Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly. OpenWorm [1] is trying to do exactly that, emulate C. elegans, with all of 302 neurons. It doesn't work yet, but they;'re plugging along. When that problem is totally solved, and the neural model is working right, it's time to move up in complexity. Probably to lizards or birds.

About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big on purely reactive AI. At the time, he was promoting Cog [2], as a way to get to human-level AI in one big jump. I asked "You've done an insect brain. Why not try to get to a mouse brain next?". He replied "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." 20 years later, Brooks doesn't even have mouse-level AI, although he does have a robotic vacuum cleaner company.

A mouse has about 1g of brain mass; a human has about 1000g. But they're both mammals, with about 90% similar DNA. If someone could simulate a mouse at the neural simulation level, that would be real progress. Once you have a mouse simulation, human level is a scaling problem.

The Human Brain Project blew through a billion dollars in funding while OpenWorm is a volunteer effort. That's the real problem.

[1] http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...

It's not clear at all that Mouse->Human is simply a scaling problem.

It would appear that there is some emergent phenomenon (consciousness) somewhere on the scale between mouse and human. This phenomenon may be triggered by a surplus of "computational resource" with respect to "body to be controlled", which I personally think is unlikely. It may be triggered by a matching of computational resource to controllable complexity, i.e. the hands and fingers -> tool use, who knows?

There is so much we don't know about cognition. For example, are Whales/Dolphins self aware/conscious? They have the requisite brain mass, if it's simply a scaling problem.

What makes you so sure mice aren't conscious? Insects probably are not, I have no strong opinion on mice, but dolphins almost definitely are.

Do you believe mice ask themselves "why do I exist?" or whether it is better "to be, or not to be"?

I am genuinely interested in your perspective.

I adore my dog. He shows a wide range of what I believe to be genuine emotions. But I do not think he is self-aware, and by self-aware I mean able to contemplate his own existence (and therefor lack of existence). For that matter, I don't think he ever contemplates the lack of my existence (despite feeling it when I am not around, so I am told).

I think conscious isn't a binary yes/no kind of property. It's more a range, where you can put humans arbitrarily at 1.0 and then a mouse might be 0.05 or something like that. It certainly has self-awareness of somekind, even basic biological homeostasis requires self-awareness of a limited kind.

Other animals then present more consciousness, like chimps, dolphins, elephants etc and would place somewhere between the mouse and humans.

Thought experiment: Dogs tend to act guilty when they know they've done something wrong. If you get two dogs together, and one does something naughty, do both act guilty afterwards or only one? If only one, then is it not reasonable to assume that the guilty dog has internally models the situation as "I did bad thing, I am bad dog" but the other dog internally models the situation as "I didn't do bad thing, I am good dog"?

I'm not saying dogs sit around quoting Kant, but they're highly social animals and I find it hard to believe they don't have some internal representation of themselves.

Dogs act guilty in response to being scolded, not because they know they've done something wrong.

No, we could always tell when my dog had gotten into something even before we found the evidence, because she'd be slinking around embodying the word "hangdog" from the moment we walked in the door. There's debate over whether this is actually guilt or simply anticipation of punishment, but there's no question that dogs know when they've done something they weren't supposed to do.

And how to do humans learn which things are wrong? Kids are scolded fairly frequently when they're young...

Reminds me of the Vonnegut quote from Cat's Cradle:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”

What would observe differently about your dog if he were self-aware? Self-awareness wouldn't automatically let dogs speak their minds or write philosophical treatises on existence. When a dog is just sitting still, I have no idea if they're being self-reflective or not.

Good question.

I would expect him to exhibit less reliably to stimuli. His behaviour is closer to a large switch(stimulus){} statement than the emergent behavior of human reaction to situations and stimuli.

One example: he was stepped on when a small puppy by a very old man from that point on and to this day, many years later, he has a major dislike of old people that he does not know well.

If the same thing happened to a child, I would expect the child to slowly, over time, question why they disliked all other old people when the old people they do know are kind to them. This would result in a change of behavior without someone explicitly teaching them.

Human reactions are hardly freeform. Most human responses are either instinctive or socially scripted/learned - more often, some combination of the two.

The only thing that makes humans truly unique is the fact that we can store, retrieve, and process information outside our bodies. While we can question our responses, as in your example, we don't - unless we live in a social environment that suggests we should. (Not all environments do. Some actively discourage it.)

Everything else we do - solving puzzles, counting, acting socially, teaching in person, showing emotions - appears in simple forms in at least some other animals.

Going up a level, humans are actually an extremely large, planet-spanning colony organism with very limited collective consciousness. We act more like an aimless flock of birds or mound-building insects than a collective with awareness of its own planetary situation.

I think the case for a collective consciousness for humanity is much too weak. An insect colony does way better. At least most individual insects tend to act toward the common good, rather than waging war on other insects in the same colony.

There are places to start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

No way, I did not mean to imply I thought that mice do that. But I think that's setting the bar too high. How often does the average person ask themselves such questions after all? I think four year olds are conscious, and yet I doubt that they ask such questions either, and might even look at you funny if you asked them such a question.

some people (very young children or mentally handicapped humans) don't ask those questions either.

furthermore there is a reason why in Buddhism this intellectual thinking and questioning is considered unessential to being.

What tests do we have for the existence of consciousness in an organism and how did dolphin pass the tests?

Humans have 92% DNA commonality with mice, and 98% commonality with chimpanzees. There's a lot of handwaving about how special humans are, but it's not showing up at the genetic level.

I'm curious--did the Human Brain Project ever produce any noteworthy science, or did it actually blow through a billion bucks with nothing to show? Because, as far as I'm concerned, if we got a billion dollars worth of science out of it, who cares if they hit the mark? That could still be a lot of good science!

GP is incorrect. HBP has only blown through 200 million dollars. It is planned to blow through a billion Euros over the course of a decade.

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