There should be some government program that forces scientists to watch dystopian science-fiction movies, so they can have some idea of the havoc their research is obviously going to cause. I just stumbled across an interview with Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, that has been on the site for a couple of months. (Apparently the Discover website is affiliated with some sort of magazine, to which you can subscribe.)
Edelman won the Nobel for his work on antibodies, but for a long time his primary interest has been in consciousness. He believes (as all right-thinking people do) that consciousness is ultimately biological, and is interested in building computer models of the phenomenon. So we get things like this:
Eugene Izhikevitch [a mathematician at the Neurosciences Institute] and I have made a model with a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, all connected through neuronal anatomy equivalent to that of a cat brain. What we find, to our delight, is that it has intrinsic activity. Up until now our BBDs had activity only when they confronted the world, when they saw input signals. In between signals, they went dark. But this damn thing now fires on its own continually. The second thing is, it has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex—what you would see if you did an electroencephalogram. Third of all, it has a rest state. That is, when you don’t stimulate it, the whole population of neurons stray back and forth, as has been described by scientists in human beings who aren’t thinking of anything.
In other words, our device has some lovely properties that are necessary to the idea of a conscious artifact. It has that property of indwelling activity. So the brain is already speaking to itself. That’s a very important concept for consciousness.
Oh, great. We build giant robots, equip them with lasers, and now we teach them how to gaze at their navels, and presumably how to dream. What can possibly go wrong?
“If we create a conscious, thinking AI human simulation, what rights does it have? If I make an AI copy of my brain, who has the rights over what happens to it after it’s switched on? The original me, or the copy?”
These are indeed very interesting questions, and ones I think we’ll need to seriously address long before we have a reasonable simulation of a human brain. After all, even non-human animals have some rights in our society. If it’s true that Edelman and Izhikevitch really have created a model cat brain that demonstrates brain-like behaviour in terms of self-stimulation, then we need to be asking these questions right now.
Incidentally, my answer to your second question would definitely be the copy, at least once it’s switched on. Do you have rights over your clone or your identical twin?
As far as I can tell from that one, if I’m defined as one continous instance of internal awareness, then I may have “died” many times already, and it’s only from an observer’s perspective that I’m one continuous being. Kind of gets under your skin. We don’t really continuously exist except to other people?!?!
That we don’t freak out about this is probably the same reason we don’t freak out about flying (well, most of us), or even getting out of bed in the morning, considering all the horrendous things that happen to other people after they get out of bed! Sometimes there is something to be said for having a limited imagination 🙂
Bruce, I’m familiar with Dust Theory, although not by that name. Again, as far as I can see it only really presents a serious problem to people who start out believing in the hard problem (and I do mean believe in a quasi-religious sense). It’s not very different from Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, which I find equally unconvincing. And I don’t have a philosophical problem with some part of the universe being conscious (or rather simulating something and thereby generating consciousness), though I think the reality of it doing so in practice is far less likely than the person in your link, ie negligible if not impossible, given the distances involved.
“Put 10 people side by side, holding hands and each thinking of a different word in a sentence. Can you say that there is a gestalt awareness that contains the whole sentence in its consciousness? No, eh? So why would that be true for 10^x atoms, or 10^10 neurons?”
Because the neurons are communicating with each other, and with other neurons, so that at a certain higher level of organisation there is a self (or if you prefer to keep it strictly biological a “neuronal correlate of consciousness”) which processes the syntax and semantics of the sentence as a whole. I mean, nobody pretends that 10 unconnected neurons each responding to an aspect of a stimulus would generate conscious experience.
“As far as I can tell from that one, if I’m defined as one continous instance of internal awareness, then I may have “died” many times already, and it’s only from an observer’s perspective that I’m one continous being. Kind of gets under your skin. We don’t really continously exist except to other people”
That’s pretty much Hofstadter’s take, and I pretty much agree. We’re less of a self than a succession of selves, and each self has less integrity than we conventionally think.
