Simulation, Consciousness, Existence (1998)
frc.ri.cmu.eduAn analogous way of saying this argument is, this world is a dream. It is a reflective dream that builds content based on the observations of the observers within that content. If I look over here, it tells me about here, if I look there, info about there. As I build understanding and knowledge about the things I'm looking at, about the act of looking itself, I gain the ability to ask deeper questions against what is effectively a lookup table of information about existing truths of the dream that I have already observed. As I observe those events more closely, and build a better reference or lookup of the information related to them, they in a sense become more stable and more solid.
In the current state, all of the aspects of what me might consider a standard "dream" are present, they just exist within the wrapper of technology. The standard sufficiently advanced technology is magic argument. Truly, all technology is magic, just accomplishing magical goals with a symbolic wrapper of tech.
Another way to look at it, is we all live within a light hologram. All of existence is a light hologram. It is like a bright point of light that we are continually looking closer at, and as we do, we discover the complexities of color and form within what was originally just a wash of light. All/No Colors -> White/Black -> RGB, ect... Researchers have already demonstrated the capacity to create subatomic particles using nothing but the confluence of light. It isn't a huge leap to then surmise that all "matter" is actually condensed or bound light.
We are effectively consciousness objects sharing the delusion that we all possess "physical" bodies and interact with a material world, but its a reflective argument, because the material objects we interact with are only material to things within the simulation of materialism. Its like we're all on the Star Trek holodeck, but the joke is that we're all actually the Doctor, and all the meat things which think they exist within the "real" world, are fundamentally just as immaterial as the Doctor - sharing only the one thing they all possess, which is consciousness, and the ability to observe, interact with, and build knowledge about their external world.
My alma mater ^_^. The basic loop is : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_framework.png You can alter the environmental context easily by re-directing the wire in/out : http://monad.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/dev_context.png. An individual would be none the wiser.
Sure we could be in a simulation. It's interesting to ponder on it. You'll begin forming answers when you dissect the different components, relationships, interactions, and try to create your own version of it : Say AGI.
;)
It's amazing how many people speak about AGI as if it's even a theoretically plausible thing.
It's about as plausible and well substantiated as the Christian God. Which isn't to say it's impossible, but just that it's almost entirely an article of faith. There are a few anecdotes which maybe hint at its possibility. But nothing even approaching a rational explanation of how it might be built.
Also, the model of cognition you are describing (information processing or I/O) is very old, from the 1960s. It was inspired by the discovery of the computer. There are other models, like Ecological Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Distributed Cognition.
It is tempting to draw a box around the brain and posit that it's the most important interface and that all of the important information passes through it. But whenever you break down so-called "cognitive" phenomena, you find that often very little information passes through that barrier. The lions share of encodings remain outside the brain, and for any given animal task, quite a lot of information processing happens outside the brain.
In a weird way, the information processing model is a vestige of the notion of a soul. If you really accept "physical fundamentalism" as OP describes it, then the interface between the brain and the rest of the world is nothing at all. Just a ribbon of atoms with a name. No more interesting than the interface between your stomach lining and the bacteria inside, or between the vibrations in front of your mouth and all nearby ears.
The only reason to center the brain/environment interface is to try to separate what you consider to be the essential identity of a person from their physical grounding. I.e. to maintain a model which includes a soul.
>Also, the model of cognition you are describing (information processing or I/O) is very old, from the 1960s. It was inspired by the discovery of the computer. There are other models, like Ecological Psychology, Embodied Cognition, Distributed Cognition.
False dichotomy. As far as I'm remotely up-to-date on theoretical neuroscience both information processing and embodied cognition are correct. The brain processes the interoceptive and exteroceptive information received from the body, computes first- and second-order statistics, and uses those to emit actions that explore-and-exploit the body and environment (including the environment's capacity to process information or convenient structures in the environment that don't bear memorizing).
>The only reason to center the brain/environment interface is to try to separate what you consider to be the essential identity of a person from their physical grounding. I.e. to maintain a model which includes a soul.
Sure. If you want a complete description of a person, at minimum you need their whole body, including but not limited to their brain.
If you figure humans have general intelligence and are built out of regular matter it would seem theoretically plausible for us to build something else that has general intelligence out of regular matter. I think you may be overcomplicating things.
