Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of 'I Am a Strange Loop' (2007) [pdf]
ams.org
ams.org
"We share a conviction that no philosopher or scientist living today has the foggiest notion of how consciousness, and its inseparable companion free will, emerge, as they surely do, from a material brain."
That's reasonable enough. Nobody seems to have a clue about how "consciousness", whatever it is, really works. If someone did, it would have been implemented in a computer by now.
"We mysterians are persuaded that no computer of the sort we know how to build—that is, one made with wires and switches—will ever cross a threshold to become aware of what it is doing."
Nah. Now he's just mouthing off. There's a long history of this sort of thing from philosophers. Aristotle claimed humans were special because they could do arithmetic. Now we know that arithmetic is simple, in the sense that it takes a very small parts count. Hubert Dreyfus, in 1972, said computers couldn't play even a decent amateur game of chess. Now, any laptop PC can trounce grand masters.
What AI isn't doing well yet is predicting the consequences of actions: "what will happen next", and "what will happen next if this decision is made". Basically, the technology to get through the next 15 seconds of life. This is the beginning of common sense, and really ought to be worked on more. We have the tools now to go at that problem. Self-driving cars have to do some of this, and answers may come out of that technology. This is an essential technology for robots which operate in an unstructured world.
Once that problem has been solved, we might be in a position to talk about "consciousness" from a non-clueless perspective. Higher level thinking is mostly a strategy module for the "next 15 seconds" control system.
At least the article doesn't use the world "quantum".
Check out various algorithms to do so, such as [1]. Model building from sensory input is very simple, and in my opinion only tangentially related to consciousness.
This is one of the basic activities AI researchers have been solving for years.
In many cases, this is not even a hard problem.
For humans, the model is bound externally in parental memory, media influences, and impersonal record systems.
But it's very much there as external programming. Baby humans don't very well when it's missing.
OK.
> Higher level thinking is mostly a strategy module for the "next 15 seconds" control system.
I'm not convinced we have even that much of a clue about consciousness.
>Penrose, for example, thinks the mystery may yield to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics.
isn't this guy's bias. he's, in part, interested in how the AI works, because he's interested in understanding how people think.
i'm also totally sick of the buzzword.
to reveal my bias, here's another thing AI doesn't do but we do all the time: have feelings.
We know biology is connected somehow to conscious awareness (sleep, illusions, blindsight, TMS, etc.) but we still haven't jumped the gap separating the objective from the subjective. It's called the Hard Problem for good reason.
Second, I think the main problem is that most people consider consciousness as something which lies outside of the physical realm, and that there is, supposedly, a one-way communication link from the physical world to our consciousness. However, since we are in fact (physically) talking about the concept of consciousness, this seems highly unlikely. It is thus more likely that consciousness is a part of physics, and we should perhaps treat it as such.
To explain it crudely, yes, it all ultimately reduces to the neuronal substrate and no one in their right mind disagrees. The point is that only looking at this level ignores the important and large set of data that is humans' first-hand observations of consciousness, what you're able to perceive, study, and observe about conscious experience, the kind of observations that Searle makes. To just write off first hand observation data as irrelevant strikes me as anti-scientific if not ideological. I mean, why wouldn't you try to develop a system of consciousness that starts with this data, in tandem with neuronal studies (there's no inherent contradiction)?
Why do you think I'm suggesting any theory of mind at all? You're stating too much.
I'm just suggesting look for patterns and produce models of what you can observe about human subjectivity. Hofstadtr's "strange loop" being an example of one such model.
Well yeah, but the whole problem with subjectivity is that it consists in the mind's model of the environment feeding back into the sensory inferences as inductive bias while the feature data extracted from the sensory inferences also trains the model of the environment.
Which is why people's first-hand "observations" aren't really observations in the scientific sense: "sensings" or "appearances" are actually theory-laden inferences.
Actually, there exists only a data set of one. Since I'm the only one I know is conscious. Joking, but not joking.
I'm just on the side that if something looks and acts like it is conscious, we have to assume it is. But the only being anyone knows is conscious is themselves.
Legends ever say that the first man who tried to make primates to understand the square root of 2 was drowned by them.
Common Lisp’s loop is so powerful that people invented functional programming so that they’d never have to use it.
G_Morgan in reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/a481l/so_to_get...
This isn't an argument, it's merely an assertion of a point of view, and one that isn't obviously true. The evidence on the other side of the argument seems much stronger than your argument about our visual field. When you look at all of the examples of brain damage causing peoples personalities to change dramatically, well you have a high hill to climb to say that who we are isn't material in nature.
You obviously haven't taken much drugs! Some do in fact make you smarter.
The playful discourse evident in GEB was no more.
BTW, I really liked "The Mind's I" (coauthored with Daniel Dennet).