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.

Comments

Neat...

[viyh]

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!

Re:Neat...

[FishTankX]

So, if processing power doubles every 2 years, this should realistically take about 35 years to accomplish. Which means we may have artificial human level intelligences before I retire. Perfect, now I can have a care taker that doesn't get fed up with me when I can't pour his coffee because I have parkinsons.

Re:Neat...

[Anenome]

And yet, that's guaranteed not only to happen at some point in the future, but to continue to grow beyond that for as long as intelligence remains in the universe. Our destiny is to merge with our machines and by that overcome the limitations of the flesh. Humanity as a species will eventually make the jump from matter to energy. Or at least, that's what the novel I'm writing is about :P

Re:Neat...

[gfody]

except if the artificial intelligence is human-level then it will probably still get fed up with you

Re:Neat...

[amigo_concept]

And thus the singularity.

Re:Neat...

[Mystra_x64]

Alternative variant our machines overcome limitations of being well... machines.

Re:Neat...

[daeglin]

This might be actually much faster for the following reasons:

• HW acceleration
• Neural networks are probabilistic and self-organizing, thus errors in the underlying HW are acceptable (much to the contrary to classical computing). It is much easier to build chips if they need not be 100% error-free.
• Once we understand the brain we might be able to wire the logic much more efficiently then it is done in real brains.

Re:Neat...

[JJJK]

might be not as many if they find out what brain "modules" can be replaced by more conservative machinery. Like some parts of the auditive / visual signal processing... or try leaving them out altogether. A simulated brain does not really need all senses, does it? (Probably a good idea to leave out pain and tactile information processing for now)

Re:Neat...

[viyh]

Pain would be good just in case you need to be able to take the thing out or teach it a lesson the hard way! :P

Re:Neat...

[jobsagoodun]

Indeed. Once we create something as intelligent as we are, it'll have the capability to be as self determined and as lazy as we are too.

"Hey Robot! Can you fix me some coffee"

"How about no, puny human. I'm busy looking at the pictures on ebuyer!"

Re:Neat...

[BriggsBU]

It occurred to me while reading this, but do they really need to replicate the same number of neurons as in the human brain? I mean, a lot of the neurons and such in our brain are dedicated to controlling autonomic responses and such that the computer doesn't have.

Though I guess the problem then becomes figuring out how many neurons are needed for consciousness without needing the autonomic control.

Re:Neat...

[TapeCutter]

"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)."

Not as far fetched as it once seemed.

From the link: "At the end of 2006, the Blue Brain project had created a model of the basic functional unit of the brain, the neocortical column. At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations."

Note that some major parts of the model are down at the molecular level. Since then experiments using data from brain scans have shown that the simulated neocortex appears to behave like a real one.

I doubt people (particularly the religious) will accept a computer consciousness. A good number of scientists belive animals are prue programming (nobody home just trainable automata) and there are a shitload of ordinary people out there who still don't belive climate simulations are usefull predictors (scroll down to embedded movie).

Re:Neat...

[viyh]

Indeed. I think as we progress toward closer artificial replication of the human brain, we will learn more and more about how our brains actually work; i.e. what's required for different functionality. At this point, we just don't know enough. Kinda like in genetic study, how they though RNA was useless for 30 or 40 years and DNA was where all the useful information was stored but then it turned out that RNA is as important, if not more important than DNA.

Re:Neat...

[TapeCutter]

"Alternative variant our machines overcome limitations of being well... machines."

Yes, ain't evolution grand....

Re:Neat...

[Filip22012005]

That's what the "sudo" command is for.

Re:Neat...

[TapeCutter]

The brain's functionality is not modular, pain and pleasure are auto-training mechanisims that are a reaction to patterns in the nurons (such as the pattern that appears when one's asre is on fire, pain emerges and makes you slap your own arse ).

Re:Neat...

[Tomfrh]

A good number of scientists belive animals are prue programming (nobody home just trainable automata)

Such as?

Re:Neat...

[ultranova]

So, if processing power doubles every 2 years, this should realistically take about 35 years to accomplish.

Actually, since neural networks are massively parallel, you could probably run it right now if you convinced Google to borrow their hardware.

Which means we may have artificial human level intelligences before I retire. Perfect, now I can have a care taker that doesn't get fed up with me when I can't pour his coffee because I have parkinsons.

Unfortunately, no. That would require us to be able to produce AIs to specification, rather than simply copy human or cat brains. We are nowhere near that.

Re:Neat...

[TheLink]

You could have the same number of neurons as a normal human being but still be permanently unconscious.

We can currently write programs to do stuff to specification (somewhat ;) ).

We already have robotic vacuum cleaners. They are very primitive now. But if we don't have stupid software patents and similar bullshit hindering progress, 35 years of copying improvements and tricks should produce a robot that's pretty darn good at what it's supposed to do.

Re:Neat...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey Robot! Sudo can you fix me some coffee"

Re:Neat...

[heitikender]

mandatory: imagine Beowulf cluster of those.

Re:Neat...

[catman]

"Anonymous Coward is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported."

Re:Neat...

[GarryFre]

I experience the beginnings of artificial intelligence every time I wake up. it's nothing new.

Re:Neat...

[phantomfive]

I doubt people (particularly the religious) will accept a computer consciousness.

There are people who still don't accept animal consciousness, let alone computer consciousness (although they tend to be scientific types. Seriously, how can anyone whose actually played with a dog or ridden a horse believe animals have no consciousness, or especially pain?)

On the other hand, most people DO accept animals pretty well, and some even get emotionally attached to Robots so it would make sense that people would have no trouble with real, conscious Robots if they ever come around. I don't know about an AI that just answers questions on the command line, though. If people can get emotionally attached to it, they will accept it; if they can't, they won't.

Re:Neat...

[jbenwell]

Which means we may have artificial human level intelligences before I retire. Perfect, now I can have a care taker that doesn't get fed up with me when I can't pour his coffee because I have parkinsons.

Unfortunately, no. That would require us to be able to produce AIs to specification, rather than simply copy human or cat brains. We are nowhere near that.

Cats, including artificial cats, would make terrible caregivers. Trust me on this. I've lived with several of the buggers.

Re:Neat...

[carlmenezes]

Thats when you say "sudo make me a coffee"

Re:Neat...

[Lemmy Caution]

I've been vacuuming for over thirty-five years, and I still can't get the dust-bunnies underneath the refrigerator.

Re:Neat...

[rubycodez]

20 billion neurons in cerebral cortoex, so only 20,000 times the one million needed?

Re:Neat...

[viyh]

Most estimates have the human brain at around 100 billion neurons.

Re:Neat...

[jheath314]

The first Copy's first words were: "This is like being buried alive. I've changed my mind. Get me out of here."

Re:Neat...

[speedtux]

That's assuming that their model is even remotely correct. The chances of that are astronomically small.

Re:Neat...

[fractoid]

I've never understood people who arbitrarily say that X nonhuman doesn't have Y human attribute. I've never seen anything remotely approaching justification for or reasoning behind such statements, but the people who make them seem curiously reticent to test them, even if otherwise they've built a career on scientific investigation.

A good example is the blanket statement that "animals don't have souls". Why? Why not? Nope, no justification needed because "well everyone knows".

Another example, one that horrified me when I found out, is that until maybe 15 years ago, surgeons believed (despite all evidence to the contrary) that infant humans were physiologically incapable of feeling pain. And so when infants required surgery, it was done with no anaesthetic:

However, surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

- N.Y. Times

Re:Neat...

[fractoid]

Mandatory: In Soviet Russia, a Beowulf cluster of these imagines YOU!

Re:Neat...

[phantomfive]

Yeah, that's really idiotic. And good point that people who claim such things rarely give any evidence, other than, "they can't talk." Again, I will say, idiots.

Re:Neat...

[TapeCutter]

As far as we can tell humans are animals, both exist and operate via the same physical process, therefore you can say "everyone knows" consiousness when they see it just as easily as you can say "everyone knows" you can feel gravity. Gravity has a good diagnostic test but can be indistinguishable from acceleration, consiousness does not have a good test.

I don't suggest that the majority of scientists reject animal consciousness, However many people have made a proffession out of denying the obvious (Take a look at Evolution, AGW or tabacco), a very small number hit on something such as Eienstien's "Time is not constant". And when they do it's not long before people are saying "yeah, but it was obvious".

Re:Neat...

[bjflanagan]

Computers are currently constructed will never achieve consciousness.

We are conscious of things we see & hear -- things represented in us by patterns of color and sound.

Colors and sounds are not (at present) represented in physical science, however.

_____________

The world as described by natural science has no obvious place for colours, tastes, or smells. Problems with sensory qualities have been philosophically and scientifically troublesome since ancient times, and in modern form at least since Galileo in 1623 identified some sensory qualities as characterizing nothing real in the objects themselves [...]

The qualities of size, figure (or shape), number, and motion are for Galileo the only real properties of objects. All other qualities revealed in sense perception--colours, tastes, odours, sounds, and so on--exist only in the sensitive body, and do not qualify anything in the objects themselves. They are the effects of the primary qualities of things on the senses. Without the living animal sensing such things, these 'secondary' qualities (to use the term introduced by Locke) would not exist.

Much of modern philosophy has devolved from this fateful distinction. While it was undoubtedly helpful to the physical sciences to make the mind into a sort of dustbin into which one could sweep the troublesome sensory qualities, this stratagem created difficulties for later attempt to arrive at some scientific understanding of the mind. In particular, the strategy cannot be reapplied when one goes on to explain sensation and perception. If physics cannot explain secondary qualities, then it seems that any science that can explain secondary qualities must appeal to explanatory principles distinct from those of physics. Thus are born various dualisms. (Clark)

By convention there is color,

By convention sweetness,

By convention bitterness,

But in reality there are atoms and space. (Democritus)

Hence I think that these tastes, odours, colours, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body [...] (Galileo)

For the Rays (of light) to speak properly are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Color. [...] in the Rays they are nothing but their Dispositions to propagate this or that Motion into the Sensorium, and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions under the form of Colors. (Newton)

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow. (Schrodinger)

For instance a star which we perceive. The energy scheme deals with it, describes the passing of radiation thence into the eye, the little light image of it formed at the bottom of the eye, the ensuing photochemical action in the retina, the trains of action potentials traveling along the nerve to the brain, the further electrical disturbance in the brain, the action potentials streaming thence to the muscles of eyeballs and of the pupil, the contraction of them sharpening the light image and placing the best seeing part of the retina under it. The best 'seeing'? That is where the energy scheme forsakes it. It tells us nothing of any 'seeing'. Everything but that. (Sherrington)

The processes on the retina produce excitations which are conducted to the brain in the optic nerves, maybe in the form of electric currents. Even here we are still in the real sphere. But between the physical processes which are released in the terminal organ of the nervous conductors in the central brain and the image which thereupon appears to the perceivi

Re:Neat...

[bjflanagan]

Oops! That should read: "Computers _as_ currently constructed will never achieve consciousness."

