[ExI] ai emotions

Fri Jun 28 20:28:03 UTC 2019

The only problem with the definition of consciousness as needing external
inputs is that there are stages of sleep where the person thinks he is
awake - i.e. cannot tell if he is asleep or awake.  If he can't tell one
from the other, is it the same thing? I spent a night at a clinic which was
trying to tell if I had sleep apnea.  My experience was that I did not
sleep at all - was conscious all the time.  All my thought was rational.
But they told me that I did spend some time in light sleep (the very stage
where you might not be able to tell the difference).  So I would call that
at least partial consciousness-  and thus change that definition.  Then
there is the odd problem of, while being asleep, taking external inputs and
including them in your dreams, such as a fire truck siren being experienced
as part of the dream.  bill w

On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 1:37 PM Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi William,
>
>
>
> Is dreaming - aka REM sleep -  a variety of consciousness to you?
>
>
>
> My understanding of Stuart’s definition is that “No being can be deemed
> conscious without some manner of inputs from the real world.” So a
> dreaming person is not conscious, according to that definition, since there
> is no inputs from the real world.  It seems to me that given such a
> definition they would also consider all vegetative people as not conscious
> <https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/detecting-consciousness-in-the-vegetative/>.
> If I were I such a person, very aware of my thoughts and their physical
> qualities, and such but unable to receive input through my senses, nor
> control any motor functions, I wouldn’t want a person with this definition
> as their working hypothesis of who is and isn't "deemed conscious" to be my
> doctor.
>
>
>
> Also, I think many people agree that sleep is when much of the neural
> brain programming occurs, enabling us to figure things out like “what we
> are trying to tell ourselves.”
>
>
> Brent
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 8:51 AM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> stuart/brett wrote    If intelligence is, as you claim, separable from
>> consciousness
>>
>> Is dreaming - aka REM sleep -  a variety of consciousness to you?  I have
>> certainly used my intelligence while I was dreaming - mainly to figure out
>> what I was trying to say to myself!
>>
>> In a way, stage 4 sleep in the deepest. That's where the night terrors
>> take place - which I have never experienced, but I assume there is
>> something like consciousness there for the terrors to be experienced in.
>>
>> Other stages of sleep are not accompanied by any consciousness, although
>> we can drift between a bit of consciousness and sleep in stage 1.  Some
>> people have said that they can tell when they are entering sleep when their
>> thoughts go from rational to a bit crazy.
>>
>> bill w
>>
>> bill w
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 2:00 AM Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Quoting Brent Allsop:
>>>
>>>
>>> >> ?Consciousness is not magic, it is math.?
>>> >
>>> > How do you get a specific, qualitative definition of the word ?red?
>>> from
>>> > any math?
>>>
>>> Red is a subset of the set of colors an unaugmented human can see.
>>> There I just defined it for you mathematically. In math symbols, it
>>> looks something very much like {red} C {red, orange, yellow, green,
>>> blue, indigo, violet}. If you were a lucky mutant (or AI) that could
>>> perceive grue, then the math would look like {red} C {red, orange,
>>> yellow, green, grue, blue, indigo, violet}
>>>
>>> Whatever unique qualia your brain may have assigned to it is your
>>> business and your business alone since you cannot express red to me
>>> except by quantitative measure (650 nm wavelength electromagnetic
>>> wave) or qualitative example (the color of ripe strawberries). Any
>>> other description of red only means anything to YOU (Perhaps it makes
>>> your dick hard, I have no clue, don't really care.)
>>>
>>>
>>> In other words, you can't give me any better a qualitative description
>>> of red then I can give you. Prove me wrong: What is red, oh privileged
>>> seer of qualia?  (Yes, that was sarcasm.)
>>>
>>> >
>>> > ?I don't think that substrate-specific details matter that much.?
>>> >
>>> > Then you are not talking about consciousness, at all.  You are just
>>> talking
>>> > about intelligence.  Consciousness is computationally bound elemental
>>> > qualities, for which there is something, qualitative, for which it is
>>> like.
>>>
>>> Intelligence and consciousness differ by degree, not by type. Both are
>>> emergent properties of some configurations of matter. If I were to
>>> quantitatively rank emergent properties by their PHI value, then I
>>> would have a distribution as follows: reactivity <= life <=
>>> intelligence <= consciousness <= civilization
>>>
>>> >> ?It is irrelevant that I perceive red as green.?
>>>
>>> > Can you not see how sloppy language like this is?  I?m going to
>>> describe at
>>> > least two very different possible interpretations of this statement.
>>> If
>>> > you can?t distinguish between them, with your language, then again,
>>> you are
>>> > not talking about consciousness:
>>>
>>> You pull a single sentence of mine out of context and then use it to
>>> accuse me of sloppy language? Here is my precise and unequivocal
>>> retort: NO! I challenge you to take that out of context.