Ginger, except for the fact that you state you don’t “believe” in the hard problem, I don’t disagree with your last post. But note where you say:
>Because the neurons are communicating with each other, and with other neurons, so that at a certain higher level of organisation there is a self…
This is still the hard problem, you’re just implying a solution to it: that meta-information states, such as physics equations, math theorems, mental models of the world or minds, all have as real an existance as the atoms and photons that they’re composed of. Each level of abstraction, if grounded in reality, exists in just as real a sense as those above or below it. But an infinite number of such things could exist, so they must have a causal relationship with physical reality.
Well, I’m not really comfortable with talk of abstract things being “as real as” material things. They’re real, all right. But I don’t claim they’re of exactly the same ontological status. Again, it seems palpably obvious that they have a causal relationship with reality. There’s a reason maths works and describes the universe. Here I suppose my approach is broadly in line with Dennett’s “intentional stance” approach.
“This is still the hard problem, you’re just implying a solution to it:”
I suppose you could put it that way, but it just doesn’t seem like an interesting or especially difficult problem to me. I mean, the 10 people holding hands bears no relation whatsoever to how hard problem denialists like myself envisage consciousness, or for that matter our neuroscientific knowledge. Searle’s and Chalmers’s experiments, and “dust theory” get closer, but they still seem to boil down to an “ick response” to non-intuitive implications of neuroscience.
>Searle’s and Chalmers’s experiments, and “dust theory” get closer, but they still seem to boil down to an “ick response” to non-intuitive implications of neuroscience…
No, there’s something we’re not getting, and those paradoxes just aren’t enough clues. It seems to me it’s more akin to theories about time or interpreting QM. There’s something seriously missing about our understanding, but it’s like seeing behind your own head. So the most practical stance is Dennet’s, but it’s just the equivalent of Feynman’s comment re QM – “Shut up and calculate”.
“So the most practical stance is Dennet’s, but it’s just the equivalent of Feynman’s comment re QM – “Shut up and calculate”.”
I wouldn’t particularly disagree with that, but then I think Feynman’s comment is right. To the extent that thought experiments generate testable hypotheses or avenues of research, then great. But otherwise they’re mainly just amusing diversions.
Sean, your claim about biological origin of consciosness is probably wrong. Strange, but nobody yet here mentioned Memetics. Although Dennets’s name was waived a lot, he is basically a philosopher …
Memetics claim that high consciosness, among other things like languages, dress codes, religions, scientific ideas, technology (even agriculture in the first place) etc. – is a product of memetic (= cultural) evolution, which works much the same way as genetic one, but has a different type of replicator. Memes are second replicators that employ humans in the same “selfish” way as genes – they just replicate with minor deviations and propagate by imitation. Only some copies can survive – hence you inevitable get memetic evolution. There is a lot of evidence that memes can have high survival ability at a detriment to survival of genes, i.e. it’s not at all true that all human culture gives some evolutionary advantage and hence can be explained by some biological “profit”. So evolution of humans is different from any other animal’s, because we bear and propagate 2 different kind of replicators – genes and memes, and animals only have genes (with exceptions so rare that they make sensations each time discovered).
By “high consciousness” i mean this feeling of mini-“me”, sitting somewhere in my head and operating the body. Imagine you look in the mirror and see utterly different face and body. You would still be quite sure it’s exactly you, but in a different body .. If by consciousness you guys mean general awareness of environment, than probably infusoria and even bacteria are conscious 🙂
This is Memetics, supported among well-known atheist people by Richard Dawkins (if you need authority on this).
Than there is brilliant and highly original phychologist and thinker Julian Jaynes, who claimed with very good arguments that above defined “high consciosness” is no less or more but a complex set of language metaphors, that allow us to create internal mind-space. Most important of them are metaphors of “time like space”, because we can’t imagine time per se, as we don’t see it or feel directly.
So there is nothing supernatural in saying that consciosness is NOT biological. Sure enough, ultimately it’s all down to QM etc., but i can’t see any value in trying to derive properties of social interactions directly from axioms of quantum mechanics.
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Why do you automatically assume artificial intelligence will become a threat to humanity?
I think the first thing a true aware and superintelligent being will do is get away from us and Earth as soon and as fast as possible. Why be stuck on one planet with such a limited species?
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