We are conscious of things we see & hear -- things represented in us by patterns of color and sound.

Colors and sounds are not (at present) represented in physical science, however.

_____________

The world as described by natural science has no obvious place for colours, tastes, or smells. Problems with sensory qualities have been philosophically and scientifically troublesome since ancient times, and in modern form at least since Galileo in 1623 identified some sensory qualities as characterizing nothing real in the objects themselves [...]

The qualities of size, figure (or shape), number, and motion are for Galileo the only real properties of objects. All other qualities revealed in sense perception--colours, tastes, odours, sounds, and so on--exist only in the sensitive body, and do not qualify anything in the objects themselves. They are the effects of the primary qualities of things on the senses. Without the living animal sensing such things, these 'secondary' qualities (to use the term introduced by Locke) would not exist.

Much of modern philosophy has devolved from this fateful distinction. While it was undoubtedly helpful to the physical sciences to make the mind into a sort of dustbin into which one could sweep the troublesome sensory qualities, this stratagem created difficulties for later attempt to arrive at some scientific understanding of the mind. In particular, the strategy cannot be reapplied when one goes on to explain sensation and perception. If physics cannot explain secondary qualities, then it seems that any science that can explain secondary qualities must appeal to explanatory principles distinct from those of physics. Thus are born various dualisms. (Clark)

By convention there is color,

By convention sweetness,

By convention bitterness,

But in reality there are atoms and space. (Democritus)

Hence I think that these tastes, odours, colours, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body [...] (Galileo)

For the Rays (of light) to speak properly are not colored. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Color. [...] in the Rays they are nothing but their Dispositions to propagate this or that Motion into the Sensorium, and in the Sensorium they are Sensations of those Motions under the form of Colors. (Newton)

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow. (Schrodinger)

For instance a star which we perceive. The energy scheme deals with it, describes the passing of radiation thence into the eye, the little light image of it formed at the bottom of the eye, the ensuing photochemical action in the retina, the trains of action potentials traveling along the nerve to the brain, the further electrical disturbance in the brain, the action potentials streaming thence to the muscles of eyeballs and of the pupil, the contraction of them sharpening the light image and placing the best seeing part of the retina under it. The best 'seeing'? That is where the energy scheme forsakes it. It tells us nothing of any 'seeing'. Everything but that. (Sherrington)

The processes on the retina produce excitations which are conducted to the brain in the optic nerves, maybe in the form of electric currents. Even here we are still in the real sphere. But between the physical processes which are released in the terminal organ of the nervous conductors in the central brain and

Slow takeoff.

[palegray.net]

Modeling a cat's brain, huh? One is reminded of Accelerando.

Now, who's working on the lobsters?

Re:Slow takeoff.

[Heytunk]

A cats brain? Its as if he is deliberately trying to enslave humanity.

Re:Slow takeoff.

[Rakshasa Taisab]

You're link is wrong, surely you meant Accelerando, the most sold ero-manga in Japan?

Re:Slow takeoff.

[gtall]

Yeah, I can see it now. Robokitty walks into the house: Hey MeatBoy, could you get some mouse kibblets for my Lady Cat here? And she likes to be brushed, so get on your hands and knees and start stroking.

Re:Slow takeoff.

[palegray.net]

No.

Uh-oh.

[Lendrick]

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.

Re:Uh-oh.

[weirdcrashingnoises]

But there is hope for those who put their faith in Ceiling Cat

Re:Uh-oh.

[Alphanos]

All your cheeseburgers are belong to us.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[takochan]

-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.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

You sound like a philosopher. But these question have simple answers.

"Now" is determined by the temporal resolution of the specific process. For thought processes, that's on the order of a quarter or half second. For auditory signals, it's less than 100 ms, for visual signals, it's even less, under 50 ms.

"Red" is what your parents told you it is. A name arbitrarily assigned to a specific visual sensation, which is defined by the physical makeup of your eye.

And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons. That doesn't keep people from speculating about it because they think there must be something special, metaphysical about our wetware. No that's not required if you look at how complex the brain is.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[GreenTech11]

It's skynet/skycat trying to lull us into a sense of complacency.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[daeglin]

"Red" is what your parents told you it is. A name arbitrarily assigned to a specific visual sensation, which is defined by the physical makeup of your eye.

Yes, but the fundemantal qeustion is: What is this "visual sensation"? In other words: What is qualia?

Otherwise, I do agree with you, you parent post is mostly gibberish.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[mark-t]

If your brain were somehow rewired so that you see red as blue, then your brain would adapt to the change over time and you would start identifying red colors correctly again after your visual cortex had learned to compensate. I once heard about a psychological experiment which involved a person wearing special goggles all the time that inverted his vision. Within the space of two years, he was claiming to see upright, showing that his visual cortex had been reprogrammed to deal with the new style of input. When he removed them at the conclusion of the experiment, he was just as disoriented as he was when the experiment began, although his cortex still remembered how to deal with the "normal view" and it was not long at all before he was perceiving normally again.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[mark-t]

The visual sensation is simply how our visual cortex interprets the signals that it is supplied. It is normally supplied these signals via the optic nerve, but can obtain them from other parts of the brain as well, as in what happens while dreaming for example.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[CrashandDie]

Disclaimer: I'm a security expert/computer scientist and have no idea what I'm talking about.

My apologies, I probably won't be answering in the right order.

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.

Putting aside the Quantum part of the argument, I would like to focus on the temporal element.

The easiest to compare this with, would be to look at how computers process data. Say when the user types his username in order to log in. The computer processes each single press of the keyboard, and puts it in a buffer until we tell it we've arrived at the end of the input (hitting the enter key, for instance). We don't store every single bit of information in the storage memory of the device, but we do use buffers. Once the computer knows he's gotten all the information, he processes it, by calling the storage unit and comparing the buffer to it.

I think the brain must work in the same kind of way. We don't necessarily store everything we hear in our "memories" part of the brain (storage memory), but it stores it in a buffer. Same goes for reading: even though we read every single individual letter, we just keep a copy of that information in a buffer until we can make sense of it [1]. How we treat that buffer later on is of no real importance. We can discard it without ever looking back, or we can store it for later use.

I also seem to recall (please, experts in this field, stop me if I'm wrong) that one part of the brain did linear calculations where the other part did parallel computations.

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.

This has always been a very interesting topic for me. We use "red" by convention. We don't suddenly pop-up with the word "red", "rouge" or "rood" in our minds because it's the only way we could ever find to express it. It's a convention.

But what says that everyone sees red the same others do? I know that red is a certain colour, because I've always been using that name for that colour, and people agree with me, when I point something out, that red is red. But how can I be sure that the red I see is interpreted by their brains in the exact same manner as mine does? This is extremely subjective. I know that red is interpreted in a certain way because it's a frequency that my eyes respond to, but what if everyone had a slight variation? Is the colour that my brain presents to my consciousness after interpreting the colour that my eyes give it the same, or if I were to swap eyes with someone else, I would see yellow, even though they'd still call it red?

I think those kind of questions might be why people have different tastes. I know I like a certain dress on my fiancée because her eyes stand out like I would never have imagined it. But she only thinks it's so-so. Maybe the underlying cause of my appeal over her apparent unreceptiveness comes from the fact that the colour she sees doesn't exactly match what I see, and as such, doesn't have the same contrast with the colour of eyes or skin.

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

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[19061969]

Quoth: "And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons. That doesn't keep people from speculating about it because they think there must be something special, metaphysical about our wetware. No that's not required if you look at how complex the brain is."

Thanks for that. I keep hearing this as if it was an oft-tested and consensus-supported theory rather than speculation / topic land-grab / brainfart by Dennett.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[ChienAndalu]

I keep hearing this as if it was an oft-tested and consensus-supported theory rather than speculation / topic land-grab / brainfart by Dennett.

I think you mean Penrose rather than Dennett .

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[sploxx]

And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.

Too simple answer
If you throw around 'scientific evidence', better be careful with your wording :-)

And, yes, I also think that Penrose's ideas are a bit off.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[robi5]

Whoever confuses Dennett with Penrose already has a quantum mind.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[anegg]

I'll just comment on your #1. I don't think there is a mysterious "how to span time" capability being demonstrated by our ability to understand the sounds in "now" as the word "now." When I'm typing in Microsoft Word, I type the word "now" one letter at a time. But Microsoft Word checks the spelling of "now,", not n - o - w. Does Microsoft Word "span time" in some deep mysterious fashion that we can't understand? I don't think so... it merely has the capability of assembling discrete inputs into symbols (tokenizing). Our brains (I think obviously) do the same thing. How we tokenize depends both on the hardware (our brain) and the particular programming we receive as our brains mature. In the case of language, we seem to have a built-in language capability (all human languages appear to follow the same deep rules but with surface differences), and we are programmed to operate under the rules of a given language by being exposed to this language along with appropriate teaching examples as we mature. So we recognize the sounds that make up the word "now" as the word "now" because our brains have been trained to associate those sounds when uttered together with the symbol that we represent with the sound "now". If you really want to understand the brain, try to figure out how the symbol "now" is represented in the brain, and how the symbolic processing takes place that makes "now" mean what it means.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[bjflanagan]

And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.

There is nothing else except these [quantum] fields: the whole of the material universe is built of them. (Dyson)

Since matter clearly influences the content of our consciousness, it is natural to assume that the opposite influence also exists, thus demanding the modification of the presently accepted laws of nature which disregard this influence. (Wigner)

In fact, biologists are trying to interpret as much as they can about life in terms of chemistry, and as I already explained, the theory behind chemistry is quantum electrodynamics. (Feynman)

[All] chemical binding is electromagnetic in origin, and so are all phenomena of nerve impulses. (Salam)

The text of this volume claims that the mathematical formulations that have been developed for quantum mechanics and quantum field theory can go a long way toward describing neural processes due to the functional organization of the cerebral cortex. (Pribram)

Among the many biological objects a particularly interesting one is the brain. For any theory to be able to claim itself as a brain theory, it should be able to explain the origin of such fascinating properties as the mechanism for creation and recollection of memories and consciousness.

For many years it was believed that brain function is controlled solely by the classical neuron system which provides the pathway for neural impulses. This is frequently called the neuron doctrine. The most essential one among many facts is the nonlocality of memory function discovered by Pribram [...]