So you're saying that because general intelligences exist and are made of matter, we can conclude that it is possible to build a general intelligence out of metals and salts?
I don't see how that follows. Seems totally speculative to me.
If you mean possible in the "I can imagine it" sense then of course it's possible. So is a zombie apocalypse. Is it possible in the "there are models which predict it as a possibility"? Not to my knowledge.
The only such theoretical model I've seen is "processing power is increasing eventually, therefore computers will be able to do anything soon, including AGI" but that's a totally flawed model.
I fail to see what bearing paragraphs 3-6 have on the possibility or probability of AGI.
AGI beliefs don't compare to religious beliefs just because you say so. You simply don't have the same knowledge background as people who think AGI is realistic or even likely. Maybe you have more or better knowledge, or maybe they do... but just saying they're wrong is pointless.
The boundary for systems-level consideration of intelligence is often placed around the brain because that's most convenient, not because nothing interesting happens at larger (sociology, ecology) or smaller (Drosophila, Portia) scales.
> You simply don't have the same knowledge background as people who think AGI is realistic or even likely.
That's ad hominem. But if you need to know my credentials to be able to take me seriously, I have a computer science degree and studied Cognitive Science at one of the top cogsci PhD programs in the U.S. (didn't finish). I have been a professional programmer for 20 years, in between school.
My point is that, like God, unless you can explain how it might work, you don't have a scientifically workable theoretical model.
At this point, it seems there is no manner of detailing that will convince people that it's plausible. I'm honestly unaware as to why people can't fathom it. It's a systems issue. If you want to resolve a systems issue, you need people who have worked on complex systems.
Having done the research myself, having the computational models in front of me, and currently developing iterative capability levels, I can assure you its plausible and I've developed some pretty complex infrastructures and systems during my time in industry.
I encountered the same issue in industry when I was developing the network infrastructure equipment that ensures your packets traverse the net. "You can't do that". "That isn't possible". "You can't shave off 300ms from that process. No one has touched that code in 10 years"
Why yes you can and I personally already have a track record of doing what is said can't be done. Everything is implausible until its made plausible. So, You'll never truly know until you try.
The biggest hurdle blocking people's way is that they're choosing to run down the same path. Why should you expect different results when everyone is approaching the problem the same way? That and, instead of the most knowing people getting in the trenches and attempting to write code, they remain in the philosophical camp and their works are tossed across the wall to the applied engineering camp. Rarely do you find someone who wears multiple hats or straddles the fence. I straddled the fence, saw what I saw, and now I'm developing it.
There are few who want to start from scratch and build up models. Many are ripping models from work done in the 60's,70's, and 80's without a second thought as to what was the thinking behind them. I chose an alternative path. It's paying off.
The model of consciousness that is being used is actually not detailed in any way (purposely). So, it is not very old. I have a stack of annotated white papers on the pioneers from the 60's/70's/80's centered on this inquiry and present day papers on : Global workspace theory (GWT), integrated information theory (IIT), etc. I fail to see any deep connection between my approach and their approach.
I intentionally haven't given any detail about the computational model of consciousness that is at the center of the architecture nor even the slightest detail on how to implement it. Given the climate in this space, I hope you can appreciate why.
You see a box. I see a relationship. There are no broad boxes over anything I am developing. The diagram was made in simple reduced form to help one conceive of the ties and flows to and from the world. People sing high praise of OpenAI and OpenAI gym. I experimented with similar open source packages when attempting to create a virtual environment for testing my code. I resolved on different packages and developed my own gym. I needed more access to the core/gut functions. From what I can tell, there are several other groups/companies/individuals that have done the same. No mention of them ever. No praise. Which is fine but it just goes to show you how there are likely numerous groups making headwinds in this area that no one has ever heard of.
>In a weird way, the information processing model is a vestige of the notion of a soul. If you really accept "physical fundamentalism" as OP describes it, then the interface between the brain and the rest of the world is nothing at all. Just some atoms of many. No more interesting than the interface between your stomach and your brainstem, or between the vibrations in front of your mouth and all nearby ears.
Interface/Relationship. There are no 'boxes' until you create one.
> The only reason to center the brain/environment interface is to try to separate what you consider to be the essential identity of a person from their physical grounding. I.e. to maintain a model which includes a soul.