>>>
>>> > 1.       One person is color blind, and represents both red things and
>>> > green things with knowledge that has the same physical redness
>>> quality.  In
>>> > other words, he is red green color blind.
>>> >
>>> > 2.       One person is qualitatively inverted from the other.  He uses
>>> the
>>> > other?s greenness to represent red with and visa versa for green
>>> things.
>>>
>>> When you said, "Are you talking about your redness, or my redness
>>> which is like your [sic] grenness?" I meant whichever you meant by the
>>> quoted statement. My argument holds either way. Unless you believe
>>> that color-blind people are not really conscious. In which case you
>>> should be enslaving the colorblind and tithing me 10% of the proceeds.
>>>
>>> >
>>> > You can?t tell which one you?re statement is talking about.  Again,
>>> you?re
>>> > not talking about consciousness, if you can?t distinguish between these
>>> > types of things with your models and language.
>>>
>>> Again, my statement reflects yours with the exact same scope. So you
>>> tell me what I meant.
>>>
>>> > Sure, before Galileo, it didn?t matter if you used a geocentric model
>>> of
>>> > the solar system or a heliocentric.  But now that we?re flying up in
>>> the
>>> > heavens, one works, and one does not.  Similarly, now, you can claim
>>> that
>>> > the qualitative nature doesn?t matter, but as soon as you start
>>> hacking the
>>> > brain, amplifying intelligence, connecting multiple brains (like two
>>> brain
>>> > hemispheres can be connect) or even religiously predicting what
>>> ?spirits?
>>> > and future consciousness will be possible.  One model works, the other
>>> does
>>> > not.
>>>
>>> I don't see how your model predicts anything except for your ignorance
>>> of what consciousness is. You say that every consciousness is a unique
>>> snowflake of amassed qualia, I say that every machine-learning
>>> algorithm starts out with a random set of parameters and through
>>> learning its training data, either supervised or unsupervised,
>>> converges on an approximation of the truth
>>>
>>> Every deep learning neural network is a unique snowflake that gets
>>> optimized for a specific purpose. Some neural networks train very
>>> quickly, others never quite get what you are trying to teach it. There
>>> is very much a ghost in the machine and each time you run the
>>> algorithm, you get a different ghost. If you don't believe me, then
>>> download Simbrain, watch the turtorial video on Youtube, and I will
>>> send you a copy my tiny brain to play with. Be the qualitative judge
>>> of my tiny brain, I dare you.
>>>
>>> Do you not understand the implications of me creating a 55 neuron
>>> brain and teaching it to count to five? Do you not understand the
>>> implication of my tiny brain being able to distinguish ALL three-bit
>>> patterns after only being trained on SOME three-bit patterns? Do you
>>> not see the conceptualization of threeness that was occurring?
>>>
>>> > In fact, my prediction is the reason we can?t better understand how
>>> > we subjectively represent visual knowledge, is precisely because
>>> everyone
>>> > is like you, qualia blind, and doesn?t care that some people may have
>>> > qualitatively very different physical representations of red and green.
>>>
>>> Quit calling me "qualia blind". I am not sure what you mean by it, by
>>> it sounds vaguely insulting like you are accusing me of being a
>>> philosophic zombie or something. I assure you there is something that
>>> it is qualitatively like to be me, even if I can't succinctly describe
>>> it to you in monkey mouth noises. I could just as easily accuse you of
>>> being innumerate and a mathphobe, so either explain what you mean or
>>> knock it off.
>>>
>>> >
>>> > If you only care about if a brain can pick strawberries, and don?t care
>>> > what it is qualitatively like, then you can?t make the critically
>>> important
>>> > distinctions between these 3 robots
>>> > <
>>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YnTMoU2LKER78bjVJsGkxMsSwvhpPBJZvp9e2oJX9GA/edit?usp=sharing
>>> >
>>> > that are functionally the same but qualitatively very different, one
>>> being
>>> > not conscious at all.
>>>
>>> No being can be deemed conscious without some manner of inputs from
>>> the real world. That is the nature of perception. A robot without
>>> sensors cannot be conscious. If that is what you mean by an "abstract
>>> robot" than I agree that it is not conscious. On the other hand, a
>>> keyboard is a sensor. A very limited sensor but a sensor nonetheless.
>>>
>>> >> ?Nothing in the universe can objectively observe anything else.?
>>>
>>> > All information that comes to our senses is ?objectively? observed and
>>> > devoid of any physical qualitative information, it is all only abstract
>>> > mathematical information.  Descartes, the ultimate septic, realized
>>> that he
>>> > must doubt all objectively observed information.
