[FRIAM] Is consciousness measurable?
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Wed Oct 19 13:15:23 EDT 2022
On 10/18/22 10:21 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
> A deep learning system set up for next sentence prediction, one that
> consumed gigabytes of literature, would learn to mimic emotions as
> expressed in writing. It would likely have mappings of context and
> events to plausible emotional descriptions. It would have latent
> encodings about the same kinds of things that a person would care
> about, if exposed to the same information. It might well have latent
> states for fear and love and such. My conclusion would be that
> emotions are not to be taken so seriously.
In the early days of N-gram (early for me, early also because
CPU/Storage had gotten cheap enough for large corpii) analysis I was
impressed with how prophetic something *that* simple could be was.
Today's spell-correction/suggestion etc. stuff is eerie (uncanny?) to
me. A few years ago I wouldn't have imagined that convincing "next
sentence prediction" was imminent, but now I'm ready to expect it any
second. Similar with body-language prediction as a corollary to this
*and* to automated driving...
In a couple of hours, Dick Gabriel will be giving his talk at SimTable
on his Poetry Generator Inkwell, which I have had my doubts about in
principle. His scholarly essay on the topic The Nature of Poetic Order
<http://www.natureoforder.com/library/nature-of-poetic-order.pdf> is too
large (100 pages) and dense for me to have quaffed in the time
available, but the bits I *have* been able to take in are very promising
as one (of many possible?) perspectives on higher order semantic
analysis of texts.
I don't think writing or analyzing poetry is necessarily anything like
the pinnacle of conscious processing, but it is probably an
important/interesting edge/corner case.
I'm still processing your concluding statement "emotions are not to be
taken so seriously". I watch my young puppy/kitty growing up together
and virtually *all* I can parse from their interactions with one
another, their people and their physical enviornment IS emotional, and
they either take it all very seriously or not at all?
>
>> On Oct 18, 2022, at 5:36 PM, Gillian Densmore
>> <gil.densmore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> *terminator soundtrack here*
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 5:55 PM Prof David West
>> <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe lack of emotion, but ability to 'fake it' by repeating what
>> it read a being with that emotion would say only proves the AI is
>> a sociopath or psychopath.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022, at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>>> When Blake Lemoine claimed that LaMDA was conscious, it struck
>>> me that one way to test that would be to determine whether one
>>> could evoke an emotional response from it. You can't cause it
>>> physical pain since it doesn't have sense organs. But, one could
>>> ask it if it cares about anything. If so, threaten to harm
>>> whatever it is it cares about and see how it responds. A nice
>>> feature of this test, or something similar, is that you wouldn't
>>> tell it what the reasonable emotional responses might be.
>>> Otherwise, it could simply repeat what it read a being with that
>>> emotion would say. One might argue that emotion is not a
>>> necessary element of consciousness, but I think a being without
>>> emotion would be at best a pale version of consciousness.
>>>
>>> -- Russ Abbott
>>> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
>>> California State University, Los Angeles
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 2:14 PM Prof David West
>>> <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I an concurrently reading, /Nineteen Ways of Looking at
>>> Consciousness/, by Patrick House and /Mountain in the Sea/,
>>> by Ray Nayler. The latter is fiction. (The former, because
>>> it deals with consciousness may also be fiction, but it
>>> purports to be neuro-scientific / philosophical.)
>>>
>>> The novel is about Octopi and AI and an android, plus humans
>>> and juxtaposes ideas about consciousness in comparison and
>>> contrast. A lot of fun.
>>>
>>> Both books pose some interesting questions and both support
>>> glen's advocacy of a typology.
>>>
>>> davew
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022, at 1:26 PM, glen wrote:
>>> > There are many different measures of *types* of
>>> consciousness. But
>>> > without specifying the type, such questions are not even
>>> philosophical.
>>> > They're nonsense.
>>> >
>>> > For example, the test of whether one can recognize one's
>>> image in a
>>> > mirror couldn't be performed by a chatbot. But it is one
>>> of the
>>> > measures of consciousness. Another type of test would be
>>> those that
>>> > measure conscious state before, during, and after
>>> anesthesia. Again,
>>> > that wouldn't work the same for a chatbot. But both
>>> aggregate measures
>>> > like EEG and fMRI connectomes might have analogs in
>>> tracing for
>>> > algorithms like ANNs. If we could simply decide "Yes,
>>> *that* chatbot is
>>> > what we're going to call conscious and, therefore, the
>>> traced patterns
>>> > it exhibits in the profiler are the correlates for chatbot
>>> > consciousness." Then we'd have a trace-based test to
>>> perform on other
>>> > chatbots *with similar computational structure*.
>>> >
>>> > Hell, the cops have their tests for consciousness executed
>>> at drunk
>>> > driving checkpoints. Look up and touch your nose. Recite
>>> the alphabet
>>> > backwards. Etc. These are tests for types of
>>> consciousness. Of course,
>>> > I feel sure there are people who'd like to move the goal
>>> posts and
>>> > claim "That's not Consciousness with a big C." Pffft. No
>>> typology ⇒ no
>>> > science. So if someone can't list off a few distinct types of
>>> > consciousness, then it's not even philosophy.
>>> >
>>> > On 10/18/22 13:12, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>>> >> Paul Buchheit asked on Twitter
>>> >> https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/1582455708041113600
>>> >>
>>> >> "Is consciousness measurable, or is it just a
>>> philosophical concept? If an AI claims to be conscious, how
>>> do we know that it's not simply faking/imitating
>>> consciousness? Is there something that I could challenge it
>>> with to prove/disprove consciousness?"
>>> >>
>>> >> What do you think? Interesting question.
>>> >>
>>> >> -J.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
>>> >
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