Objective reality (governed by strict laws like physics).. Subjective experience. Pay close to attention to the wording I use as I don't give many details.
Seeing will eventually be believing. Once made manifest, you won't be able to deny its plausibility. Seems one can save a lot of time skipping attempts to try to convince people and just get to the development.
But yeah, consciousness isn't that serious. You just have to think outside the box to begin making progress on it. Whether or not were in a simulation is immaterial. The word 'simulation' really loses its meaning once you peer deep into the constructs that underly the universe. What does that even mean and how, even if you discovered it was a simulation, would you alter it in any meaningful way. Don't you think the person who created it, given how amazing it is, had the wherewithal to implement safe-guards/alerts? Or even made universal laws that forever restricts you from certain things? It's better that you focus on how it works than trying to define it. It makes for good story telling but I'd rather just dig in, understand it, and make use of that understanding instead. Again, do you want to sit around philosophizing and dreaming about it all day long or do you want to start converting that understanding into something ground breaking?
P.S - A component of the research that was conducted centered heavily on physics/quantum physics. It is quite important to understand the 'environment' and its laws when working on AGI.
I just want to say: I wholeheartedly support you and any and all research in this direction. I think AI is and will be hugely important.
You think I will be surprised how "general" the AIs are. I think you will be surprised how similar to human bodies you have to make them for them to approach a human definition of "general".
This is the only sense in which I think AGIs are impossible... not that they couldn't be fabricated, but that they would be functionally indistinguishable from a human with access to some good subroutines.
> Seeing will eventually be believing. Once made manifest, you won't be able to deny its plausibility.
I look forward to it. I say the same thing about my own work all the time, of which many people are incredulous. But still, you must admit that doomsday prophets say the same kind of thing. Again, please don't take that as disbelief, just not-yet-belief.
Regarding the specifics of the models, I would humbly submit this (as old as I am) paper on Ecological Psychology as a good, usable alternative to the information processing model of cognition: http://www.trincoll.edu/~wmace/publications/realism.pdf. If you don't want to wade through the high philosophy stuff, pages 194-209 get into more concrete specifics of the model they are proposing.
To me it seems fundamentally different than the I/O based picture my OP proposed. I would be interested to hear your perspective. And hit me up if you ever feel like coming out to Oakland to chat with a fellow crazy person with a passing knowledge of cognitive science and quantum mechanics. I would love to buy you a coffee.
Thank you very much. I support others and any research in this direction as well. Many aspects of my architecture are deeply biologically inspired. I find it to be of no surprise. I may grin from ear to ear from time to time when I see the function of a biological construct but I'm definitely not surprised :)
If you're capable and that's what you see, why not integrate it into a conceptual model and then a computational model and then write the code for it? When I say its possible I mean to say that, once you have the right model, you can write any code you want to make it a reality. The capability and hardware are already here today and more is on the horizon. One of the stacks I have lying about are spec sheets and white papers regarding Nvidia's GPU microarchitectures, HSA architectures, latency white papers, etc. I was literally waiting on their new microarchitecture to experiment with some new concepts. Future chips on the horizon make me :) deeply. So, unlike the past, the compute power is there and more is coming quite soon.
I scanned through 194-209. Excellent analysis and construction of a framework. I have hundreds of pages of this kind of analysis that I performed in the initial stages of my inquiry. This is excellent work. The thing is, you need to begin constructing models and theories from it. Start prototyping code and see how it fits together with other subsystems and aspects of your architecture and theory. You really just have to get in there and start stringing together code and start dissecting and trashing things that don't fit and locking in things that do fit.
My perspective is that the paper highlights a fundamental first step of how you approach AGI : By reasoning through your thought process, cognitive functions, and interaction in the world.
I would love to take you up on that offer and will when I return to the bay area. I always enjoy a good conversation on these matters. I'll take tea :)
For now, I'm in a bit of an undisclosed location doing dev. I Decided it would be best to get away from the high noise level in the valley while I focus on my R&D effort.
I read 194-209. I think their approach is fantastic, and it's rare to see such careful thought on this subject. However... nothing struck me as being incompatible with an information IO model?
Their core hypothesis is that you can't separate any kind of agent from their physical capabilities in the environment and still have cognition. That perception and action are not two phases but are an atomic unit of analysis. Perception is action. And what is perceived is not signals but relationships between an organism's capavilities and it's environment.