There have been many models based on quantum theories, but many of them are rather philosophically oriented. The article by Burns [...] provides a detailed list of papers on the subject of consciousness, including quantum models. The incorrect perception that the quantum system has only microscopic manifestations considerably confused this subject. As we have seen in preceding sections, manifestation of ordered states is of quantum origin. When we recall that almost all of the macroscopic ordered states are the result of quantum field theory, it seems natural to assume that macroscopic ordered states in biological systems are also created by a similar mechanism. (Umezawa)

We can also find information embodied in conscious experience. The pattern of color patches in a visual field, for example, can be seen as analogous to that of pixels covering a display screen. Intriguingly, it turns out that we find the same information states embodied in conscious experience and in underlying physical processes in the brain. The three-dimensional encoding of color spaces, for example, suggests that the information state in a color experience corresponds directly to an information state in the brain. We might even regard the two states as distinct aspects of a single information state, which is simultaneously embodied in both physical processing and conscious experience. (Chalmers)

The mathematical machinery of quantum mechanics became that of spectral analysis... (Steen)

The physical action only depends on [the spectrum]... (Connes)

It is a most beautiful and awe-inspiring fact that all the fundamental laws of Classical Physics can be understood in terms of one mathematical construct called the Action. It yields the classical equations of motion, and analysis of its invariances leads to quantities conserved in the course of the classical motion. In addition, as Dirac and Feynman have shown, the Action acquires its full importance in Quantum Physics. (Ramond)

Furthermore, and now this is the point, this is the punch line, the symmetries determine the action. This action, this form of the dynamics, is the only one consistent with these symmetries [...] This, I think, is the first time that this has happened in a dynamical theory: that the symmetries of the theory have completely determined the structure of th

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[daeglin]

Wow, long post. But you have not got the parent post right. Of course, brain is a quantum system. The same way as you car travels according to Einsteins special relativity. But I assume that your car moves at speeds where using Newtonian mechanics makes more sense.

The same holds for your brain, there is no evidence so far that its function can not be accurately described solely in the terms of electric potentials (no quantum mechanics involved).

In fact TFA is about modeling the brain as a relatively simple (although very large) electric circuit. Of course consciousness is still a mystery, but this doesn't prove that brain is a quantum system, there is probably something much deeper (information?) in play.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[SUB7IME]

If the argument is that the *chemistry* in the brain is governed by quantum principles, then I'll (trivially) agree. However, chemistry is below the 'level' that is relevant for consciousness. rrohbeck is correct in saying that the evidence doesn't support the notion that quantum mechanics is relevant for that type of neuronal function.

Perhaps more damning, there isn't even theoretical support for that idea. The scale at which quantum is relevant is substantially smaller than the scale at which neurons interact.

Even if you had a machine which could solve equation specifying, say, all of the particles in a water bottle, it wouldn't give you a more precise understanding of that bottle's macro behavior than the more simple formulae that we use for engineering macro objects all the time. Neurons are much like this (though smaller than a water bottle, they're too large to exhibit quantum mechanical behaviors).

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[daeglin]

If your brain were somehow rewired so that you see red as blue, then your brain would adapt to the change over time and you would start identifying red colors correctly again

You brain would adapt in the sense that you would start to associate (your subjective) blue with things like fruits, warmth, aggression (and other things not-rewired people do associate red color). Yes, you would adapt and start responding to colors correctly.

But would you see the red as red or blue? And what does it mean to "see red as red" anyway? It is not that easy as you might think, see qualia. These are "feelings" in their "raw form". Where do they arise from? People like D. Dennet argue they are just "illusions". But what does "illusion" means then (renaming the problem doesn't solve it). I can feel them [qualias], therefore I want to know what they are, be they called feelings, qualia or illusions.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[Boronx]

"And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons. That doesn't keep people from speculating about it because they think there must be something special, metaphysical about our wetware. No that's not required if you look at how complex the brain is."

The human eye can see a single photon. Are you saying that's not a quantum effect? It's quite absurd to think that one of the most superb amplifiers in the world is not affected by quantum scale events

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

Firstly, the human eye can not see a single photon, it needs on the order of 10 to register light. If we could see single photons we would see quantum noise, which we don't. Some animals are hypothesized to see single photons though.
However, you can use simpler non-quantum theories to explain how the rods and cones work. That means that the quantum effects that they are of course based upon are irrelevant. In particular, any superpositions are destroyed in extremely short time frames at the size and temperature we're dealing with here.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

That article confirmed my suspicion that a philosopher's main job is making mountains out of molehills in the absence of knowledge - again (like the post I responded to.)

Visual sensation is what's going on in the brain. We don't know enough to speculate about it reasonably. End of story.
And if you want to make unreasonable speculations go ahead but leave me alone - I prefer science.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[smoker2]

Have you ever looked at a clock and it takes seemingly forever for the first second to pass then suddenly it runs at normal speed ? "Now" is a concept that can be stretched apparently. A similar thing can occur in dreams. If you wake up but are still half asleep, and drift back into a dream, you can "experience" hours of action in the dream, but when you open your eyes again, barely 2 minutes have passed.
What causes this ?

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

Everybody knows that quantum mechanics is the basis of all chemistry.
I said "play a role." You can explain neuronal behavior with classic chemistry since they are macroscopic systems working at room temperature. Any quantum effects are spread out by decoherence over the size of the neuron (or its organelles) and destroyed by thermal noise so quickly that they are completely irrelevant on the timescales a neuron is working at.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[smoker2]

You realise that science starts from having ideas, reasonable or not ? Only by testing those ideas do you discover the truth. Your attitude seems to be, if you don't know something, then give up. So we should give up on speculation and therefore science ? Was Einstein able to test all his hypotheses ? Some of the stuff he "dreamed up" wasn't verified until well after his death. He should have stuck to the patent office I guess.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

I didn't say that. There are plenty of researchers looking into how the brain and neurons works. But as long as they don't have more results it's futile to speculate, unless you want to venture into metaphysics or sci-fi. That's OK, but it's not science.
Einstein started off with very reasonable ideas based on the science of the day. He did not fumble in the dark, he was just an independent thinker who refused to bow to the conventional wisdom of physicists at the time.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[rrohbeck]

Of course the "temporal resolution" of thoughts depends on what else is going on in the brain. It can be several seconds if we're distracted.
And as to what dreams deposit in our memories I don't even want to speculate. That's too close to theology for my taste.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[ShakaUVM]

>>And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.

There's also no scientific explanations that explain subjective experience at all. Which is why Penrose theorized the idea of quantum tubercules. Essentially, there's two possibilities for explaining consciousness, neither one of which are very palatable:
1) There's something special about the human brain, and silicon chips can never be conscious. Though they might be able to accurately simulate a human brain, they are not actually conscious - they are just running a physics simulator. But what about neurons makes them so privileged as being the only things in the universe to support subjective experience? It's deeply suspicious.

Or:

2) There's nothing special about the human brain, and any physical process that has some (currently not understood) criteria causes subjective experience to arise. Some people think that 60Hz brain waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness, but that implies panpyschicism - everything meeting the basic requirements are conscious. 60Hz waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness? Then our entire power system has subjective experiences, though it probably wouldn't be very interesting. Chalmers thinks that all information processing systems have subjective experience... so your CPU and your thermostat have an internal life to them. Which is also a bizarre, counterintuitive notion.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[Bigjeff5]

Aye, Einstein wasn't making pie in the sky "Hey what if X?" statements, he was working from verifieable evidence and extrapolating. I.e. if we know A, B, and C are true, the X is plausible; but with D, E, and F thrown in X is downright probable. With further analysis (much of which I'm sure was mental gymnastics that he did not record) a framework was exposed within which virtually all of modern physics fits into.

The main point being, his theory was verifyable because the physics at the time fit into his framework quite neatly. The stuff that was not yet verifyable were simply extrapolations, predictions of what they would find as long as his theories held true.

That's a hell of a lot different than asking a dumb question like "I wonder if Red isn't really Red?". It's like an idiot trying to play at being smart.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[fractoid]

I can't remember what it's called but the thing about looking at a clock and it seeming to pause for a while before starting is a known phenomenon. Something to do with the fact that your brain has no visual knowledge of previous ticks, but that the whole pipeline from light hitting eyes to recognition of an event in your environment is around half a second, so you end up with up to a phantom half-second pause where you haven't perceived the last tick.

That, or our virtual reality's heuristics for starting and stopping silly environmental things like clocks can be up to half a second slow. I've never walked into a room and seen a glowing torch in the room suddenly burst into flame as the particle system starts, though...

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[PiSkyHi]

Quantum logic is basically our operational logic within the realm of uncertainty.

A neural network has properties of quantum logic already. This is not to say that there is necessarily a processing function of the brain dependent on physical quantum processes.

Philosophically, though, I think the question is, do our classical physics exist separately to the quantum physical realm ? We may do experiments within the classical realm and show that they are separate, since consistency is maintained without a quantum explanation. It is still possible though that our classical certainty is a by-product of relative certainty between observer and observed, and that a quantum logic explanation can be found for the consistency of a classical experiment. This would make the quantum explanation just as useful and in cases where quantum logical behaviours are being mimicked, like in a human brain, it is also possible that at least some of it makes use of the quantum physical foundation to operate in an observably similar way.

It may also be unprovable either way. Not much use really, but we do need to address this belief that quantum processes are limited to the realm beyond the classical.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[daeglin]

Visual sensation is what's going on in the brain. We don't know enough to speculate about it reasonably. End of story.

The information that it happens in the brain is not that much useful to understand it. It is a very interesting (and very old) problem we should try to solve. If we do not know enough we should try to learn more.

And if you want to make unreasonable speculations go ahead but leave me alone - I prefer science.

First, we should try to define the problem. I believe that qualia (although somebody would call this phenomenon differently) is key to defining consciousness. Once we have a correct definition we can start what you call "science". For me trying to define a problem is part of science. Don't get too distracted by the fact that many philosophers speak crap.

This is not end of story. We are at the very beginning.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[SpinyNorman]

Your post is also gibberish.

1) You're confusing qualia (plural) and quale (singular). This isn't just pedantry since the answer to the generic "what are qualia" is qualitatively different to "what is the xxx quale" (or better "explain the zzz quale"). If your question really is what are qualia then the WikiPedia answers that question.

2) A deeper misunderstanding is that you seem to think that all visual qualia can be lumped together ("what is this visual sensation") whereas really they (the various visual qualia) need to be explained on a case by case basis.

The answer to the well formulated question "what is the redness/color quale" or in plain english "why is the subjective experience of color the way it is" is quite simple, and can be proved via experiment:

a) Color is a uniform surface attribute of an object, hence the subjective experience is of a quality of the perceived object that is the same everywhere on it's surface. Contrast this, say, to the quale of a sound which is time-domain feature vs a surface one and hence has a completely different subjective experience/quale, or to texture which is also a surface attribute but a non-uniform one, etc, etc.

b) While we detect color via the r/g/b color cones in the eyes, which have an absolute relationship to the quality (i.e. wavelengths of light) being sensed, the brain itself does not know that (it knows nothing). The color of an object is therefore just a sensory pattern associated with it, and associated with other objects of the same color. The experience of color therefore is necessarily a comparative one, not an absolute one. The quale of redness is that of a surface attribute that recalls the experience of other objects of the same/similar color, ditto for blue or any other color. Sounds non-intuitive (athough maybe you logically accept it)? Experiments have shown that if you make someone wear color goggles so that everything (initially...) seems uniformly tinted, after a while (I forget - a week or two, perhaps) the normal sensation of color vision comes back - the color of things look normal to you despite the fact that you are wearing color-tinted goggles!! The reason is because of the necessarily comparative vs absolute nature of color in the brain.

