Can a man-made computer become conscious?

[Belindi]

Greta wrote:

My guess is that AI will carry on the story long after humans are gone, not through takeover but endurance.

I must be a spiritual person though not religious, because I think it would be bad if AIs were unfeeling, had no sense of what pleases them but went around reproducing and maintaining themselves and nothing extra.

I totally agree with Greta, as I understand her and panpsychism ,that what we commonly called consciousness evolved and is a matter of degree , not a matter of kind, and that rocks partake of consciousness only to a much lesser degree than we mammals do.

However it so happens that what also evolved is sense of quality. The old idea that the planets and all the small things of nature too praise God is true, if God is to be taken as quality itself. If, and it is a big if, AIs have sense of quality they may rule the world . There is no magical God Who will intervene to save the world from quality-less AIs . It's up to us to prevent soulless machines from taking over.

[Sy Borg]

Greta wrote:

My guess is that AI will carry on the story long after humans are gone, not through takeover but endurance.

I must be a spiritual person though not religious, because I think it would be bad if AIs were unfeeling, had no sense of what pleases them but went around reproducing and maintaining themselves and nothing extra.

I totally agree with Greta, as I understand her and panpsychism ,that what we commonly called consciousness evolved and is a matter of degree , not a matter of kind, and that rocks partake of consciousness only to a much lesser degree than we mammals do.

However it so happens that what also evolved is sense of quality. The old idea that the planets and all the small things of nature too praise God is true, if God is to be taken as quality itself. If, and it is a big if, AIs have sense of quality they may rule the world . There is no magical God Who will intervene to save the world from quality-less AIs . It's up to us to prevent soulless machines from taking over.

In less than a billion years the Earth will be too hot for life. Humans must go, and hopefully their line will be continued by AI rather than the story cutting short.

Whatever, humanity's collective soul is necessarily poured into its machines with our senses of quality hardwired into them. Whom else's sense of quality will be within intelligent machines but humanity's?

[Belindi]

Greta wrote:

In less than a billion years the Earth will be too hot for life. Humans must go, and hopefully their line will be continued by AI rather than the story cutting short.

Whatever, humanity's collective soul is necessarily poured into its machines with our senses of quality hardwired into them. Whom else's sense of quality will be within intelligent machines but humanity's?

But AIs at present are sophisticated calculators. They lack feelings. If AIs can be made so that they have the anatomical structures that human feelings are rooted in, i.e. pleasure and pain centres, then the AIs will feel quality.
I understand that AIs are going to be given power to make decisions a lot sooner than a billion years. They really must be castrated before this happens.

[Tamminen]

I would say it is a matter of the level of organization of the system.

I think that material objects are our instruments for being. This includes our brains and our computers. We think with our brains, and we use computers and robots for our own purposes. It is true that matter generates structures of consciousness, but for a potential consciousness. The properties of matter must have a reason for their being just those properties that make consciousness possible, and that reason can only come from consciousness itself.

I cannot prove that this is the case, but this is how I see the situation.

-- Updated June 7th, 2017, 11:01 am to add the following --

I do not know what original rather than physical time is.

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences: the present vanishing into the past and a new present appearing from the horizon of the future. Physical time is only an interval of spacetime where the present, for example, is ambiguous, and to speak of directly experiencing such time has no sense. It would be interesting to study the relation of these two time concepts. As can be seen from the word 'original' I see the subjective time concept more fundamental than the physical.

[Belindi]

Tamminem wrote:

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences: the present vanishing into the past and a new present appearing from the horizon of the future. Physical time is only an interval of spacetime where the present, for example, is ambiguous, and to speak of directly experiencing such time has no sense. It would be interesting to study the relation of these two time concepts. As can be seen from the word 'original' I see the subjective time concept more fundamental than the physical.

It never stands still does it?

I think that time is how we try to capture change, by measuring it, thereby crystallising it or spurious feeling that we do, although of course this is impossible, as, if nothing changed, nothing would exist. Past and future are subjective, crude , measures of time. I say "subjective" as in reality the passage of time relates to the observer.

[Tamminen]

It never stands still does it?

