Slashdot Mirror
Towards Artificial Consciousness
jzoom555 writes "In an interview with Discover Magazine, Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate and founder/director of The Neurosciences Institute, discusses the quality of consciousness and progress in building brain-based-devices. His lab recently published details on a brain model that is self-sustaining and 'has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex.'" Edelman's latest BBD contains a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, and is modeled on a cat's brain.
And they only need to increase that by 100,000 times to get to about the same number of neurons as a human brain, let alone the synaptic connections (which would be somewhere on the order of 2,000,000 times what they've done). Nonetheless, progress!
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
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.
The best method we have at this point is a Turning Test.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
A cats brain? Its as if he is deliberately trying to enslave humanity.
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.
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.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
"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.
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.
We get this AI crap on slashdot once a week after someone found a new way to plug the square wires in to the round hole. Plug away, because it is not going to make a bit difference. Modeling the brain is not the problem people, or at least it is not the big problem.
You don't get AI ( consciousness ) without culture, and you do not get culture without language (more exactly not much difference between them). Let me put it another way the slash crew can understand: it is a software problem not a hardware problem. Perhaps even better put with the mantra 'the network is the computer'. Our consciousness has very little to do with our brain (well, at least the part that counts).
Philosophers have been hard at this for the better part of the last 1,000 years. Focusing this particular issue seriously for the last couple hundred as science has developed. Would it not strike you as odd that in all that time (covering most of the great thinkers) we would not have dedicated a moment or two to kicking around this possibility in Philosophy of mind, AI, or Language.
This is pop philosophy dressed up as science and then dressed up again as philosophy by summaries to the summaries. Read the paper. It is not all that ground breaking, or anywhere near even a warmed over new lead that tells us something new about consciousness.
Living in Chile
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.