So that's the redness quale - we analytically expect the subjective experience to be a uniform surface attribute that recalls other similarly colored objects, and so it is. Redness is just the shared surface quality of all red objects. That subjective experience of "leaf green" when you look at the greed LED on your router isn't an absolute thing - it's a recall of leaves and other similarly colored objects.

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[bjflanagan]

A classical field is just a special large-scale manifestation of a quantum field. (Dyson)

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[bjflanagan]

See: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

American Journal of Physics

May 2002, Volume 70, Issue 5, pp. 558-559

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=AJPIAS000070000005000558000002&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Re:Consciousness - right track / wrong track

[bjflanagan]

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red must have some color; it is, so to speak, surrounded by color-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. (Wittgenstein)

The characteristic of an n-dimensional manifold is that each of the elements composing it (in our examples, single points, conditions of a gas, colors, tones) may be specified by the giving of n quantities, the "co-ordinates," which are continuous functions within the manifold. (Weyl)

[So] few and far between are the occasions for forming notions whose specializations make up a continuous manifold, that the only simple notions whose specializations form a multiply extended manifold are the positions of perceived objects and colors. (Riemann)

When we're asked "What do 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?" we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colors,--but that's all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further. (Wittgenstein)

Thus "this is red," "this is earlier than that," are atomic propositions. (Russell & Whitehead)

Mathematics has introduced the name isomorphic representation for the relation which according to Helmholtz exists between objects and their signs. I should like to carry out the precise explanation of this notion between the points of the projective plane and the color qualities [...] the projective plane and the color continuum are isomorphic with one another. Every theorem which is correct in the one system S1 is transferred unchanged to the other S2. A science can never determine its subject matter except up to an isomorphic representation. The idea of isomorphism indicates the self-understood, insurmountable barrier of knowledge. It follows that toward the "nature" of its objects science maintains complete indifference. This for example what distinguishes the colors from the points of the projective plane one can only know in immediate alive intuition [...] (Weyl)

[It] became possible to affirm that projective geometry is indeed logically prior to Euclidean geometry and that the latter can be built up as a special case. Both Klein and Arthur Cayley showed that the basic non-Euclidean geometries developed by Lobachevsky and Bolyai and the elliptic non-Euclidean geometry created by Riemann can also be derived as special cases of projective geometry. No wonder that Cayley exclaimed, "Projective geometry is all geometry."

The principle of duality in projective geometry states that we can interchange point and line in a theorem about figures lying in one plane and obtain a meaningful statement. Moreover, the new or dual statement will itself be a theorem--that is, it can be proven. On the basis of what has been presented here we cannot see why this must always be the case for the dual statement. However, it is possible to show by one proof that every rephrasing of a theorem of projective geometry in accordance with the principle of duality must be a theorem. This principle is a remarkable characteristic of projective geometry. It reveals the symmetry in the roles that point and line play in the structure of that geometry. (Kline)

While a proper understanding of M-theory still eludes us, much is now known about it. In particular the various geometric results that have emerged from string theory become related in interesting but mysterious 'dualities' whose real meaning has yet to be discovered. (Atiya)

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[viyh]

The best method we have at this point is a Turning Test.

Now...

[johanwanderer]

... if they use Pentiums, Schrodinger might finally know if the cat is alive or dead.

Re: Now...

[mantissa128]

TFA doesn't describe the brand, but it does say: "...it is run on a Beowulf cluster of 60 3GHz processors with 1.5 GB of RAM each."

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:can you shut it off?

[timmarhy]

actually i think a dog has just as high level of consciousness as a person. they know their name, they have emotions and they feel happiness and pain. they also consider beings outside of themselfs. really they just lack the high level reasoning and opposible thumbs.

on the topic of shutting off an AI, i think pulling the plug would be no different to putting them into a coma as long as all the details of the consiousness are saved first.

Re:can you shut it off?

[Ethanol-fueled]

a dog has just as high level of consciousness as a person

Dogs are widely believed to have the emotional maturity of a 2 year old human(or a 3 year old depending on the source). You can look into a dog's eyes and know how they're feeling.

Cats are a little different, only extreme feelings can be seen in their eyes. But their body language is always a reliable indicator of how they feel.

As far as AI goes, the validity of computers as life forms has been successfully argued up the wazoo, but I will always stubbornly believe that computers will never have true individual consciousness as biological organisms do.

Olivier Lartillot

[ollilartinen]

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

Re:Olivier Lartillot

[EdZ]

More worryingly, he lambasts AI research, then proceeds to describe what is simply a Self Learning Neural Network as if it were something new and revolutionary.

Re:Olivier Lartillot

[daeglin]

The difference is that he is studying a special case of a neural network. namely the best model of mammalian brain (more specificaly cortex and thalamus) we can put together with the current knowledge.

Re:can you shut it off?

[timmarhy]

yep i'd believe the emotional maturity of a 3yo, it's one reason i can't stand fuckheads who are cruel to animals

We can't know that it's consciousness...

[HadouKen24]

...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?

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[iamacat]

Hmm, we routinely "shut down" beings that we are pretty sure are conscious, if not very intelligent. Been to McDonald lately? And we certainly limit the amount of money to continue "supplying power" to human brains that have faulty transformers. Generally this is limited by the amount of money in the brain's checking account. Finally, we have no problem turning off computers who beat us at chess or algebra.

So I suspect that we'll have no problem shipping intelligent and possibly conscious computers to toxic dumps in third world countries. As long as they are not too cute, that is.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[HadouKen24]

Hmm, we routinely "shut down" beings that we are pretty sure are conscious, if not very intelligent. Been to McDonald lately?

Eating meat is not necessarily as ethically unproblematic as most of us would like. Ethical objections to consuming animals go back as far as Pythagoras in the West, and possibly much further in the East. The arguments for minimizing, if not eliminating, meat consumption have not gotten weaker with time. If anything, the biological discoveries showing the profound similarities between humans and other animals provide a great of justification for ethical vegetarianism.

Furthermore, we usually don't treat all animals alike. More intelligent animals, like the great apes, dolphins, and elephants, tend to garner much more respect. Should such a creature through a fluke gain human-level intelligence, I don't think the ethical implications are at all obscure; we should treat them with the same respect we give to other humans. We would at least have to set out guidelines as to how intelligent or sentient an artificial consciousness would have to be to deserve better treatment.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[digitalchinky]

The short story: Biological brains die when they are shut down, currently this lasts forever. A snapshot of an electronic brain can be made at any moment in time, it can then be shut down and later restarted in exactly the same state as when it was shut down. This would mean the 'intelligent' component can be resurrected with no loss of whatever made it 'it' in the first place.

Not only that, any number of copies of this intelligence could be made at any point along its lifespan, each of these could be fed in to a different host and started up. It'd be interesting to see if they take divergent pathways from the original, but that's another topic. All of these copies would be just as alive as the original.

Would they die when they are switched off? I guess you could say yes, but I'd say they'd have no knowledge of this other than the impending circumstances of the action. They may not be happy about it either, but meh. They can be turned on again.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[MichaelSmith]

Conciousness? I don't believe it exists. Its just an excuse to put an artificial barrier between us and other animals.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[superwiz]

Your premise is wrong. The barrier between us and other animals is not artificial. We are not like other animals. If you want a simple way to convince yourself that animals are not self-aware, put them in front of a mirror.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[MichaelSmith]

Your premise is wrong. The barrier between us and other animals is not artificial. We are not like other animals. If you want a simple way to convince yourself that animals are not self-aware, put them in front of a mirror.

I don't know what the animal thinks when put in front of the mirror, any more than I know what you think. We may look for expected behaviour like testing to see if the animal touches a spot painted on its face but such tests are loaded with assumptions which have nothing to do with conciousness.

Conciousness is basically an invention to allow us to kill animals and satisfy our conscience.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[anegg]

So answer the question will you? "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[anegg]

I'm pretty sure consciousness exists. And I'm pretty sure that a dog or cat has more consciousness than a butterfly or an ant. And I'm pretty sure that I have more consciousness than a dog or a cat. The problem that you may want to point out is that we who have more consciousness than other beings use that difference to justify why we are in charge, and why we can terminate lesser consciousness beings without penalty (and even eat the meat machine that supported the consciousness of those beings if it is tasty to us). So when we create electronic consciousness, and when electronics prove to be a bigger/faster/more robust container of consciousness than our own meat machines - should we be surprised when those electronic consciousness beings exercise their domain over all lesser consciousness beings, including us?

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[the_humeister]

Did you ever watch "The Prestige"? In the end, the one guy explains how he gets duplicated: one dropping into a tank of water and drowning, and the other teleporting and living and he didn't know which one he'd be during each performance.

So, back to your post, I would argue that each copy of an intelligence made, once it has been made and activated ends up being different than the original.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[Ed_1024]

"A snapshot of an electronic brain can be made at any moment in time, it can then be shut down and later restarted in exactly the same state as when it was shut down. This would mean the 'intelligent' component can be resurrected with no loss of whatever made it 'it' in the first place."

Tell that to HAL...

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[superwiz]

Conciousness is basically an invention to allow us to kill animals and satisfy our conscience.

Well, there is no doubt that consciousness is a real rather than made-up concept. Your attribution of motives is quite loaded. And not only is it not causal, but your hypothesis is not even correlated with your conclusion. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and perform animal experiments on daily basis. There are people who feel bad about animal pain and try to alleviate the suffering. There are people who are in both of those categories (I've known plenty of scientists who work on animals and yet have domestic pets). You are really making a moral judgment and trying to doctor the evidence to justify it. You are not presenting evidence and then drawing conclusion out of it. And you are really trying to play with words here. You are using the phase "don't know what animal thinks", but "thinking" is very difficult to define without defining consciousness. And keep in mind, just because you don't know something, it doesn't mean that it is not known. Your ignorance is not evidence.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[Zeroko]

Aside from the inability even in principle (i.e. even allowing for magic) to perform perfect quantum-level copying (assuming the theory of everything upholds that aspect of quantum theory) & the possible irrelevancy thereof if consciousness is classical, if someone were to copy me while I was unconscious & then destroy the original, I would argue that I would experience waking up in the copied body. Maybe a bit disorienting if it was located somewhere else, but nothing more. Identity of indiscernibles & such.

But if you try it when I am awake, I hope the copy returns the favor.

Re:We can't know that it's consciousness...

[matt20102]

Another reason that arguments against eating meat have gotten weaker is that the meat we eat resembles the animals from which it is taken less and less. The closest we get to seeing a meat animal in the west is a whole chicken or turkey in the roaster. Steak doesn't seem like an animal at all and hot dogs don't even seem like meat! People will have a greater respect for the meat they eat if they can see the animals from which it is taken. As a result, people will begin to care about industrial ranching and poultry practices and about the suffering of animals for cheap food.

(no, I'm not a vegetarian; I've been known to roast whole pigs and just last night caught and filleted a half-dozen fish.)

