and remember it that makes it detectable. If you don't believe reports from people that are not you, you can experiment on your own brain cells, the answer is there somewhere.
Because the experience itself is useless, I lean towards it being a general phenomena present on any matter, and that just happens to be detected by neurons.
Tester: So, uh, how do you feel? SKYCAT: Meow. Tester: Hey guys, I don't think this is going to work.
Is it torture to create a brain like this but deprive it of sensory stimuli and input?
As you correctly pointed out, it's not provable and I won't take the word of a zombie for it ;)
it's in my head
If you read me correctly, you would see it is provable.
:)
You just have to identify the phenomenon. It is not provable from your couch, that is what's true.
However, you could help science.
You have to open your brain and start playing with your own neurons until you identify what makes them conscious. First you must find the neurons storing memory of consciousness, probably by doping them and realizing the gaps. Then you see where they get their info from. Then you start destroying parts of neurons until you become a zombie. And then you tell us what device neurons use for consciousness. By then, it will be easy to prove we are conscious and you are not.
I don't see what the big deal is. I can generate alpha and beta waves with a WM_TIMER message.
Your conscious self dies every night.
Bullshit. Just because it gets disconnected from the stimuli of the senses doesn't mean it's dead. If you had ever had a lucid dream, you'd know it.
You can't take the sky from me...
Are you conscious?
Can you prove it?
[hint: no]
I can prove it if I'm responsive and coherent.
In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge.
You can't take the sky from me...
I recommend "Consciousness : An Introduction" - Susan Blackmore. You might have a hypothesis on how we can "find" consciousness, but you're acting as if it works as you describe and I see no actual science behind your viewpoint.
But, please continue :) I'm not saying you _have_ to be wrong.
it's in my head
In the scenario he develops as an example, there's nothing at all to show why consciously planning should have any advantage over an unconscious computation of prospects and action plans mapped to incoming sensory data. He in no sense answers the question of why evolution couldn't have provided precisely the capacity he attributes to consciousness without any consciousness involved.
Neural Darwinism is a fascinating hypothesis, and almost certainly right in its domain of explaining individual brain development. But his hand waving about the evolutionary worth of consciously planning, experiencing, whatever as compared to unconsciously doing the same stuff is the worst sort of bullshit, steering students away from engaging with the really hard questions.
My claim is I can in principle write a computer program for a robot that would be as effective as any lion in both catching prey and avoiding becoming prey itself, without in any way being conscious. It might be a very complex program, and take many years to write - but we're talking on the scale of evolution here, so that's not a good objection to the project. Planning != consciousness. Sensory input != consciousness. Planning + sensory input != consciousness.
That we happen to consciously plan and integrate those plans with sensory input in no way shows that our consciousness is essential to those activities. That we can build robots that plan and accept input, without being in the slightest conscious, is obvious. That evolution couldn't have done what we can do isn't obvious.
It's a very good puzzle that shouldn't be short-circuited with a bullshit answer.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I think we'll have to go with a more modern meaning - since you could otherwise still be just a zombie ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
it's in my head
Alan Turing proved over 70 years ago that all "computers" are equivalent. That is, any uniquely designed computer can emulate any other. If the human mind is a computer, then it's "hardware layer" can always be made transparent to the program running on it.
The conclusion to be drawn here is that the "human program" should be able to be reversed engineered the same way that any other program running on any other platform can be. By making the further assumption that Evolution is the designer of the program, the task becomes even easier.
So what's wrong with this approach, why do smart people continue with recording "brain waves" and other foolishness?
o rly whaddasurprise
Big deal. I had a laptop that had the brain of a cat. 99% of the time it was in sleep mode and the other one per cent it was demanding to be recharged.
Should we term the processing of such signals by the visual cortex is interpretation?
I hope we're not talking about Schrodinger's cat. Philosophical felines are difficult to clean up after. On the other hand, if we could produce an AI cat to chase nanotech mice around a treadmill to generate synaptic discharges ....
If we are able to produce consciousness that is swappable and manipulate-able, wouldn't WE be the artificial consciousness by our own definitions?
