Matt makes some good points below. Qualia are a key aspect of consciousness. But consciousness probably comes in many different forms and degrees. It is not clear episodic memory is essential to all consciousness, but it plays a large part in ours. I do think consciousness require a state space with a temporal dimension. It would be very different than our own if it did not have a memory of temporal patterns.
I CONCEIVE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS THE SENSE OF AWARENESS OF SENSATIONS, EMOTIONS, MEMORIES, AND THOUGHTS MY MIND EXPERIENCES --- and that other humans also claim to experience. I THINK CONSCIOUSNESS RESULTS FROM THE NATURE --- AND COMPLEXITY OF --- COMPUTATION WITHIN THE HUMAN MIND --- THAT IT IS NOT AN INCONSEQUENTIAL SIDE EFFECT --- BUT RATHER A KEY FUNCTIONAL ATTRIBUTE OF COMPUTATION WITHIN THE BRAIN. I BELIEVE CONSCIOUSNESS RESULTS FROM A MENTAL ARCHITECTURE SOMETHING LIKE B. J. BARRS' THEORY OF THE THEATER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. The analogy to a theater is only partial --- but valuable. IT SUGGEST THE MIND IS LIKE A THEATER FULL OF AGENTS --- EACH WITH INTERNAL STATE AND DESIGNED TO RESPOND TO CERTAIN PATTERNS RECEIVED BY IT IN CERTAIN WAYS. THE THEATER HAS A MECHANISM FOR SELECTING WHICH OF THEM GET TO BROADCAST AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT BY SOMETHING ANALOGOUS TO SELECTIVE SPOT LIGHTS --- OR SELECTIVE LINKS BETWEEN DIFFERENT COMBINATIONS OF MICROPHONES AND SPEAKERS. TO MAKE THE ANALOGY BETTER, THE AGENTS SHOULD ALSO BE CONNECTED WITH SOMETHING LIKE INSTANT MESSAGING. The analogy assumes human consciousness results from the behavior of a theater of millions or billions of agents that transmit and respond to broadcast patterns, including temporal patterns, spread through significant portions of the brain. The agents have state information that reflect not only what is currently being broadcast to them, but also what has been broadcast to them before, and more private communications they are receiving, or have received, reflecting the state of directly connected agents. There is machinery --- such as the cortical - basil ganglia - thalamic feedback loop --- for selecting which patterns get broadcast and when, based on measures such as degree of match, importance, fit or importance within context, or surprise. Some of the patterns activated in response to broadcasts can themselves be selected for successive conscious broadcast in a stream of consciousness manner. The broadcasts vary in the number of elements they reach, but we humans are probably only directly "conscious of" broadcasts that reach a relatively large number of other elements, either directly or indirectly. This broadcast normally result in mullti-hop spreading activations. The spreading activation and the activation of responsive patterns are modulated by the context of co-occuring and prior activation patterns --- and by attention allocating mechanisms. CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT JUST WHAT IS BROADCAST --- BUT ALSO THE TOTALITY OF ACTIVATION IN RESPONSE TO IT --- as sensed by intuitive qualia-like and emotional experiential responses --- and as sensed by individual subconscious activations that pre-dispose the later conscious or subconscious activation of related patterns or transmission. OUR INTUITIVE EMOTIONAL RESPONSES ARE SOMEWHAT LIKE CROWD RESPONSES IN A THEATER. They tend to sum the emotional associations of many different agents to what is being, and has been, broadcast into one composite emotional sensation stream --- even though that composite can include activations of differing emotion patterns, corresponding to the boos and cheers of a crowd. Listen to radio of a crowd during an exciting situation in an important playoff, or world series, game. You will get a feeling for the sense of the stadium's (a type of theater's) crowd as a dynamic, living, collective spirit. You can hear the difference between a pop ball and a ground drive --- between a home run, a pop fowl, and a pop out --- and you can hear group chants --- that often start in the unconscious of the crowd and then build up so until they are heard in its consciousness --- or that are driven by the stadiums organ. You can hear all this from the crowd's collective voice. You can sense its collective mind. The mind's theater is probably something like a caucus meeting, because apparently it can be divided up into differing sub-theaters. This is indicated by the fact that synchronies --- which appear to be associated with at least certain kinds of conscious experience --- can be dynamically wired between different neural sub-populations in the mind depending on the particular mental function being performed. There is also evidence that other types of broadcast spread selected information throughout much of the cortex, such as by the waves of decreased inhibition that radiate out from selected points to almost all of the thalamic reticular nucleus, which controls inhibition from most of the thalamus to the cortex. Sensory inputs would be inputs into sub-populations of the theater, which would process them through a succession of hierarchically and laterally connected sub-populations by relatively local communication, and activations in such populations would only enter consciousness if activations in response to them within some one or more levels of these sub-populations were selected for wider broadcast. THE SENSE OF