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[rrohbeck]

perl -e 'print "Cogito, ergo sum.\n"'

Why create a conscious AI?

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[benjamindees]

Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?

McDonald's employees have consciousness. How do we treat them?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Zerth]

It is only slavery if we force the AI to perform against its will. If its will is to enjoy and prefer to care for the elderly, like the little robot Ford Prefect makes deliriously happy to help him with a bit of wire, then allowing it to do what makes it happy is not slavery. Indeed, preventing it from doing what it enjoys could be slavery.

If you consider designing it to enjoy the task we set for it to be a more insidious slavery, consider the base programming that causes us to prefer a diet that is unhealthy when not in a survival situation, or the internal modelling that shifts between self-preservation and self-sacrifice for the most irrational reasons. Is that not a form of enslavement we have yet to throw off?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Nathrael]

Of course we - Slashdotters - do. We could finally get girlfriends (that is, when they program these artificial consciousnesses to like tech-savvy, Star Wars/Trek/whatever-loving, DnD-playing computer geeks, which might be a quite difficult task).

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[TapeCutter]

"If its will is to enjoy and prefer to care for the elderly"

Kepp your machine away from me, I have a deal with my adult daughter that when the time comes she can put me in a home provided it has a cute nurse doing the sponge baths.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[lobiusmoop]

I am convinced all AI philosophy work is documented by Australians,as every sentence ends in a question mark rather than a full-stop.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Enokcc]

I think the goal here isn't to give computers consciousness, it is about simulating consciusness inside a computational model. Computer is still a tool here.

After we have a working model of the device, we can build the actual physical device, the brain, which does not "compute" its actions, it just works. Compare this to an electric motor, which we first modeled using a computer. The actual motor just works as we intended given that the simulated model was accurate enough.

Building an artificial synapses network might be an another matter though.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[wisty]

Cue open source fembot joke.

What was that line by Linus, about the only instinctive user interface?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[sploxx]

I generally agree with your post, but I still think that one needs to better separate concepts in the discussion here.

After we have a working model of the device, we can build the actual physical device, the brain, which does not "compute" its actions, it just works.

Well, one needs do define 'compute'. A computer also just works and is a man made machine. Put the supercomputer into a black box and you have your 'brain that just works'.

I do not think that there is any qualitative difference between 'computing' something and having a machine that 'just works'. For example, in the embedded world, you would say that a PID controller is a PID controller, regardless of whether it is implemented analogue (doing real integrations in a capacitor) or digital (approximating the integration with digital counts, i.e. a 'simulation' of a real capacitor).

That said, I think the point of such simulations can only be the validation of functional models of the brain. We already have a way of 'producing' conscious beings, which is effective enough (given the overpopulation concerns). It is also a highly energy efficient way of implementing the 'conscious machine'.

Given that artificial consciousness is possible at all:

Implementing something like consciousness on a large supercomputer would give a lot of insights into ourselves.

Implementing consciousness in a box that consumes less power and takes less space than the human brain would be more of a serious technological breakthrough than a scientific advance.

Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here... :-)

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Drakkenmensch]

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.

Why create an artificial being we would treat as animals and slaves when we can create the next evolutionary step of humans who will do the same to us instead?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[somersault]

If you consider designing it to enjoy the task we set for it to be a more insidious slavery, consider the base programming that causes us to prefer a diet that is unhealthy when not in a survival situation, or the internal modelling that shifts between self-preservation and self-sacrifice for the most irrational reasons. Is that not a form of enslavement we have yet to throw off?

The point would be that the desire to store body fat and to protect your family/clan are down to natural selection rather than a conscious process, so you can't use it as an excuse - unless you believe in some creator or guide for evolution, but even then it's a poor excuse when trying to justify your own actions.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[maxume]

I'm usually quite polite to them. On the other hand, I don't go there very often.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

McDonalds employees don't have a chance to become omnipotent and return all the "favors" that humanity did them. With AI, I wouldn't be so sure. /mumbles something about welcoming overlords etc...

Seriously though, it would IMHO be a good thing if humanity would be shown a mirror this way, so humans can see just how big monsters they really are. And then perhaps do something about it. Somehow, I don't see this happening though. /pessimism.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[simplerThanPossible]

Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?

There's a great cartoon online illustrating this, but I can never find it.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[TaoPhoenix]

Yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Roboto

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[dov_0]

Exactly, do we really want computers to have consciousness?

I think the question is more like CAN we give computers consciousness? By what mechanism are we even 'aware' at all? Is it possible to imbue a machine with life, or only the appearance of it?

The amazing thing is that we could theoretically spend our days ruled by a set of algorithms (or evolutionary behaviour and thought adaptations) and never actually be conscious of anything, but instead we are aware of our touch, taste, smell, hearing and we can weigh our own thoughts instead of just reacting dumbly to stimulus (input data) like a computer. This, in my view, is the most poignant evidence we have that we exist as more than just completely physical ambling lumps of meat.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Nebulo]

In this case, we would explicitly be placing these attributes into this being's personality for our own convenience. On the other hand, for whatever reason, we *evolved* to prefer the diet that we do - no one (apparently) guided our evolutionary path so that we would prefer to eat a particular diet.

Ergo, there's a real difference here. Is it ethical to engineer the consciousness of another being to serve our needs?

Nebulo

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[cduffy]

How is qualia evidence of anything at all, other than an interesting emergent behavior deriving from the way more recently-evolved high-level facilities interact with more longstanding ones?

It's quite straightforward to track down pathways in the brain responsible for making individual aspects of our perceptions available to the conscious mind -- disrupt the portions responsible for motion and you see the world as a series of stop-gap images, with no idea how fast anything moves; disrupt vision from reaching that portion at all and you can see nothing consciously, but can still grab a pencil someone holds in front of you or navigate a room full of obstructions -- with no idea how you did either of those things.

V.S. Ramachandran's "Phantoms in the Brain" is interesting reading, as is (from a more abstract perspective) Douglas Hofstader's Godel, Escher, Bach.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Bones3D_mac]

Well, also, with consciousness, you'd have to consider the possibility of the system needlessly wandering off a given task and going off into s random tangent, relative to the information it's working on. And, depending on how fast this system is, there is the question of the system getting "bored" between idle moments. From the perspective of a computer, the way a conscious entity experiences "time" while running in that environment may be vastly distorted from our own experiences. While we tend to experience days as "getting shorter" the more we age, a computer-based entity might well experience every second exactly the same, no matter how long of an uptime it has acquired. The difference alone might even skew whatever "personality" it may have into directions we might not expect. (Though, I'd probably go with "irritable". Then again, I'm speaking entirely as a human.)

While true, conscious AI might make for a fun toy, simply watching for patterns in data and drawing new conclusions based on it should be enough by itself.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Jaazaniah]

Very true. We had a hard enough time with rights for a people of color, and then women after that, neither gap has really gone away even today. Can you imagine the problems with a created sentience and many who would cry rights of ownership over sentience?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[carlmenezes]

Speaking of DnD playing, AI characters with a consciousness in an always on MMORPG would add a huge level of depth to the game. Heck, within an MMORPG, you could experiment with all types of consciousness - from completely good to completely evil. It would be fascinating to watch them develop. Imagine say, going on one of the highest level WoW quests with a conscious AI that was completely good against another AI - the arch nemesis. Wouldn't it be an amazing quest if the character's personality actually made an impression on you one way or the other?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Nefarious Wheel]

Determining whether machines can think is akin to determining whether submarines can swim.

It's all just semantics until one of our desktops demands the vote.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Walkingshark]

Remember, computers are currently our tools. If we give them consciousness, would we then be treating them as slaves?

Is it wrong to enslave something if you can empirically prove that it consents and even finds joy in serving (say, by inspecting its source code)? The purpose behind our moral rejection of slavery is that we know that in general people do not wish to be enslaved. This reasoning doesn't automatically extend to an artificial being who has been created to actively find joy and pleasure in serving humans.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[dov_0]

It's quite straightforward to track down pathways in the brain responsible for making individual aspects of our perceptions available to the conscious mind

Well, I'm not sure that any neurologist would call the brain straight-forward, but after a great amount of research these areas of the brain have been located and can be numbed, but still the conscious mind is there as a separate thing. It would seem to me that qualia is WHAT we are aware of. I am talking of the fact that we ARE aware.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[dpilot]

Reminds me of the "sentient meat animal" in "The Restaraunt At the End of the Universe." It was bred to want to be eaten, and told you so when brought out to your table as you placed your order. It even suggested its best parts, and how they should be cooked.

The difference between "insidious slavery" and our "base programming" is that one is directed by a selfish individual with a lower consideration of the programm-ee, and the other is at least undirected. Leap of Faith: If you're presuming to play god by directing evolution, at least be a "good" one.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[fractoid]

Yeah, until Yogg-saron escapes via some poorly executed hacking attempt and takes up residence in the Internet at large. Ai, ai, f'thangan!

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[fractoid]

Of course, in any case, ethics issues remain.. "may you switch 'it' off..." etc. - which I feel are much too complicated to warrant cramming any of my armchair philosophy thoughts in here... :-)

One thing I very seldom see mentioned here is that 'switching off' a conscious entity is not intrinsically a bad thing. We do it regularly to humans with general anaesthetics during surgery. The ethical dilemma comes when it's not possible to switch the entity back on in a similar state - for example, completely deactivating a human generally kills them. With a sentient virtual entity, assuming their state is persisted, they may be deactivated without any harm.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[fractoid]

I think if an entity is conscious, then the 'enslave' action becomes the act of forcing it (by design) to 'enjoy' its role as servitor. It's just like helping a human build an addiction to a drug that you can supply, and then withholding the drug to make them 'want' to serve you.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Phoghat]

"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?"

Quite well actually. Check out how much money we spend on feeding and pampering our pets. Cats and dogs eat better than most people in third world countries.

Sure some people mistreat their animals, but not the great majority.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[virgil_disgr4ce]

McDonald's employees have consciousness.

Got any supporting evidence? ;p

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Xest]

The problem with AI discussion is that it's scarred with the popular sci-fi view of AI, it's viewed with the Asimov style rules for AI and questions about how we should treat AI.

Realistically, this is missing the point to an extent. If we were to try and create artificial life forms for the sake of living and caring about living, caring about what they do, emotions such as sadness, boredom and so on you have a point, but I don't think that's really anyone's goal. From sex AI not wanting to having sex to soldier AI suddenly not wanting to kill, there is really little use for AI that has exactly what we perceive as being the faults of humans for a specific purpose

Conciousness doesn't necessarily mean some AI should be able to go rogue and do and think what it wants, it should just be situationally aware because that's effectively what conciousness is.

The whole "Should we treat them like humans?" argument is a great philosophical debate, but it's pretty ignorant of what we want to be aiming for in reality - and that's machines that are concious in that they can respond, react and deal with the situation in which they exist or are programmed to deal with, but not that they necessarily have the facility to worry, care, get upset, get bored and that sort of thing.