I just wanted to back you up, because I have a funny feeling you'll be criticized (common for frontierspeople) and I was thinking a lot about this very thing just yesterday. I've been a computer scientist for 25 years, and I've always tried to approach everything on the most basic terms of information, transformation, and IO. I revisit this fundamental way of conceptualizing daily, no matter what problem I'm working on.
Like you, I can't fathom what the objection is to AGI. A human body is complex, but human behavior is simply not that complex in the grand scheme. I have never encountered or thought of any theoretical difficulty with an algorithm mimicking human behavior, or the behavior of a vastly more intelligent sci-fi AI for that matter.
I don't care whether AGI has internal subjective experience. At least, I don't care beyond circular philosophical musing. I certainly don't care as regards the construction of AI, because it has no bearing on the construction of AI for the forseeable future.
AGI is going to sneak up on everybody incrementally, and intelligent people will still be arguing about whether it's possible, even while it happens.
>I've been a computer scientist for 25 years, and I've always tried to approach everything on the most basic terms of information, transformation, and IO. I revisit this fundamental way of conceptualizing daily, no matter what problem I'm working on.
Indeed. Breaking things down to their most raw and simplistic forms allow you to build them back up as you see fit or translate something from one domain to another. Through the deconstruction effort, you maintain the formula and methods to construct it back with confidence :)
> Like you, I can't fathom what the objection is to AGI. A human body is complex, but human behavior is simply not that complex in the grand scheme. I have never encountered or thought of any theoretical difficulty with an algorithm mimicking human behavior, or the behavior of a vastly more intelligent sci-fi AI for that matter.
Well, it depends how deep underneath it all you want to go. You can create a mimic machine or you can really get underneath the hidden layers and concepts and get at the root and create a truly artificial version of something. You have to be willing to dig deep and pursue answers wherever they are to be found even when they contradict your fundamental world view.
> I don't care whether AGI has internal subjective experience. At least, I don't care beyond circular philosophical musing. I certainly don't care as regards the construction of AI, because it has no bearing on the construction of AI for the foreseeable future.
Good, you have to be willing to put all your preconceived notions out to pasture. If you come to have a solid model that includes x,y,z or excludes it, it shouldn't matter as long as the model functions and is true to a stand-alone computational engine.
> AGI is going to sneak up on everybody incrementally, and intelligent people will still be arguing about whether it's possible, even while it happens.
Yeah, I kept asking myself why hasn't someone just gotten in the pits and started stringing together and forming a system. I got tired of asking questions and yelling out on an airhorn "this way everybody". So, I spent ~3 years researching the matter, created conceptual and computational models, and am now developing them.
>AGI is going to sneak up on everybody incrementally, and intelligent people will still be arguing about whether it's possible, even while it happens.
*nods head
This is one of the longest posts I've ever seen that managed to say almost nothing aside from dropping a few popular buzzwords.
>There are few who want to start from scratch and build up models. Many are ripping models from work done in the 60's,70's, and 80's without a second thought as to what was the thinking behind them. I chose an alternative path. It's paying off.
What does your "alternative path" have to say about visual categorization/object recognition? Do you have ImageNet results?
>You see a box. I see a relationship. There are no broad boxes over anything I am developing. The diagram was made in simple reduced form to help one conceive of the ties and flows to and from the world. People sing high praise of OpenAI and OpenAI gym. I experimented with similar open source packages when attempting to create a virtual environment for testing my code. I resolved on different packages and developed my own gym. I needed more access to the core/gut functions. From what I can tell, there are several other groups/companies/individuals that have done the same. No mention of them ever. No praise. Which is fine but it just goes to show you how there are likely numerous groups making headwinds in this area that no one has ever heard of.
Can your "alternative path" play Atari games? How about Nintendo games? Can it complete Link to the Past for the Super Nintendo, as I could at age seven?
His book "Robots: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind" is really excellent, even if he takes quite a few gigantic logical leaps that aren't really justified, imo. It's just a great piece of futurology.
Agree, one of the better books on the subject in the sense of framing a potential path towards the robotic revolution.
I also enjoyed the precursor, "Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence".
Morpheus from The Matrix: "What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation.
