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 Post subject: A reply post under 3 pages in length? Yeesh, I must be losing my touch...
PostPosted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 9:13 am 
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RedKnight wrote:
If we go down this road, aren't we veering toward determinism? Essentially, we are saying that our responses are completely predetermined by our, "programming," and if the same is true for all human beings, aren't all of our interactions since the dawn of time already set in stone? Obviously, natural events and other, "outside," stimulus come into play...

And if we are, what of it? Unless you want to go back to Cartesian dualism and say that our minds are separate from our brains, then our consciousness is based on a physical construct. We're probably safe from full determinism, from our point of view, due to quantum uncertainty, but that doesn't change the fact that if we can replicate a similar physical construct, or an artificial construct which works in an analogous manner, then it is theoretically possible to create an intelligence (there's more to it than that of course, involving development and input/output methods, but the basic principle stands).

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What I'm trying to say is that when a computer, independent of direct human suggestion, can conceive of its' own existence, it will define exactly what it means to be a sentient AI; in the opinion of the forum readers, is this possible?

Yes. Krylex's argument that we cannot create something smarter than ourselves is a bit silly. While it's true that no one person can completely understand a being smarter than ourselves (in fact, we cannot completely understand ourselves, for Gödellian reasons), that doesn't mean we can't build one. No one person knows every line of code in Microsoft Windows, but it still works (More or less). Furthermore, the creation of any actual AI program would likely involve a great deal of evolutionary algorithms and so forth, things which are set up to use simple rules in order to become more complex on their own. So, barring some unforeseen physical barrier*, I don't see why it shouldn't be theoretically possible to create a machine intelligence at some point.

Now, whether or not we will ever do so is another question. We could easily end up killing ourselves off before then, or just banning AI research outright.

As for the wisdom of doing such a thing, I can't say I'm really opposed to it. Hopefully we would be able to give them some sense of ethics to head off any potential Matrix (Ha!) or Teminator-type scenario. And you have to keep in mind that AI's wouldn't necessarily contain the competitive and dominating impulses humans do unless we put them there. Yudkowsky has been talking*2 about this type of thing for years. Although if it came to it, and the Machines had access to advanced nanotech and automated weaponry, I don't think the requisite ragtag human resistance would have much of a chance :)


* Of which I don't see any on the horizon. Processing power could be a problem, as we still have a ways to go to reach human-equivalence for advanced abilities, but that'll probably be solved by either quantum computers or better (nanotech?) methods for making non-quantum ones.

*2 Usual disclaimers apply- his opinions are not necessarily all my own, and so forth. I haven't had the chance to read through this revised version yet, but as I recall, it's pretty good.

EDIT: Misspelled "determinism". I had no choice!

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Last edited by Wandering Idiot on Sat Aug 30, 2003 3:29 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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 Post subject: Yes, I [i]can[/i] turn any debate towards abstract metaphysics.
PostPosted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 11:10 am 
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RedKnight wrote:
Referring briefly back to the Occam's razor procedure, is it useful in the context of our daily lives to accept the implications of what you have said here?


I think you're confusing Occam's Razor with basic pragmatism here. Occam's Razor is a scientific principle. It simply states that models of reality that are needlessly complex should be rejected in favor of "the simplest explanation" for all phenomena in question. This has nothing to do with whether such a model would be "useful" to us or not. Pragmatism is a philosophy that says that "truth" can only be understood in terms of usefulness (rather than the distinction between "subjective" and "objective" reality). Pragmatism uses Occam's Razor to some extent, as does every other philosophy in the world. However, you cannot use the two terms as synonyms.

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If we go down this road, aren't we veering toward determinism? Essentially, we are saying that our responses are completely predetermined by our, "programming," and if the same is true for all human beings, aren't all of our interactions since the dawn of time already set in stone? Obviously, natural events and other, "outside," stimulus come into play...


WI pretty much answered this one. However, I might as well give you a link to the free will debate thread, where this topic has been covered in detail. Basically, as WI said (somewhere, I think - too lazy to find the exact source), human beings have free will because, due to Godel's incompleteness theorem, no system can be totally self-explanatory - i.e. it can never comprehend itself completely. Thus, human beings can never actually learn the exact (electrochemical) reasons for their actions, even in theory. A being more complex than a human could, but that being could never learn the specific details of how vis own brain worked. Thus, free will does exist insofar as each individual can never understand why they make all the choices they do.

Before we attempt to create a conscious machine, however, we have to figure out exactly what consciousness is. My theory (and it is only a theory) is that consciousness is a naturally-emerging feature of any complex system. In other words, any system, once it reaches a certain level of complexity (defined by the number of interactions between the different components of the system), can be considered conscious. (I'll probably explain my reasons for believing this in more detail in a later post.) Of course, just because the system is conscious doesn't necessarily mean that it will "think" or "act" in any way like a human being.


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 12:42 pm 
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Before we attempt to create a conscious machine, however, we have to figure out exactly what consciousness is. My theory (and it is only a theory) is that consciousness is a naturally-emerging feature of any complex system. In other words, any system, once it reaches a certain level of complexity (defined by the number of interactions between the different components of the system), can be considered conscious. (I'll probably explain my reasons for believing this in more detail in a later post.) Of course, just because the system is conscious doesn't necessarily mean that it will "think" or "act" in any way like a human being.

So, then, is God or some deity the consciousness of the universe?

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 Post subject: Yes, I realize I'm being vague and confusing. I think I'll just answer questions and objections as they come up, and hopefully that way you'll all be able to get a coherent picture of what I'm trying to say. Me so lazy...
PostPosted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 1:04 pm 
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The Baron wrote:
So, then, is God or some deity the consciousness of the universe?