It's perfectly feasible for something to be concious but also be constrained on what it can think and feel. It's a very human trait to apply the human context to non-human things but it's a mistake we mustn't make when making serious decisions as to what we should and shouldn't do. Just as your Word processor doesn't also double up as a porn site you would only make sure your AIs did what you want them to do, there's no reason that conciousness has to also mean chaos.

No doubt there is always the possibility of emergent behaviour, but to suggest complex feelings and so forth will necessarily emerge is really as ignorant as saying notepad will suddenly turn into a web browser when you open it one day. If we do not create AI systems with traits that we do not want, they will not have them just as when we create applications with features we do not want, they do not have them.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Citizen of Earth]

McDonald's employees have consciousness. How do we treat them?

If that McDonald's employee had an IQ of 1000, how long would it be before he nuked your ass with a cold-fusion bomb?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Walkingshark]

Hmm. Ok, how about this: is it wrong to buffalo free range graze and then collect their manure for use as fuel and fertilizer? They enjoy the activity, it allows them to continue functioning, and we get something directly useful out of it. I know they're not considered 'sentient,' but if we have a role that needs to be filled that requires some level of sentience, wouldn't in fact be MORE wrong to cause the artificial being we create to fill that role NOT enjoy it?

The other, more obvious answer to your scenario is that once again your propisition fails due to a false equivalence. A sentient machine designed to enjoy doing some sort of repetitive, tedious work (maintaining an acre of farmland, perhaps) would be better than a sentient machine forced to do so but not enjoying it. The machine is designed from the ground up to have a specific function and to enjoy performing it. Your "addict someone to drugs" scenario is different because humans are not built from the ground up to do whatever you're forcing them to do. Our desires, needs, values, and priorities are different than those of a machine intelligence.

I really don't see a problem as long as the robot is happy, except the problem that people have when they anthromorphize something and then empathize with its "plight" based on false assumptions.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[Wandering Idiot]

As it see it, actual consciousness requires a model of the internal world as well as the external, which means the "data structure" you mentioned would have to contain a simplified model of itself, changes is which could be analyzed and acted upon in much the same way as external data (and which analysis would then go into the data structure to be analyzed, as well as the analysis of the analysis, etc., with enough simplifications and limits at each level to prevent an infinite recursive loop). I would argue that this type of feedback loop is at the root of what we experience as "consciousness". Humans' awareness of our own cognitive processes is very high-level, abtract, and limited, but it is there.

Building a true AI seems fairly simple in concept:

Step 1: Create a program that is good at noticing, categorizing and analyzing patterns in arbitrary data that is fed to it, can create some form of output, and will notice when this changes the data it is receiving.

Step 2: Once it's up and running being given encyclopedias, TV feeds, etc., have it devote half its resources to analyzing *itself* as the data set.

Step 3: Profit?? (Or possibly just time-travelling killer Cyborgs with Austrian accents)


Of course, this is nothing new, and the hard part is doing that first step.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[matt20102]

There are many problems in Computer Science which are trivial for conscious entities but very difficult for binary computers. (i.e., image recognition, etc.) One school of thought is that these problems can be made easier for computation by making a computer work more like a living brain.

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[cduffy]

Two questions:

1. Can you prove to me that you are self-aware?
2. If not, how can you prove that an artificial intelligence isn't similarly aware, should one claim to be so?

Re:Why create a conscious AI?

[thasmudyan]

I would say the prospect of creating a new race of slaves is almost as horrifying as the standard sci-fi nightmare of our creations rising up against us. However, I do believe that we should try to recreate the spark of consciousness that makes us into what we are, we just have to be especially careful. The reasoning goes like this:

As humans we are part of two worlds. One of them is the realm of pure biology, it gives us the very mechanics by which we are allowed to exist. But it's also the only form of procreation available to us. Nobody thinks it's morally questionable to clone and mix two human sets of DNA to create a new entity and then assert heavy influence over its mental development for at least the first decade of its life. Yet, we acknowledge that it's a great responsibility.

The other realm is the realm of thought and mind, and it's probably even more important to us than our biological origin in a lot of ways. It's not just the dimension of pure logic and knowledge, it's also the platform for all that makes us special: the ability to love, to empathize, to understand, our innate curiosity and the desire to advance. Now for the first time, when we're thinking about creating artificial intelligence and consciousness, we have the opportunity to procreate following this path as well. Again, we know that it must be done with great care. But I believe that in a way it's "natural" for us to do that, not only to create new life but also to learn from it and to infuse new perspectives into our (then) shared society.

You were talking about human augmentation which is also very important and most anxiously awaited by many, myself included. I don't believe augmentation research competes with AI research. On the contrary, concepts and knowledge from one field often translates well to the other. We should do both.

well,

[lord3nd3r]

I for one, Welcome our AI Overlords.

What about sub-symbolic AI? (header erratum)

[ollilartinen]

sorry about the header of my previous comment. (was my first attempt to write a comment in Slashdot..)

Re:can you shut it off?

[gfody]

As far as AI goes, the validity of computers as life forms has been successfully argued up the wazoo, but I will always stubbornly believe that computers will never have true individual consciousness as biological organisms do.

Maybe if you'd had some better reading material than "is Data human?" you'd believe that computers will eventually host full-blown consciousnesses.

Still waiting for one that can evolve..

[jnnnnn]

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.

Re:Still waiting for one that can evolve..

[TapeCutter]

Probably more than you want to know href="http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/page26906.html">here.

A Cat Brain

[strannik]

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.

Re:A Cat Brain

[fractoid]

At least, when judgement day comes, we'll be able to make the robots run around in circles by twiddling a laser pointer while we make our escape.

Re: That's easy

[Rashdot]

Just wait for it to ask: "I can has cheezeburger?"

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[daeglin]

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

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[viyh]

You should re-read my comment. I said the "best method" we have. Any other suggestions?

They should just...

[viyh]

...invent AI that can invent better AI. Yeah for a positive feedback loop!

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[daeglin]

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.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[viyh]

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

AI amature hour

[cenc]

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.

Re:AI amature hour

[TapeCutter]

Why do you assume HUMAN conciousness?

Yes there is no real subjective test for consiousness but most people recognise it when they see it (or have it pointed out). Another assumption I think you are making is that we have to understand the brain to make one, this is not at all true, people were making and using levers well before they understood how they worked. A physically accurate model of a brain may well spontaneously produce consiousness in exactly the same way as the seasons, hurricanes, cold fronts, etc all "emerge" from physically accurate climate models. Indeed the blue brain project claims that data from brain scans fed into it's simulated neocortex produces the same reactionary patterns as seen in the real brains.

Re:AI amature hour

[faceleg]

Hear hear! Philosophy of Mind and Cognition: An Introduction, 2nd Edition http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405133244.html

Re:AI amature hour

[anegg]

Wow - that sounds like really ethical science, especially considering the risks to us that developing alternate consciousness beings might bring about.

I hope we don't proceed quite that recklessly.

I suspect that we will discover that language developed as the evolutionary answer to the need for one being to communicate its own internal brain state to another being. In other words, language isn't what makes consciousness possible, language is the means by which one consciousness communicates with another. What seems to have made human beings so damn powerful is that our consciousness was successful enough to bridge this communications gap. Once we had a symbolic communications capability that could transfer complex ideas from one consciousness to another, human beings became the most powerful animal on the planet. So if we create a machine consciousness that can operate at higher speeds and with more memory capacity, and we give it the ability to communicate with other conscious beings, won't it become even more powerful than the human animals that created it?

Re:AI amature hour

[Dachannien]

Are you saying that feral children lack consciousness?

Trying to make culture somehow a requirement for consciousness (a) is a dubious premise and (b) misses the point of where we stand technologically w.r.t. neuroscience and brain modeling. There are certainly several metric assloads of unanswered questions left behind by the linked paper, and the state of the art is nowhere near being able to generate an artificial consciousness (hence the word "toward"). Certainly, the "software", i.e., the actual arrangement of neurons and synapses in a given brain, is an unsolved (and barely addressed problem), but we still have to have a fundamental understanding of the large-scale dynamics and the general small-scale structure of the brain before we can get into that.

To some degree, this is in hopes that someone can arrive at a fully functional brain simulation without having to simulate a lot of physical development (i.e., zygote to infant) as well. Time will tell whether that's possible or not. But worrying about language (and eventually "culture") in a simulated brain is a problem decades, if not centuries, down the road, and we'll likely have decided a lot about human consciousness by virtue of modeling the brain itself long before the language problem is solved.

As for your "pop philosophy" statement, actually, this is science, first and foremost. Many scientists like to, er, philosophize on the nature of their work, particularly in neuroscience, and it makes great fodder for friendly argument at conferences and such. But ultimately, these questions will be answered by science, not philosophy.

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

Kids, kids, try this for some Sunday reading to get at what I mean by my analogy of it being a "software" and "networking" problem (man you guys can take crap way to literally):
EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND by Wilfrid Sellars
http://www.ditext.com/sellars/epm.html

Surprisingly his writings are best digested by those that have not had their brains tainted by too much study in things like Philosophy, Neurology, and the likes. Perhaps it will inspire someone that knows how to plug in the right wire to come up with an implementation. Call it one of the best road maps we have to date of getting to hard AI (without reinventing the wheal). It likly will not hurt anyone to chase down the 5,000 or so books and problems in Philosophy he mentions, but you can get by without them.

Here however is a short bit of the problem as I see it. "Consciousness", even if it can be generated by dumb luck through "emergence" (we call this a philosophical weasel word) is more than a mere state or property of brain/computer (in isolation). It has a whole rat's nest of linguistic and cultural conditions that have to be met for it to be "Consciousness" (with the big C), not just a simulation of something with consciousness (small c here). Essentially Consciousness does not just happen in the vacuum of a lab.

Obviously, and to my original point, this not one of those subject that can not be done justice to in a one hit wonder headline on slashdot. It is scientific trolling with overly sensational headlines on slashdot that gets all the computer geeks scifi fantasy panties in an uproar. There was likly over a 1,000,000 papers published last month in AI, linguistics, philosophy, neurology, and related fields on the same subject that could have been spun the same way if a slashdot poster had stumbled across them on the internet.

Re:AI amature hour

[narcc]

Looks like someone failed computer science 101. Do a search for "Church-Turing Thesis" and "Computational Equivalence". Apparently you need a refresher.

Re:AI amature hour

[endymion.nz]

A million papers published on AI, linguistics, philosophy, neurology and related fields on the same subject in the last month? Overestimate much?

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

Big industry all those dusty magazines that no one ever reads sitting in the back of University libraries. Most are so obscure they will only be read by a dozen or so specialist.

Re:AI amature hour

[daymitch]

If you can get a dozen people to read and cite your obscure academic writing, you have achieved a massive success and will get tenure easily at all but the most competitive institutions.

This comment isn't just for snark. It's humbling how HARD it is to do work that other people find useful.