>>>
>>> You are in no way an objective observer. Any information that may have
>>> been objective before you observed it became biased the moment you
>>> perceived it. That is because your brain filters out and flat out
>>> ignores out any information that does not have relevance to Brent. Why
>>> else could you not see the color grue unless it had no survival
>>> advantage to you or your ancestors? Even now, your inborn Brentward
>>> bias is seething with the need to disagree with me: your primal and
>>> naked need to impose Brent upon me and the rest of the world. Can't
>>> you feel it?
>>>
>>> > But he also realized: ?I
>>> > think therefore I am?. This includes the knowledge of the qualities of
>>> our
>>> > consciousness.
>>>
>>> No it doesn't. Thinking pertains to logic and abstracts and not to
>>> qualia which are in the realm of that what you perceive and feel.
>>> Descartes said that his ability to make logical inferences entailed
>>> that he existed. If intelligence is, as you claim, separable from
>>> consciousness, then Descartes did little more than make a good case
>>> that he was intelligent. In fact he made it point to explicitly assume
>>> that all his perceived qualia were the work of some kind of malicious
>>> demon trying to mislead him about his existence through his senses or
>>> something similarly paranoid. In any case, if anyone was "qualia
>>> blind" it was your man Descartes, who used imagined demons to come up
>>> with a definition of himself that did not incorporate sensory
>>> information. Nonetheless, I don't think Descartes was a philosophic
>>> zombie.
>>>
>>> > We know, absolutely, in a way that cannot be doubted, what
>>> > physical redness is like, and how it is different than greenness.
>>> While it
>>> > is true that we may be a brain, in a vat.  We know, absolutely, that
>>> the
>>> > physics, in the brain, in that vat exist, and we know, absolutely and
>>> > qualitatively, what that physics (in both hemispheres) is like.
>>>
>>> How could we know for sure what what the physical redness of ripe
>>> strawberries looks like when they would look different in the light
>>> and the shadow?
>>>
>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion
>>>
>>> > Let?s say you did objectively detect some new ?perceptronium?.  All you
>>> > would have, describing that perceptronium, is mathematical models and
>>> > descriptions of such.  These mathematical descriptions of perceptronium
>>> > would all be completely devoid of any qualitative meaning.  Until you
>>> > experienced a particular type of perceptronium, directly, you would not
>>> > know, qualitatively, how to interpret any of your mathematical
>>> objective
>>> > descriptions of such.
>>>
>>> Perceptronium is Tegmark's notion and not mine. I am not sure that as
>>> a concept it adds much to the understanding of consciousness.
>>>
>>> > Again, everything you are talking about is what Chalmers, and everyone
>>> > would call ?easy? problems.  Discovering and objectively observing any
>>> kind
>>> > of ?perceptronium? is an easy problem.  We already know how to do this.
>>> > Knowing, qualitatively, what that perceptronium is qualitatively like,
>>> if
>>> > you experienced it, directly, is what makes it hard.
>>>
>>> Being Brent is necessarily like being Brent. And if I were born in
>>> your stead, then I would necessarily be Brent. Moreover, you are being
>>> of finite information in that your entire history, your every thought,
>>> and your every deed can be described by a very large yet nonetheless
>>> finite number of true/false or yes/no questions and their answers. The
>>> smallest number of such yes/no questions and answers would equal your
>>> Shannon entropy.
>>>
>>> That means that there is a unique bitstring that describes you. The
>>> sum total of every discernible thing about you can be expressed as a
>>> very large integer. It would be the most compressed form of you that
>>> it is possible to express.
>>>
>>> > The only ?hard? part of consciousness is the ?Explanatory Ga
>>> > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explanatory_gap>p?, or how do you eff
>>> the
>>> > ineffable nature of qualia.
>>>
>>> There is no "explanatory gap" because it is filled in by natural
>>> selection quite nicely. There are some qualia invariants that can be
>>> identified and experienced quite universally. For example, I know what
>>> your pain feels like. It feels unpleasant. I know that because our
>>> ancestors evolved to feel pain so they would try to avoid dangerously
>>> unhealthy environments and behaviors.
>>>
>>> > Everything else is just easy problems.  We
>>> > already know, mathematically what it is like to be a bat.  But that
>>> tells
>>> > you nothing, qualitatively about what being a bat is like.
>>>
>>> You are right, that's where technology can help. If you go
>>> hang-gliding on a moonless night while wearing a pair of these sonar
>>> glasses, you might come close to knowing what it is like to be a bat.
>>>
>>> http://sonarglasses.com/
>>>
>>> Alternatively, since you are what you eat, you could just eat a bat
>>> and describe how it makes you feel. ;-)
>>>
>>>
>>> Stuart LaForge
>>>
>>>
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