[oracle]Bingo.[/oracle]

(Well, sort of; The universe itself really can't be considered a unified system; as I said, complexity is measured by the number of interactions between the constituent parts of the system. The inherent complexity of each individual part does not matter unless that complexity translates into a complexity in the relationship between that part and other parts. I would say that individual galaxies' interactions with each other are not as complex as individual neurons' interactions with each other. (The fact that a galaxy is more complex than a neuron is irrelevant.) In this way, our brains can be considered a more "complex" system than the universe itself. However, the universe is to some degree "conscious"*, in the same way any reasonably complex system is conscious. Thus, the universe can be considered a kind of god, since it is (somewhat) "conscious", it is omnipotent (in the fact that anything that happens can be considered to be a "decision" of the universe), and it created itself. Still, just because the universe as a system encompasses us doesn't mean its level of complexity, using my definition, is greater than the level of complexity of the human brain. Therefore, in a sense, god exists, but we are smarter than ver.

I would say that the entire planet Earth and its ecosystem is more "complex (using my definition) than the human brain - thus, I believe that the Earth, as a whole, can be considered more "conscious" than us.)

* Or maybe not. Another problem is that the idea of a system kind of requires some kind of input/output of information between the system and an "outside". The universe, by definition, has no "outside". Again, I'll deal with my ideas about systems, complexity, and consciousness a little more explicitly in a later post - I'm kind of tired right now.

[EDIT]
revolutio wrote:
I assume you have read about the Gaia theory, right?


Indeed.[/EDIT]


Last edited by IcyMonkey on Sun Aug 31, 2003 1:18 am, edited 13 times in total.

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 Post subject: Re: Yes, I [i]can[/i] turn any debate towards abstract metaphysics.
PostPosted: Sat Aug 30, 2003 1:08 pm 
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IcyMonkey wrote:
Before we attempt to create a conscious machine, however, we have to figure out exactly what consciousness is. My theory (and it is only a theory) is that consciousness is a naturally-emerging feature of any complex system. In other words, any system, once it reaches a certain level of complexity (defined by the number of interactions between the different components of the system), can be considered conscious. (I'll probably explain my reasons for believing this in more detail in a later post.) Of course, just because the system is conscious doesn't necessarily mean that it will "think" or "act" in any way like a human being.

I assume you have read about the Gaia theory, right?


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 3:31 pm 
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If we go down this road, aren't we veering toward determinism? Essentially, we are saying that our responses are completely predetermined by our, "programming," and if the same is true for all human beings, aren't all of our interactions since the dawn of time already set in stone? Obviously, natural events and other, "outside," stimulus come into play...


If you know all the inputs and the program then you can derive the outputs. Why would it be different for a human brain? There is chance on the quantum level, (however, this is only because we don't have a way of observing something without changing it. If we did we could fully understand it in the way we could understand a computer system, or a airplane.) so you couldn't take the state of the universe 10^-47 seconds after the big bang and tell whether or not your guest this evening will take sugar in his tea or not. There is limits to what you can do with an input/output system. However, there could be random numbers going into the equations of the brain. But, because the brain is not infinite it cannot be truely random (I can whip up an explaination of this if called for). Only pseudorandom (much like a computer chip's RNG). And therefore it can still be predetermined with the proper information. The reason why decisions can be seemingly random and strange is because we do not have enough information to work with.

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 3:36 pm 
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Does Heisenberg Uncertainty not state that if you somehow knew the position and momentum of an electron simultaneously, you could then derive the action of every atom afterwards?

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 4:09 pm 
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You'd have to know the exact posistion and momentum of every electon it interacts with, (and every electron those interact with ad nausium). But if you did know it then you could derive the posistion with perfect accuracy.

Which is pretty much what I said:

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(however, this is only because we don't have a way of observing something without changing it. If we did we could fully understand it in the way we could understand a computer system, or a airplane.)

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PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 4:26 pm 
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The Baron wrote:
Does Heisenberg Uncertainty not state that if you somehow knew the position and momentum of an electron simultaneously, you could then derive the action of every atom afterwards?


What the fuck are you talking about?

Not only does the uncertainty principle not state anything resembling what you said, it basically would render what you said meaningless. Heisenbeg's Uncertainty Principle states that we can never know the position and velocity of a particle simultaneously. Asking what would happen if we "did know" is like asking what would happen if an object exceeded the speed of light. Light speed simply can't be exceeded (unless we cheat via wormholes or warp drive or such, but even then the actual object is moving at less than c relative to the path in space-time that it is taking), and likewise, we simply cannot determine both the position and velocity of a particle to an arbitrary degree of accuracy. In fact, most scientists don't even believe that particles have an exact position or velocity anyway. The position and velocity are considered to be inseperable aspects of the particle's wave function (somewhat analogous to the way space and time are considered to be inseperable aspects of spacetime in relativity).

Quantum Physics is an explicitly nondeterministic theory.


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PostPosted: Mon Sep 01, 2003 6:11 pm 
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I prefer Sherlock Holmes' idea over Occam's Razor.

Sherlock Holmes wrote:
Once you've ruled out all other possible solutions, the last one, no matter how ludicrious or impossible, must be true.

I just felt the need to share that with everyone, right here. Don't ask me why. Well, do... But you won't get a clear and concise answer.

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 4:24 am 
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Hercule Poirot used that as well. It must be in the Great Detective's handbook. :wink:

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