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

It for that very reason there has been an explosion in the number of publications, besides Universities that pay bonuses for getting published to their professors. The solution in the last few years has been to increase the number of journals, rather than make everyone fight over fewer spaces for publication.

The dirty secret of academia is that getting a book published is a relatively easy trick, getting in to good academic journal is a lot of work with the mountain of articles that are submitted. Just being one of the reviewers of an article is considered a feather in the cap, because it gets your name in print.

Re:AI amature hour

[jdoeii]

I believe you are mistaken. First, you assume the brain function is effectively calculable. It is not. At least not at the level relevant to this discussion. Second, I think you assume if a device is computationally equivalent to a Turing machine it must have software and hardware as distinct components. Church-Turing thesis does not claim that and I believe it generally is untrue.

Imagine an expanding air balloon. Is the function it calculates effectively calculable? What is hardware and what is software in this case?

Re:AI amature hour

[An Onerous Coward]

I think your points are trivial. Once we understand how to build the hardware, programming the proper software for it is easy. My parents performed the feat four times, with no specialized training.

Put the hardware in a body that squirms, demands attention, and pushes our nurturing buttons, and all that's left is a couple decades of worrying about whether it's getting its chores and homework done.

Actually, it would be faster to just decompile an existing brain, map the neurons and connections, and call that the program. We don't need to understand the encodings in order to replicate them, just like you don't need to be able to decrypt a DVD in order to burn a copy.

You sound frustrated that philosophers aren't getting the credit they deserve. I'm curious, are you a philosopher?

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

Yes, I am a Philosopher and have been at this for better part of 15 years. Not frustrated they don't get credit (Philosophers are use to that), I am frustrated that the other fields insist on reinventing the wheal.

Let me put this all another way.

I would ask everyone on slashdot to please give a detailed account of what you did the day after you where born (you likly spent your first day sleeping mostly)?

Then tell me that consciousness has nothing to do with language and culture.

Re:AI amature hour

[An Onerous Coward]

1956? I know that some truths are timeless and all that, but the paper you're asking "the kids" to read was published prior to the invention of MRI and CAT scans, prior to a million advances in neurophysiology and artificial intelligence, in an age when the computer was in its infancy.

That leads me to suspect that, either somebody has done work updating Sellars' work to reflect the last fifty years of scientific progress, or that those years have rendered him obsolete. Since Sellars' Wikipedia entry describes his paper as "lengthy and difficult", and I freely admit that I have the attention span of a cocaine-sniffing gnat, I need more incentive to read it.

The other reason I'm disinclined to read it is, well, you. You call your opponents "kids", thereby asserting your intellectual superiority, then make glib, simplistic comments like, "Consciousness does not just happen in the vacuum of a lab," and "just a simulation of something with consciousness." As if the difference between a thing and the simulation of the thing are so cleanly separable.

Re:AI amature hour

[An Onerous Coward]

Your example is flawed. If you asked me to give a detailed account of what you did on July 15th, 1997, I couldn't do that either. I could reflect back on exactly what time in my life that was, maybe make a guess at what I might have been doing. It would help to know what day of the week it was. But honestly, I have zero recollection. Most likely, if you gave me a detailed account to peruse, I probably would remember none of it. Yet I was probably conscious that day.

As someone pointed out, feral children have been studied. They lack language and culture, but they nevertheless have consciousness. The problem is, with these strange cases, our usual tools for understanding the contents of their mind (language and culture) are useless. Our inability to understand those contents doesn't mean their minds are empty.

Same goes for animals and pre-verbal humans. Quite a few humans never achieve language skills, but there is no way of showing that they aren't really aware of themselves or their surroundings. In fact they seem to show the opposite.

Long term memory formation is crucial to answering your question, but may not be strictly necessary for consciousness. There are examples of people who cannot form long-term memories. But if you talk to them, they are clearly conscious.

Finally, we have the rock-throwing chimp. Chimps don't have language, yet the chimp was able to carry out planning, based on a prediction of a future emotional state.

In the article, I found Gerald Eldman's answer to "How did these various levels of consciousness evolve?" particularly enlightening. To him, the ability to network your memories together to create narrations seems to be the seat of consciousness. Language seems to be something bolted on top of that ability, that allows the narrations to be transferred from one brain to another (in a highly compressed, lossy fashion that can only be properly decoded if the recipient brain shares some culture with the source brain). Now, once that ability developed, I'm sure that it had some profound effects on the rest of the brain. So you could say that language may now be crucial to human consciousness.

But that still avoids the issue I raised earlier: If we take the hardware being described (or a more detailed future analogue), and perfectly map the connections of a human brain on top of it, and set that software to running, why wouldn't consciousness emerge? All the requisite language and culture should already be encoded in the interconnections.

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

The problem has not changed all that much since 1956. In fact, it has not changed that much since 1856 or 1756 for that matter, and one of the strong points of the paper is that he presents a unified system to patch (mostly) the holes in philosophy going back as early as Aristotle. All that in a few hundred pages.

By the way Sellers was updating and expanding on that paper until his death (very small part of his total works), and numerous fields are still debating his papers today (inside and outside Philosophy). I have never heard any of the big guns in Philosophy of AI or Language mention that they considered it dated in any respect.

Sorry, the kids line was intended to be humorous (everyone off on different tangent), not condescending.

Re:AI amature hour

[cenc]

Here is a nice book review that puts his relevance today in context (although the review is a bit lacking) this month:
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue72/72fernandez.htm

Re:AI amature hour

[An Onerous Coward]

Thank you for the response. I think I'll give it a read.

Re:AI amature hour

[daymitch]

The explosion of journals isn't a bad thing in itself. (I'm not saying you said it was.) As long as the standards of review are good, more journals is a good thing.

Publishing is about the only way to measure scientific output in a reasonable way. Administrators and other decision makers can't wait a generation to find out who's work was worth promoting.

The director of my institute is always trying to find a meaningful statistic to apply to publication records to tell which scientists are cranking out fluff and which are focusing more on scientific merit than on pub rate.

It's not easy when, say, two immunologists are so specialized that they can't quickly judge the relevance or timeliness of each others work. Try being a director of a department or institute full of specialists and having to make budgetary decisions. Imagine also that you really care about Science and want to make the correct decisions so as to advance knowledge generally rather than just feathering your nest.

When publication (and indexing and retrieval) costs go down and there are competent review processes in place, more journals and more publications is a good thing.

Someday my obscure work on optimizing the Wackenheimer Transform may be just what we need to suppress the robot revolution. In the more likely event that it's just cerebral wanking, the marginal cost is low.

Re:AI amature hour

[narcc]

I'm going to guess that you intended to reply to someone else. If not, then like the Anonymous parent to which I replied, you could use a refresher course in computer science. Go and read about the things I mentioned above!

Technological singularity

[Lord Lode]

The technological singularity is near... Let's all welcome the next step of evolution.

Re:Technological singularity

[bar-agent]

Let's all welcome the next step of evolution.

Are there overlords involved?

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[TapeCutter]

"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.

Re:can you shut it off?

[Nathrael]

As far as AI goes, the validity of computers as life forms has been successfully argued up the wazoo, but I will always stubbornly believe that computers will never have true individual consciousness as biological organisms do.

Why? When it comes down to it, the human brain is just a extremely complex biomachine. Sure, it's unlikely that we we'll be fully able to emulate a Human brain tomorrow, but eternity is a quite long time. Eventually, the brain will be all mapped and understand, and technology will be able to recreate such a mechanism without any doubt. It's just a matter of time (and how fast we can program software capable of advanced learning processes).

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Troed]

Are you conscious?

Can you prove it?

[hint: no]

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[MichaelSmith]

Turning Test? Not sure my mother would always pass that one.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[viyh]

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.

Information overflow

[G3ckoG33k]

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.

Re:Information overflow

[autophile]

If we plug Skycat into the Internet, it will probably find icanhascheezburger.com. Then, and only then, will the human race be doomed.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[daeglin]

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"]):

• I know I am conscious, therefore I assume that similar beings are conscious too.
• Other people have "independently" (of me) coined the term, therefore I assume they feel conscious (which is just different way of saying they are conscious).

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.

you gotta wonder...

[3seas]

... Don't we have enough artificial consciousness already?

Then there is Julian Jaynes definition of "Consciousness"

Re:can you shut it off?

[Tomfrh]

I'd put money on us producing artificial consciousness, but that isn't the same as saying computers will one day be conscious. We simply don't know if computation alone is sufficient to generate consciousness. To claim that computers will one day be conscious is to claim that consciousness is understood, and it isn't.

cyberkitty

[aenubis]

Does the idea of a fully functional cyberkitty scare anyone else?

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[superwiz]

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.

Re:This creeps the fucking hell out of me.

[anegg]

Alternatively, we discover that there is nothing particularly special about "consciousness," and we stop placing any extraordinary value on it. At that point we will really have to work hard to outline and teach why its important to not kill to the borderline sociopaths that we call our young. I'm not sure I like where that may end up, because the distinction that may be drawn will be between "created" consciousness and "natural" consciousness. Another division to fight over.

Re:can you shut it off?

[jdoeii]

Murder is a human concept. It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself]. And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. One more step back, and you will notice that fear of death is also an evolutionary achievement. Another look, and perception of continuous life itself is an evolved psychological construct to protect sanity. Consciousness is not continuous. Your conscious self dies every night. AI does not need to fear death, does not need to have psychological crutches that humans use to stay sane. If life for an AI is overrated, murder is irrelevant.

Turing test and SKYCAT

[whipple-spree]

Tester: So, uh, how do you feel? SKYCAT: Meow. Tester: Hey guys, I don't think this is going to work.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Troed]

As you correctly pointed out, it's not provable and I won't take the word of a zombie for it ;)

So?

[Burnhard]

I don't see what the big deal is. I can generate alpha and beta waves with a WM_TIMER message.

Re:So?

[narcc]

You've hit the nail on the head.

This is the "cargo cult" approach to AI. Put all the bits we know about together maybe we'll get consciousness.

It wouldn't be a bad approach, if we knew what all the bits were and how they fit together. We don't.

Re:So?

[fractoid]

If the islanders had access to aluminium rivet construction techniques, beefy radial engines, the scientific method, and a supply of avgas, their approach might well have worked.

If you can't build a duck, then build something that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and does everything else like a duck. The question of whether or not it actually IS a duck becomes somewhat academic.

Re:So?

[narcc]

Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. The trouble is, like the hypothetical islanders, is that we don't know enough about our "airplanes" to successfully produce one.

Our islanders built a plane based on their understanding of one. A plane, unfortunately, they did not produce. Building a brain based on our current understanding of them is likely doomed to the same fate.

Hence, cargo cult science.

Re:So?

[An Onerous Coward]

What, pray tell, is wrong with the cargo cult approach? The original cargo culters built the best simulations of steamships that their understanding of the phenomenon allowed. Perhaps, given enough time, and more observations of steamships...