> Doesn't feel like there's ultimately any way out of this line of reasoning. What would it take to prove to you that you are indeed not in a simulation of some kind? as the only methods of providing proof are also parts of the simulation.
Simulations are just as real. Why wouldn't they be? What makes "natural laws enforced by reality" really any more "real" than "natural laws enforced by a simulation"?
Are simulations just as real? Or are they only culturally real? A simulation of the weather only makes sense when you have humans around to interpret the output from displays. Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s. It's not even really that. It's a lot of electrons moving about. A bunch of electrons aren't a simplification of the weather. It's only because human culture has computing devices that simulations make any sort of sense.
Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality.
> Inside the machine, it's just a lot of 1s and 0s.
And inside reality, we're just a lot of vibrating strings. I don't see any meaningful difference what the fundamental constituents of reality are.
"Real" is simply a relation between perceived and perceiver.
> Physical systems aren't about anything, and don't represent anything on their own. It's the entire problem of intentionality.
By your own argument, 1s and 0s aren't "about anything" either, they're just as devoid of intentionality anything "truly real".
> It's a lot of electrons moving about
The actual weather is also a lot of electrons moving about.
Sure, in part, but we don't consider weather systems to be running simulations.
Although Jaron Lanier wrote a paper on treating a meteor shower as a simulated computer running simulated minds to make a point about consciousness.
Nothing, but the possibility does increase the chance of those laws changing.
Not only that you can't know for sure that you're not living in a simulation, you actually can't surely tell that you existed before this point in time. Imagine that you are instantiated in a simulation with pre-installed memories that give you the illusion that you existed prior to this point.
This line of thought is really old and goes back to Plato (see allegory of the cave) but formalized by Descartes (see evil genius https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon)
Not a creationist, but a common argument against the earth being only several thousand years old is that star light must have taken much longer to get here given c. However, the simulation of those photons could have begun in transit, as you say.
But the argument for living in a simulation is parasitic on being outside of a simulation. We say that we could be inside a simulation because we notice that the physical world seems to support the possibility of incredibly detailed simulations which could be indistinguishable from what we experience now. But if we're in a simulation, none of that reasoning applies.
In that case, the argument is undermined.
the dream is a simulation? we create also an "avatar" of us that is completely different from us like memory and personality. But when we wakeup we understand that was a dream, and also we can wakeup inside the dream (lucid dreaming)
But the philosophical worry that we could be in a dream our entire waking lives is based on the fact that we wake up from dreams, and can therefore distinguish being awake from being in a dream.
Plotino in the Enneadi say that our life is a teatral rappresentations, and we (we as "souls") are actors that interpreting a role in the show of live. And we are worry for our role more that for our soul. the role is the mask and the soul is our reality.
Not everything that you cannot disprove should be believed to be true, or even taken seriously.
Well, there were the glitches - the black cat that ran by twice?
We can look for if lattice QCD was used in the big bang simulation by searching for anomalies magnified during expansion into the cosmic microwave background.
It took someone from the outside to explain what the deja vu meant though, as there was no way of knowing from the inside that the glitches where a result of a broken simulation of the internal reality.
My main problem with the simulated world argument is complexity. Take the Billiard Ball example[0]. This means to accurately simulate the universe you can't really get away with approximations. Under close enough scrutiny discrepancies in the simulation are discernible, and we can scrutinize it at the subatomic level. But to simulate the observable universe, how big would your computer need to be? How slowly would the simulation run relative to the simulator's real-time? It just doesn't stack up.
The only way to do it would be to fake it by generating the appearance of a thorough simulation rather than the reality of one. In which case the arguments put forward for wanting to perform a real simulation - to simulate history and so forth - break down because you'd only be emulating the appearance of it not simulating it.
The only way out of this I can see is if the universe containing the simulator were vastly more complex than ours, such that in comparison our universe would be trivial to simulate. But then why would they do it? Our universe would be nothing like theirs. In principle this is possible, but it massively reduces the chances that our world is a simulation because only a subset, and quite possibly a vanishingly small subset, of possible universes would be capable of hosting the simulation. Possibly fewer universes that there are universes like ours. At which point the odds of ours being a simulation collapse.
[0] http://www.anecdote.com/2007/10/the-billiard-ball-example/
Here's a thought that ends up with exactly the opposite view...