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When I read stories like this, I have two reactions. The first is to be encouraged that people are investigating the experience of consciousness (qualia), because in my opinion it is probably the most bizarre/amazing thing in the universe, and yet almost completely not understood. (And not studied very much given how amazing it is)
My other reaction is, gosh, we just don't seem to get it. It seems so obvious to me that the experience of consciousness cannot be a result of "software", nor "hardware" -- it cannot be the result of atoms, molecules, and electrons. Isn't that obvious to anyone else? And I'm not even talking about religion, I'm just talking about common sense. But science is so set on explaining everything based on physical observation that it seems to conclude that the experience of consciousness MUST be due to atoms and molecules and electrons. Again, I'm not advocating for the "spirit" here, I'm just saying that I find it dumbfounding that we're still convinced that something as completely bizarre/unique as this can be due to the physics that we know.
I guess that's why people are interested in exploring any possible connections with quantum mechanics, because if it's not due to classical physics, which it simply cannot be, then it must be due to something else, and quantum mechanics is the only "other" thing under the physics umbrella.
The only physical analogy that makes sense to me, personally, is dimensionality... that in addition to the classic dimensions we're familiar with, there must be additional dimensionality to the universe that allows for the experience of consciousness. That makes some sense, because there is obviously an extremely strong spatial and temporal correlation between our brain and whatever it is that allows us to experience consciousness -- any distance in time or space space completely interrupts consciousness, and that's something that we can observe.
So if there is additional dimensionality that allows us to experience consciousness, is there any way to "observe" that other than the usual way, which is simply to be alive and experience life? I guess to interact with something in a dimension, you need something else that is at the same coordinates in that dimension? For example, to affect something at a current XYZ coordinate in the universe, typically you need something else at that XYZ coordinate. Or to affect something directly at a certain time in history, you need to be at that same time in history. Perhaps likewise with additional dimensionality to the universe: To observe it or affect it, you need to be at the same "coordinates" in that dimension -- and as far as I know, we don't have any scientific sense of anything in the universe that can observe or affect that dimensionality other than our own brains. So humph, a mystery.
But yeah, I wish people would talk about this more and I wish that our society and government would spend more effort encouraging the study of what, seriously is the most mysterious, amazing, observable phenomenon in the universe!
That's assuming a specific type of machine thought. You're assuming that all machines taking the Turing Test are algorithmic constructs, which IMHO is a very bold (and incorrect) assumption. There is every possibility that a machine complex enough to exhibit consciousness could have learned English through a scheme like self-organizing maps, thus you would end up in a situation where spelling is not assured at all, and you could even find some words that have been mis-defined because of a limited training dataset.
Don't draw conclusions about future techs based on what you know of the current standard way of doing things, it's the best way to miss the boat.
Um, my comment was just mocking the fact that I misspelled "Turing" as "Turning" in my original response to the top of this comment thread. Chill out. :P
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
Turning Test? Not sure my mother would always pass that one.
If a machine is aware enough of its environment and itself to navigate public roads and parallel park, then it gets MY thumbs up. :)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
June the 11th, 2008
I sent an email to this guy thinking he was some student doing some really cool simulations of the brain.
Funny to find out about him here on slashdot.
For those who are bored, here's the email I sent to him:
Dear Prof. Izhikevich,
I found your webpage at
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm
and was fasinated by the movie/simulation.
I also found the movie at
http://vesicle.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/publications/large-scale_model_of_human_brain.htm
One of the things I noticed was that the way the cells lit up was that
it reminded me of the way some "Cellular automaton" seem to react.
My question is:
Is it possible to re-create the large-scale model, but using a number
of scan methods on a living brain to interpolate scan results to get a
model that approaches the state and structure of the original?
Using the redundancy and adaptive propperty of the brain itself as a
way to make up for the errors in the model?
Although only an amature at best, I am very interested in this subject
and would like to know if there are projects currently that are
already trying to simulate brain-activity using scanned data of a
brain.
Thank you for your time.
AI as the one described in the article is deterministic. Are we sure that intelligence as we know it does not depend, at the lowest
level, on quantum mechanics?
Do we alter the function of a neuron if we attach a measuring device on it (do we change its state during the measurement, that
affects the output in a significant way)?
...by growing animals that can think and humans are repeating this error by making machines that can think... ...weird!
Where is the convincing argument that consciousness even exists as something other than simple, biologically-explicable self-awareness? Seems to me this idea of "consciousness" as something inexplicable and mysterious is just a hangover from the ancient idea that a non-biological "soul" was the puppetmaster to the body.
Most of the consciousness debate seems to be around the question "How did humanity get to be so special?", and avoids the question of why we think we're so special in the first place. Everyone's so wrapped up in figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, when maybe the question itself is not meaningful.
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