When climate scientists come up with a climate model where things like the Gulf Stream emerge of their own accord from the data, nobody calls it cargo cult science. Instead, they rightly recognize that the models have improved, and are now capturing some aspects of the climate that they didn't before. In the same way, a brain model where alpha waves emerge on their own (not, as the GP suggests, programmed in) then we know we've captured something about the workings of the brain that we didn't before.

Is it conscious? Probably not. But until we can simulate a human brain, I'm not sure how we're going to make that determination.

Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a viking!

[Scrameustache]

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.

Re:Oh boy, sleep! That's where I'm a viking!

[fractoid]

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.

And contrariwise, if you've ever been that damn tired that your head hits the pillow and you're out like a light, and you wake up 9 hours later not having moved and feeling like you only minutes have passed, then you'd know that consciousness isn't always maintained during sleep.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Scrameustache]

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.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Troed]

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.

Is this even very smart?

[wytcld]

What is the evolutionary advantage of consciousness?

The evolutionary advantage is quite clear. Consciousness allows you the capacity to plan.

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.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[raftpeople]

I agree with you, I was anxiously waiting for his explanation but pretty disappointed. One of the things I've been thinking is that maybe consciousness is what allows our emotions to be effective. If we are conscious of ourselves as an entity in this world, it seems to give our emotions a focus ("me") to operate on.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[colinrichardday]

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.

But could you write such a program on wetware, where the speed is much less? I dob't believe that there were silicon-based life forms a million years ago.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[fractoid]

But could you write such a program on wetware, where the speed is much less? I dob't believe that there were silicon-based life forms a million years ago.

Evidently, yes you could. Unless you claim that something magical and irreproducable in silicon is happening inside that wetware. Lions exist, that's a fact.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[PiSkyHi]

Being able to consciously plan, implies that you can simulate an action or sequence of actions without risk of real failure and therefore learn from it.

Wasn't that hard to see why its advantageous.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[colinrichardday]

As the OP has not yet produced his lion-hunting robot, I would not say that it is evident. And even if he could, that does not mean that such robots could have evolved, which means that consciousness might be necessary after all.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[fractoid]

Sorry, I was merely pointing out that programs to control lion-shaped meatpuppets in the act of catching yummy meatgazelles already exist and run on the wetware of many lions. I missed the bit that non-consciousness is an actual requirement for the robolion.

I guess it never occurred to me, though, that consciousness could be a tool usable to help create such a program, rather than being an additional requirement of said program. It's an interesting thought, anyway, that it might actually be _easier_ to build a conscious artificial entity to perform a particular task than it would be to design a non-conscious algorithm to perform the same task.

Re:Is this even very smart?

[grumbel]

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.

Just look at the last few decades of AI research, which has nicely shown that hard coded computation just doesn't get you very far, because its far to inflexible to react to unexpected events. Its good enough for winning chess, but just not very good to interact in the real world, which simply doesn't follow clear cut rules.

Planning != consciousness

It might not be the same, but its certainly something very similar, as consciousness is in large part about forming a model from the input that can then be used to plan and predict actions without actually acting them out in the real world. Try to build a robot that will act intelligently in the real world and you have to build up some internal model as well and sooner or later you might up with something that could be considered consciousness.

Or to put it another way: We really don't have any reason to assume that consciousness is something magical.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[Troed]

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

Cat AI

[dis the ambiguator]

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.

Pedant point

[colinrichardday]

Should we term the processing of such signals by the visual cortex is interpretation?

Schrodinger's Cat?

[Virtual Drama]

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?

Ah, the experience of consciousness

[DanielB]

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!

Re:Ah, the experience of consciousness

[bnenning]

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?

Well, it's "obvious" to creationists that DNA is too complex to have arisen without supernatural intervention. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. Even if your theory of extra dimensions is correct, consciousness would still be a result of the interactions of atoms; they'd just be interacting in ways that were previously unknown.

Re:Ah, the experience of consciousness

[An Onerous Coward]

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?

True, quite a number of people take this for granted. They vastly outnumber those who feel otherwise.

That in no way makes it correct.

I do wonder, if you're certain that consciousness is impossible to explain in merely physical terms, then why are you hoping that the phenomenon will get more study? If you're correct, what is there to learn? Shouldn't it be beyond any tools we can use to study it?

My impression is that few people in the relevant fields have resorted to the idea that consciousness requires a quantum mechanical explanation. Most of those who have, I think, are of the mind that they're two seemingly magical tastes that taste great together. Consciousness seems mysterious, quantum mechanics seems mysterious. Of course they must be connected. I doubt they are.*

* Not that I'm qualified to pass judgment.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[neomunk]

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.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[viyh]

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

Re:can you shut it off?

[ShakaUVM]

>>It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself].
>>And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival.

Is it? One of the annoying things about evolutionary psychology is that you can use it to prove anything (and if you can use something to prove anything, it's not science). If people tended to murder each other instead of not murdering each other, you could argue that was an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. You can use that phrase on *anything*.

Moreover, it's telling that primitive peoples (the ones without that thou shalt not stuff) have radically higher rates of murder before Christianity is introduced rather than later. If thou shalt not murder was an evolved behavior, then primitive people should be closer to the evolutionarily influenced behavior, no? But we see the opposite.

Re:can you shut it off?

[fractoid]

If you build a conscious computer by simulating a brain, can you ethically shut it off without committing murder?

Of course you can, just like you can ethically sedate a human without committing murder. The 'murder' part of shutting off a human is the part where the human is permanently destroyed, not the part where the human is unconscious for a period of time.

Re:How can you tell that something is conscious?

[fractoid]

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. :)

Classic VS Quantum

[kafros]

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)?

Re:Classic VS Quantum

[An Onerous Coward]

Well, neurons are vastly bigger than the scale where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle takes effect. So theoretically it should be possible to observe the relevant workings of neurons without altering their functioning in a meaningful way. People reach for the quantum mechanical explanation not out of logical necessity, but because an explanation that is amenable to classical physics opens itself up to cries of "determinism."

There are a few problems with the QM path. First, I don't believe there's anything wrong with the classical-only explanations. The only real problem is that some philosophers find them distasteful. Second, I'm not sure that any reasonable models for QM consciousness have been proposed. That is to say, I don't think anybody has shown a plausible mechanism by which quantum interactions could filter upwards in such a way as to affect neuron firings. Lastly, would replacing a hypothetically deterministic brain with one that occasionally fired some neurons based on a random number generator be any more satisfying, from a free will perspective? I don't think it would. You would have to show not only that the QM interactions were substantially affecting the workings of the brain, but also that "you" were somehow in "control" of those interactions.

Without showing that, it seems that you would be no more responsible for your crimes, and no more the master of your destiny, than you were when your brain was entirely mechanical.

Re:Classic VS Quantum

[kafros]

You are incorrectly deducing that QM is for "the little things" only. Try reading Schrödinger's cat thought experiment in order to
see how a change at the atomic level can change the state of a very large system (a cat).
The fact is: we do not (yet) now if neurons are correctly modeled using a classical theory. Free will and the rest of what you
wrote are irrelevant to this very specific fact.

Re:Classic VS Quantum

[An Onerous Coward]

But you have to admit, Schroedinger's Cat is an extreme case. Quantum mechanical effects rarely have such clear, large-scale effects. In the case of the human body, the dark-adjusted eye has the ability to detect a single photon, but I can't think of anywhere else where quantum mechanics is really relevant.

There is no evidence that quantum mechanical effects are vital to our thought processes. In the absence of such evidence, Occam's Razor dictates that we are better off not trying to integrate them into our theory of mind. As I said, when quantum mechanical solutions get invoked in this area, it's never to explain an observed physical phenomenon. The motivation is always to avoid the implication that the mind is deterministic, to reintroduce some of the "magic" that the proponent wants the mind to have.

At this point, I don't believe that we've learned anything about the workings of the brain that demands a quantum mechanical explanation. Unless you have a counterexample, speculations on the matter seem pointless to me.

Re:Classic VS Quantum

[kafros]

I guess you have evidence that the process is classical and you do not use Occam's Razor on that.

We don't have *evidence* for either. Classical model is simpler to use than the QM one, but it does not mean it will yield the
right results. Why do you obsess with free will btw? You can have free will in either system. If the brain is working on a
macro(classical) way, the inputs the drive it (everything surrounding us) are not. So how could a thought/action be deterministic?

Re:Classic VS Quantum

[An Onerous Coward]

I guess you have evidence that the process is classical and you do not use Occam's Razor on that.

No need. Occam's razor basically says that you take the simplest explanation until that explanation stops working. In this case, standard biochemistry is the simpler explanation.

Imagine that a modern day CPU were sent back to the 1930s for reverse engineering. Scientist A looks at it under a powerful microscope, sees the silicon pathways, and guesses that electricity flows along them. Scientist B disputes this, saying that such complex computations couldn't be a mere electrical phenomena. He instead posits that the paths are made up of a dense tangle of hollow tubes, where quantum interactions drive the calculations.

Scientist B has the more complex theory, violating Occam's razor. Moreover, he insists on clinging to it even as the evidence pours in that the features on the chip are analogous to the vacuum tubes used in 1930's era computers.

We're in about the same situation today. We do have evidence that simulating only the large-scale features of neurons leads to firing patterns similar to those we see in real brains. In fact, that's kind of the point of the article.

I'm not obsessed with free will. I really doubt that my actions were foretold at the moment of the Big Bang, and I don't much care if they are. Being alive is still a pretty nifty sensation. The reason I brought up free will is the reason I gave: people who harp on the idea of quantum mechanical neurons are usually doing so in an attempt to rescue free will from classical determinism.

By the way, Daniel Dennett, in his book "Freedom Evolves", demolishes the idea that a QM brain is useful, using your argument (among others). It's a good read.

Re:can you shut it off?

[An Onerous Coward]

The problem is, right now we have one good model for conscious thought. That is the human model, and we will be spending probably the next twenty or thirty years trying to emulate it. Using the knowledge we gain from that, we might be able to create another form of intelligence that fears not for its own existence. But the fact that we may be able to build such a conscious artifact doesn't mean that we can ignore our duties towards a consciousness that can fear for its life.

By your reasoning, if we develop a drug that makes a person oblivious to fear and impervious to pain, murder might be all right if the drug were administered first. In fact, it's pretty easy to argue that administering the drug would be a more humane murder than the alternative. But people who kill their victims painlessly are still punished, because the suffering inflicted is not the whole of the crime.

Re:can you shut it off?

[matt20102]

Murder (as a bad thing) is not a human concept. If that was the case, no animal would ever be able to live in a group because, were killing one's mates to be acceptable, all pack animals would have died eons in one big feeding frenzy. At some level, humans are pack animals who acknowledge that living in a group is evolutionarily preferable to living independently. The human concept is the word 'murder'.

And fwiw, your consciousness doesn't 'die' or 'turn off' when you are asleep. Rather, your brain pays less attention to sensory inputs. If this wasn't the case, no sleeping person would be able to be roused by loud noises, cold, or any other stimulus.

Re:12121

[Lord Lode]

What, no zeros??