The internal logic of subjective time is such that (1) it never stands still, (2) the past is always before the present and the future. These are not facts, they are pure logic. The physical time, instead, according to general relativity, allows time in certain conditions (1) to stop, (2) to move backwards, (3) to take the role of space. Therefore it differs very much from our ordinary concept of time.

[Fooloso4]

Tamminem:

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences …

Hence my question about when one experience ends and another begins and what occurs in the gap between them. I do not experience a series of successive experiences but rather an uninterrupted flow of experience. I can mark a before, during, and after of particular events, but that is a matter of making divisions after the fact.

[Sy Borg]

Greta wrote:

In less than a billion years the Earth will be too hot for life. Humans must go, and hopefully their line will be continued by AI rather than the story cutting short.

Whatever, humanity's collective soul is necessarily poured into its machines with our senses of quality hardwired into them. Whom else's sense of quality will be within intelligent machines but humanity's?

But AIs at present are sophisticated calculators. They lack feelings. If AIs can be made so that they have the anatomical structures that human feelings are rooted in, i.e. pleasure and pain centres, then the AIs will feel quality.
I understand that AIs are going to be given power to make decisions a lot sooner than a billion years. They really must be castrated before this happens.

They are already making decisions. Our society would collapse without the speed and complexity of machine decision-making (within human-specified parameters). What is machine intelligence but the specialised rationalisation of multiple (often genius) minds? At present, as you pointed out, machine intelligence is very specialised and rationalised. Obviously that will change over time.

With "be careful what you wish for" ringing in my ears I admit to feeling that logic and rationality in politics would be welcome at the moment. Imagine a national leadership that didn't prioritise ideology and political expediency over scientific evidence. Imagine pragmatic governance without ideology - presuming that AI will not be made so blitheringly unaware of what humans find acceptable and desirable, and not stage ham-fisted control like Asimov's VIKI in I, Robot. Normally the beauty of dealing with humans rather than an AI service is that you can reason with a human. Alas, in a world where unreason is increasingly lauded as "commitment" and "faith", that advantage is not what it once was.

For over twenty years I worked in the public service and most times my work teams were dedicated and smart - but consistently hamstrung and distracted by political pressure and interference. Idiot emotional, manipulative and short-sighted humans, repeating the mistakes of history ad nauseam. We are learning too slowly from history en masse to prevent some very "hard landings" this century. Would AI make the kinds of catastrophic decisions made by Trump, Bush, Blair, Thatcher, Howard, Putin, Bin Laden, Assad, Jong II, Jong-Un, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Marcos, Mugabe, Suhato, Sese Seko, Abacha ...... and the multitude of other leaders blinded by ideology and/or corruption? Is consciousness necessary for good governance - or may it be a hindrance that prevent clear-sighted policy making?

Whatever, I see AI (or more likely, human/AI hybrids) as being the next great emergence in the Earth's evolution. That might not suit many of us, but evolution never suits species that are being superseded. By the same token, humanity's emergence was hardly a boon for other species. So it goes.

Tamminem:

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences …

Hence my question about when one experience ends and another begins and what occurs in the gap between them. I do not experience a series of successive experiences but rather an uninterrupted flow of experience. I can mark a before, during, and after of particular events, but that is a matter of making divisions after the fact.

That's just blurred temporal perception, isn't it? We perceive reality in millisecond chunks, exponentially longer that reality's apparent Planck time refresh rate, and our minds are reportedly about a million times slower than machines.

[Fooloso4]

Greta:

That's just blurred temporal perception, isn't it? We perceive reality in millisecond chunks, exponentially longer that reality's apparent Planck time refresh rate, and our minds are reportedly about a million times slower than machines.

Are you saying that if we could process fast enough we would see discrete moments of time, one after another, with nothing existing in the gaps, as if the world was constantly recreating itself, going in and out of existence?

[Tamminen]

Tamminem:

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences …

Hence my question about when one experience ends and another begins and what occurs in the gap between them. I do not experience a series of successive experiences but rather an uninterrupted flow of experience. I can mark a before, during, and after of particular events, but that is a matter of making divisions after the fact.