Does someone really need to build a computer that carries out the simulation for a universe to be “real”? If there is a set of rules defining a universe, one can say that the universe already exists without having to simulate it.
The same goes for universes that are capable of life that can simulate other universes nested inside them. And, indeed, universes nested three times, four times, all the way to infinity.
There number of nested universes is a much larger infinity that the number of non-nested "root" level universes. Thus, picking a universe at random (ours), the probability that it is a simulation is 1.
>Does someone really need to build a computer that carries out the simulation for a universe to be “real”? If there is a set of rules defining a universe, one can say that the universe already exists without having to simulate it.
Marvin Minsky made this argument and it's a compelling one. But rather than meaning all universes are simulated, it means it doesn't matter whether they are or not because for all possible universes they will exist as root universes and as simulations within more complex universes and there's no meaningful distinction between those. It's not the argument I'm making though.
I absolutely agree. But... the quantum mechanical "it doesn't really have a state until you observe it" could make sense as the simulation optimizing by skipping the parts that nobody can see.
Except if that were the case the quantum system could have a determined state, it just doesn't. But the Kochen-Specker theorem[0] proves that it cannot have a determined state. Quite possibly in any universe, though I'm not sure if that's been proven yet.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kochen%E2%80%93Specker_theorem
We already run simulators of our universe with vastly lower resolution then reality, and they do tell us useful things about it.
We also make maps of the Earth. They tell us useful things, like how to get from point A to point B. But nobody mistakes a map of the subways in New York for riding a subway.
Sure, but that isn't simonh's point. Those simulations aren't very good. There's nobody living in those simulations that thinks that they're alive, let alone that is capable of creating a working computer out of the material in that simulation.
Right, and the Billiard Ball Example shows what you need to do to even just simulate a game of billiards. To do so accurately you have to simulate every elementary particle in the observable universe. That's how complex and interconnected the universe is.
Arguing that present technology is insufficient doesn't prove that all future technology would be insufficient. The trajectory of improvement rather suggests the opposite.
It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of complexity. By definition a computer capable of simulating every elementary particle in the universe would have to be many orders of magnitude more complex (in crude terms 'bigger') than the universe itself, even assuming ideal technology with mathematically perfect efficiency.
and we create the simulations with the rules of the "real world" that we know. So we can study also the interactions of the rules that we know. But not what we don't know of out universe.
The elephant in the room of the assembled Gaian biomorphs is the Human capacity for discerning meaning. Meaning and consciousness are very much related.
A simulation is only dealing with form.
>A simulation is only dealing with form.
It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning. If meaning is critical to decision making and that decision making is precisely simulated, then the simulation must also capture meaning.
> It seems to me a sufficiently precise simulation would necessarily capture meaning.
That is the very bone of contention here.
> If meaning is critical to decision making.
I don't believe it is in the general case. Our current crop of Go winning machines seem to indicate otherwise.
Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine lack?
All of it. It has no idea that it's playing a board game, or even what a board game is.
That it's even playing Go is a human interpretation of what the machine is doing. Granted, we gave it that interpretation in the form of software instructions. But to the machine, it makes no difference.
Within the context of Go there is no board game, its just sets of possible states and transitions between valid states. Any feature of the game Go is encoded within this state space. The "meaning" of pieces, moves, captures, win, loss, etc are all encoded here. The go playing machine may not capture these concepts explicitly at a high level, but I'm not sure that's an important distinction.
Concepts like board games, people, ancient Chinese culture, etc are all external to Go.
Well, actually the human context of Go includes something entirely unavailable to our mechanical constructs, yet very much an aspect of the human conscious experience: pleasure.
Yeah, but the encoding of the possible states, etc are all based on the actual board game. We made an abstract version of the game and fed it to a learning algorithm.
At least with regards to the original question, your point isn't a rebuttal. That we can make an abstraction of the game and then operate on that abstraction just means the meaningful/informative portions of the game (within the context of playing the game) are contained in the abstraction. In fact, that just is what an abstraction is: taking only the necessary features for some particular context.
hackinthebochs:
Right, but the parts of the abstraction only have meaning because they are given meaning by us from the reality we abstract from.
You seem to be defining meaning just as what conscious entities endow something with, and so our abstract notion of Go necessarily receives its meaning from us. I don't agree with this.