AWARENESS WE ASSOCIATE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS RESULTS FROM THE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF SYNAPSES THAT FIRE IN RESPONSE TO EACH OF THE ROUGHLY 40 HERTZ GAMMA-WAVE ACTIVATION CYCLES OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH CONSCIOUS RELATED BROADCASTS --- FIRINGS THAT ACTIVATE MILLIONS OR BILLIONS OF PATTERNS TO VARIOUS DEGREES. THIS MEANS THE SYSTEM IS WATCHING --- I.E., RECURSIVELY RESPONDING TO --- ITS OWN COMPUTATION, with an informational bandwidth equal to tens or hundreds of thousands of simultaneous uncompressed HDTV channels --- bandwidth dynamically generated in response to dynamically selected portions of itself by dynamically select portions of the equivalent of roughly hundreds of trillions of computations a second --- computations that respond to massive, instantaneous broadcasts and collective summations --- while at the same time responding to billions of instantaneous, individual, highly non-linear distinctions. THIS SELF-REFLECTIVE COMPUTATION --- THAT HAS BOTH MASSIVE UNITIES AND DISTINCTIONS --- AND STORES A DYNAMIC HISTORY OF ACTIVATIONS --- REPLACES THE HOMUNCULUS AS THE SOURCE OF OUR PERCEPTION OF A UNIFIED AWARENESS OF MULTIPLE EXPERIENCES, JUST AS THERE IS NO EVIDENCE PHYSICAL REALITY IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPUTATION --- SIMILARLY --- THERE IS NO EVIDENCE CONSCIOUSNESS IS ANYTHING OTHER THAN COMPUTATION. JUST AS THE NATURE OF PHYSICAL REALITY IS DETERMINED BY THE ARCHITECTURE OF ITS COMPUTATION (THE LAWS OF PHYSICS) --- SIMILARLY --- THE NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS DETERMINED BY THE ARCHITECTURE OF ITS COMPUTATION. There is no reason to believe consciousness does not come in many different forms and degrees. We humans sense different degrees and types of consciousness, depending on whether or not we are asleep, awake, dreaming, meditating, concentrating, or how aroused we are, or what chemicals we may have taken into our bodies. There is no reason to believe that many lower animals --- such as primates, pigs, dogs, perhaps birds, and perhaps even insects --- are without any form and degree of consciousness. In fact, it is arguable that consciousness as we normally use the word to describe our own sense of self awareness is just a special kind and degree of the computation of physical reality itself --- and that all of reality is conscious to some degree. The rate and complexity of quantum mechanical and chemical computations of the atoms and molecules within a lowly worm are probably many billions of times more complex than the logical computer computations within the first human level AGIs. But presumably whatever "consciousness" pervades most of physical reality --- including our lowly worm --- lacks many of attributes of human consciousness that we value most --- which define the type of consciousness we normally mean when we use the word. I think within a few decades many AGI's will have computations with many of the characteristics we humans attribute to our own consciousnesses --- and that those characteristics will be very useful to those AGIs. I DON'T KNOW IF CONSCIOUSNESS IS NECESSARY FOR HUMAN LEVEL AGI --- BUT I THINK SOMETHING WITH MANY OF THE ATTRIBUTES OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS IS ESSENTIAL FOR ANY AGI TO HAVE AN ARCHITECTURE OF THOUGHT THAT FUNCTIONS LIKE OUR OWN. Ed Porter -----Original Message----- From: Matt Mahoney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2008 2:58 PM To: agi@v2.listbox.com Subject: RE: [agi] Consciousness vs. Intelligence What many people call consciousness is qualia, that which distinguishes you from a philosophical zombie, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-zombie There is no test for consciousness in this sense, but humans universally believe that they are conscious, and this belief is testable. Just ask someone. Do you really feel pain, or do you just behave as if you feel it? The belief in experiencing qualia is what I call recursive episodic memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall a time sequence of events in the correct order. These events could include earlier acts of recall. For example, earlier today I recalled how yesterday a tune was playing in my head that I heard the day before (and so on). You probably do not remember any events that happened before you were 3 years old. You were clearly learning then, but it was not in episodic memory. A person without a hippocampus lacks episodic memory. He could learn new skills but wouldn't remember the lessons. Episodic memory has been demonstrated in birds, but we do not know if it is recursive. I don't know if recursive episodic memory is necessary for intelligence. When I need to come up with an algorithm when writing software, it is useful to go through the steps in my head and then be able to recall my thought process. It is also useful for databases to log read-only transactions. It is useful for computers to copy recently read data to cache. However, recursive episodic memory could also be an artifact of the brain's memory management system. Long term memory is written at a constant rate (about 2 bits per second, according to Landauer). During quiet times, it has to write something. -- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=103754539-40ed26 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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