This is a difficult question concerning the identity of an individual. I think it is something like this: Suppose I have an experience with a content A and then an experience with a content B. There is nothing between them, and in fact they constitute an elementary unit of time. What causes the experince of a flow of time, or identity of myself, is the fact that in the content B there must be something which refers to A, in the same way as there is a reference to the transcendent world. This reference is the basis of memory. So memory defines an individual.

[Belindi]

Greta wrote:

Whatever, humanity's collective soul is necessarily poured into its machines with our senses of quality hardwired into them. Whom else's sense of quality will be within intelligent machines but humanity's?

I cannot see that AIs can feel quality unless they have the material substrate (whatever that is) that determines that we carbon- based biologicals feel quality. I suppose that what I am saying is that programming AIs won't do it ; they will need a special something made of silicone before they can feel quality of good or bad.

I can see the point you made in a later post, about there being insufficient reason in public life. I agree, and I support political and individual teachers' efforts to improve critical abilities . Reason isn't antithetical to feeling but sharpens feeling, if the "material wherewithall" of feeling is present.

When the "material wherewithall" of feeling is present it can be nurtured or alternatively subdued or even depraved. I do believe that to nurture the ability to feel the subjective perception is entirely necessary. The subjective perception is enhanced by reason which presents alternative points of view for comparison and, let's face it, dissent. Would this fit with your experience in your line of work?

[UniversalAlien]

Talking about time and the way it is perceived - Here is where the computer and the hypothetically aware {if not conscious} AI becomes really interesting.

How does the AI computer experience time? - Or does it experience time at all? As I stated earlier in my hypothetical
description of an interactive and aware AI:

"......... "And I wonder if a robot has an experience of time." - We {the AI matrix} can calculate time and units of time on the atomic and even sub-atomic level - But you ask about time as an experience? - We experience all time or no time, as we exist in a timeless state, close to what it was like before the first Singularity, what you call the Big Bang......"
http://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/ ... start=2535

A machine can calculate an almost unlimited series of events and sequences of events - And yet stand outside of time
- It is existing in a timeless state, and is not affected by time - You as a Human are 'stuck in time' and can never experience time accurately.

Of course we must assume time is a real phenomena - In Einsteins universe space time is real - But one might wonder if time has a meaning at all without the dimensions of space.

Before the singularity that created our universe there was no time - So the reality of existent time is based upon a beginning whose cause and origin are still open to speculation

We might find that the advancing processing power of the machines of the future may show what it was like in the beginning - And the so called 'Singularity' of the coming age where so called artificial intelligence exceeds Human intelligence may bring about another Singularity that creates a new, or recreates the universe we now live in.

Man and God become one - Possibility this process has been going on forever.

[Gertie]

Greta

Consciousness (subjective experience) as a novel emergent property of some systems is a popular idea because it's a good fit with what we see, and we have other examples of emergence in nature, so it's a concept we can understand and see how it might be applicable to consciousness. . We don't see any signs of consciousness in a rock or a toaster, but we do in systems with brains and a nervous system. Certainly there's a gradation, humans having the most complex brains, have the most sophisticated consciousness we're aware of. That in itself suggests that complexity of interactions is relevant to consciousness.

Speculating that a rock or a toaster has consciousness is a problem, because we can't see any evidence of it. So it leads to questions like - if consciousness is part of the fabric of all matter, why is there only evidence of it in complex biological systems?

Do you really believe a rock carved to scale in your image is experiencing what you experience? If you smashed it, would you believe it's akin to bashing your brains out? It's possible, but just asserting panpsychism isn't an explanation, it has to explain things like why that rock would or wouldn't feel just like you do. Why you stop experiencing when your bodily functions stop working. Why some parts of your brain's processes result in conscious experiencing and other parts don't. Why your liver isn't conscious. And so on. All these examples suggest that patterns of interactions of certain types of matter are key to consciousness emerging.

But panpsychism might be on the right track, we just don't know.

Gertie, let's consider the humble rock. Yep - stop the presses! - a rock doesn't feel as we do After all, not even the embryo that each of us once were felt even remotely as we adult humans do, so what hope does a poor 'umble rock have? Still, if we were to conduct a ranking, rocks represent a level of organisation of matter that emerged from more primitive states of matter still. From there, a rock is more "conscious" (at that level, read: blindly reactive) than a neutrino, which hardly "notices" anything at all.