At its most basic, meaning just is the set of concepts and behaviors that allow correct manipulation as judged by some standard. So in this case the rules of the game have meaning within the context of a game of Go as they allow for correct manipulation of the game state. That what constitutes valid board states was derived from conscious entities isn't relevant here. The rules of Go have meaning (allow for proper manipulation) within the context of the system of valid board states and transitions between them.
(you can reply to comments by clicking on the timestamp)
Concepts are something minds create to make sense of the world. Correct manipulation as judged by standard is also a mental judgement. The rules of Go are rules because human beings defined them. That there is a context for valid board states is because we created a game that had a context.
>The rules of Go are rules because human beings defined them.
But this says nothing about meaning within this framework. "Concepts"/entities/units within the framework have meaning precisely because of the relations inherent between the entities and states within the framework. The ultimate source of the framework is not relevant.
The entities in the system do not "get" meaning because of a conscious observer, they get meaning because of the relational properties between the entities. If every person in the universe suddenly died, those meaningful relationships would still be valid. After all, the relationships entailed by math is true regardless if anyone is there to recognize them.
How would I prove to you that the assembly of neurons and synapses that compose me are sentient?
Within the context of Go, what meaning does the Go playing machine require?
(Entire point here was to refute -- in the general case -- the notion that "meaning is critical to decision making".)
A go playing machine certainly has to have some equivalent representation of "piece", "move", "capture", etc. These concepts have meaning within the context of Go as a set of valid board states and transitions. Understanding these fundamental features of the game is required for proper decision making within this context.
Meaning is formless?
I subscribe to the school of thought that asserts that meaning is the product of the act of reading form.
So we consider the space of meaning and each point in that space can map to a multiplicity of (possibly similar or possibly entirely distinct) forms. The mapping function is the sentient actor extracting/projecting meaning from[/to] form.
Example: ဖခင်, predak, پدر, 父亲, father.
The evil demon which Descartes described is very real - it is one's own mind conditioned by dogmas, traditions and so called collective consciousness, and the illusions that such a mind produces are as good as real.
Simulations can tell nothing new about the true nature of reality, because any simulator would reflect the current assumptions up to date and will be based on an oversimplified model. Weather simulation is not a weather. Map is not a territory.
> The prescientific suggestion that humans derive their experience of existence from spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world has had notable social consequences, but no success as a scientific hypothesis.
Why?
Not sure what you mean by 'why' here but scientists have done a lot of experimenting with psychological experiments, neurology and the like and there hasn't been much sign of spiritual mechanisms outside the physical world. Now if seances worked better or reality was like Ghostbusters that might be counter evidence.
Depending on your definition of "outside the physical world," it's at best untestable. You can explain consciousness by saying it comes from a massless, noninteracting, odorless, tasteless... etc. but that explanation doesn't really help. So far, lots of other things that were previously explained by non-physical whims of God have had at least partially reductive explanations in science; a lot of people hope that consciousness will yield the same. It still may be possible that consciousness is a spiritual phenomenon, but with no way to test, prove, or expand on that, scientists would rather not close the book there.
The modern philosophical argument against a scientific explanation of consciousness is that science is an objective, third person pursuit, abstracting away from subjective, first person. If so, you can't hope to explain the subjective in terms of the objective.
There is no need to invoke the spiritual or supernatural to see that consciousness is a problem for science.
It honestly depends on who you ask. A lot of people think consciousness is inherently unsolvable by normal science (Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), but there are plenty (Dennett etc.) who will deny that such a hard problem exists, and make reasonable arguments that the scientific method can make headway in reductively explaining consciousness.
Would you ask this question using more words, please?
I thought about this essay a fair bit over the years. It's one of the things that persuaded me that reality is mathematical in nature.
in the dream for oriental philosophy we create the connoisseur, the knowledge, and the known object. or in other terms the object experienced, the experimenter and the experience of the object known.
I am very happy to see this at least bring up one of the most strange parts of Everett's many-worlds (and others' "many-minds") theories: that in them, you are immortal; for there always exists a possible world which you didn't lose consciousness in, and your final consciousness will only propagate into those worlds.
Searle's objection still seems to hold some water, though. Consciousness does not seem to be a computation because whether something is a computation is observer-relative; for some observers this set of electrical flickering makes sense as a computation to produce a sunflower-like pattern of points based on emitting branches in directions of (pi * the golden ratio) radians... but for the vast majority of observers probably it doesn't seem like anything until I print out a picture of the result; and even then it might not mean anything to those observers (they might be blind, or they might not associate it with sunflowers, or they might have alien brains so differently wired from mine that they simply cannot appreciate art the way that humans can). We actually have formally defined computation to be observer-relative in precisely the way that the status of what words a book contains and what those words together mean is observer-relative (think that in some other parallel universes the English language was exactly the same but that the words for 'cat' and 'dog' were transposed, and so this same book tells a somewhat different story in those worlds).
The problem is that my two bunnies seem to be quite conscious, to say nothing of myself or my girlfriend. It's not just that they're conscious-relative-to-me-but-it-depends-who's-looking... if that's true then it's a very different perspective which almost nobody takes seriously and practices. My bunnies just seem to be conscious, full stop. They appear to have both interests and the capacity to feel pain (observer-relative consciousness), but it appears to be more than just an appearance! In some sense they are objective observers who their own consciousness is relative to; therefore they are objectively conscious in a way that computations just don't seem to be objectively anything.
The hope of the functionalist approach to consciousness, with its common-sensical "anything which could replace this airy-fairy consciousness stuff in all of its functional roles would be equally justified to be called conscious," is therefore that as processes with no-intrinsic-meaning become more complex and more involved, there is some way to say "no, the parts of that don't have much intrinsic meaning by themselves, but you put them together and then this thing is objectively computing X or Y, there is just no other way for an observer to view it, it has passed a complexity threshold beyond which there is only one interpretation of it." Our books, with the cat <-> dog substitution looming in our minds, clearly don't pass this threshold by-and-large, but perhaps things more complicated processes than those books' narratives can?
The premise about computation being observer-relative overestimates how much meaning we read into a system, and underestimates how much we read out of it. When two 1kg bags of sand land on a lever and counterbalance the one 2kg bag at the other end, that has an objective, logical, correspondence-based meaning that transcends observers. When a domino computer "executes" - same. When a silicon computer computes - same. As the computer gets more complex, it becomes harder to intuit how the physical working is objectively a computation, but this proceeds by straightforward extension from the bags of sand.
We can certainly attach semantics to the numbers (e.g. saying this bit pattern represents dollars, or a spaceship's shield %), and that is observer-relative. But that is completely different from categorizing or understanding a process as a computation in general, in terms of logic.
I'll stop short of implying that it's the same for the human brain, because nobody should be pretending to understand the brain at this point in history. However, this does provide a way to see how it could be true for the brain, if it is ever determined that the brain is precisely equivalent to a computer.
Sorry, what is the "objective, logical, correspondence-based meaning" that you're referring to? Moreover, you've already laden a lot of interpretation in there, "1kg" vs "2kg", "counterbalance".
Let me put it to you a different way: suppose that I put two bags of some substance on one side of a beam attached to a fulcrum, and one bigger bag containing a substance that looks similar, on the other side of the beam. Suppose that the beam continues to tilt such that the bigger bag is resting on the ground. There are definitely some observer-relative ways to read this situation; but is there an observer-independent way to read it, which goes beyond what I have already said about it in this paragraph?
I have trouble with the quantum immortality theory because people normally die in the 75-90 years range, and it would be supremely weird for you to just keep living while those around you all died, since in our reality humans tend to have similar lifespans.
I mean, I like the idea, but it just seems so implausible.
There's no problem with the statistics. It's understood that the worlds in which anybody is 200 years old are extremely few. The probability that you'll experience such a world is either 0 or too close to make a difference. But by an anthropic principle, somebody is experiencing those worlds.
consciousness can observe herself. the thought can't. the eyes can't observer himself. we should speak of autoconsciousness. the animal is consciousness but not autoconsciousness. the human can be autoconsciousness.
Not only that, there is also the issue of Qualia. This can put some light on behavior of the mind but it says nothing about Qualia.
we can speak of Qualia as attributes of consciousness?
we can speak also of continuosly consciousness? when we are unconscious, at the awakening whe have consciousness that we were unconscious: there is a part of us that is conscious also when we are unconscious otherwise we will not be conscoius of the unconsciousness.