OK, but I'm talking about subjective experience, not just physical interactions.

I'm not clear, are you saying you believe rocks and neutrinos have some kind of subjective experience? Or not?

Abiogenesis was an emergent, exponential leap, so microbes can be thought of as exponentially more conscious than nonliving chemical (like rocks), just as multicellular organisms are exponentially more aware and flexible than microbes, then we have brained animals, then humans, then institutions, and so on. Each time the evolutionary advantage is strong enough to create local areas of dominance in a population, which we then label "emergence".

When people talk about 'Emergence' re philosphy of mind, they usually mean that a novel property (subjective experience) emerges from 'lower level' stuff and processes, which isn't reducible to the 'lower level' stuff and processes. Something new comes into the world. Where-as 'panpsychism' takes a different view, that some kind of consciousness exists in everything (pan). So rocks and toasters subjectively experience what it's like to be a rock or a toaster.

I'm not quite sure which, if either, position you're arguing for here? Or something else entirely?

The issue is for me is that the lines between consciousness, life and reactivity are blurred. It would be more accurate to skip the broad labels of "consciousness", "life" and so forth and instead score entities based on their responsiveness, flexibility, senses, complexity, sociability, self-control, animation/motility, reproducibility, homeostasis, metabolic activity, and so forth.

Have to disagree here. For sure boundaries are often fuzzy, but it strikes me that knowing if a rock or worm or computer has subjective experience is important re how you should treat it, even what rights it perhaps should have, based on the nature of its subjective experience. It's a key differentiator between the statue or robot Greta and the experiencing flesh and blood Greta, if the statue/robot can't experience anything. But if RobotGreta can experience being RobotGreta, then I'd say that's a justification for welfare (moral) issues to come into play.

[Belindi]

Tamminem:

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences …

Hence my question about when one experience ends and another begins and what occurs in the gap between them. I do not experience a series of successive experiences but rather an uninterrupted flow of experience. I can mark a before, during, and after of particular events, but that is a matter of making divisions after the fact.

I think Planck units differentiate units of time. I think the Planck unit of time is referred to as an h with a stroke through it called hstroke. I tried to copy the maths symbols but I cannot do it.

-- Updated June 8th, 2017, 4:31 pm to add the following --

Here is another attempt:

In physics, the Planck time ( t P) is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. It is the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, a distance of 1 Planck length, approximately 5.39 × 10−44 s. The unit is named after Max Planck, who was the first to propose it.

-- Updated June 8th, 2017, 4:36 pm to add the following --

Error: not h stroke, but pronounced h-bar

-- Updated June 8th, 2017, 4:37 pm to add the following --

Anyway, h-bar is the Planck constant

[Fooloso4]

Belindi:

I think Planck units differentiate units of time.

I am not sure that any of this addresses the problem. The time it takes light to travel a Planck length in a vacuum seems to me to be very different than what occurs in ordinary experience. The measurement of a unit of time does not mean that time exists as discrete units. There is a constant stream of light from all directions. The images that reach my eye as things come into and out of my field of vision do not all begin at the same time.

If there are units of time would we experience time as successive units one after another if we could process fast enough? Would there be a gap in time between them? If not, then what differentiates one unit from the next?

With regard to experience, time is phenomenal. Phenomenal experience, that is, how we experience things, is not as separate events in discrete moments. As I sit here on my porch writing this, it is not as if one experience ends before another begins. There are myriad things occurring, some of longer and some of shorter duration. I feel warm and my body pressing against the chair and my fingers hitting the keys. I hear a bird singing and the sound of a child at play and the leaves of the trees rustling in the wind. I see the leaves moving and my fingers moving and my dog sitting there and an insect landing on the lilacs. I smell the lilacs which is pleasant but at the same time it gives me a slight headache. I am experiencing many things but is it all part of the same experience? If I get up and go inside there is a sense in which this experience comes to an end, but parts of it continue. My headache persists, the sound of the child laughing and the smell of the lilacs follow me. The mildly vexing problem of thinking about time and experience may come to the fore and slip into the background as I begin to make dinner.