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Consciousness is the secret sauce. Consciousness as in "subjective experience", what separates us from philosophical zombies, the sensation of the color blue, o

Consciousness is the secret sauce. Consciousness as in "subjective experience", what separates us from philosophical zombies, the sensation of the color blue, of middle-c. Our bodies evolved and kept this extremely rich phenomenon for a reason; it is extraordinarily unlikely for it to have arisen and remained through genetic drift alone. My theory, and I'd love to find someone offering a similar and more fleshed-out hypothesis, is that conscious experience serves as a universal data type. It can encode and play-back any type of knowledge and memory, and relationships among them, from the color of the teacher's shirt that time you broke your bone in 3rd grade, to the formula for electron energy in quantum mechanics. Unfortunately, the word consciousness is almost forbidden in most scientific circles. The dominant view is that there is no Hard Problem of Consciousness and that any discussion of it is quackery, or at least "not science". This taboo is holding us back.

king_magic 10y ago
I've had somewhat similar thoughts, and I am entirely unqualified (and highly likely not the first) to put forth the idea that consciousness's killer app is the ability to rapidly assembly abstract models of experiences (present from current sensory input, past from short/long-term memory or future from mental simulation) and be able to query/manipulate those models, and my (admittedly potentially naive) suspicion is that whatever does "that" is the machinery behind consciousness. This is also why I think that deep learning / neural networks are only going to take us so far. I think there is more to the story of how the brain works than only neural networks that make predictions, and frankly I do not think that any system that does not at least attempt to do "that" (simulating consciousness's model building/manipulation feature) will have much better luck at language processing/understanding.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  One possibility about the machinery of consciousness that would help address the Hard Problem is that the brain is not creating consciousness from scratch, but tapping into some currently misunderstood or unknown physical phenomenon. It's hard to see how information processing alone (which can be done by monks with paper and pencil, if incredibly slowly) can give rise to subjective experience. It seems that this phenomenon, whatever it is, plays a central role in sensory perception, and there's reason to think that it's present even in animals with simple brains. So I suspect that we're looking for some kind of simple operation that can happen on the scale of a small number of neurons, maybe even a single neuron. This is all speculation of course, informed by some knowledge and intuition, but speculation nonetheless. But it's the only way to push the frontier, and the unwillingness to engage with consciousness as a matter of serious study seems to be a major failing of brain science and AI.
outsideline 10y ago
It won't remain a taboo when someone proofs a functional computational model for it. It seems that will need to occur to silence the idea that its quackery. Nothing short of that will suffice. Seeing will indeed be believing. I was partly inspired to pursue the path I took in R&D by observing that the industry didn't seem to want to consider someone thinking different or working on the true foundation of A.I (the hard problems). I figured, if I was able to write software up and down the stack for the billion dollar network infrastructure equipment that powers and services the internet, I probably knew what I was doing w.r.t to engineering. A networked system with a missing foundation...The rest is history and I look forward to making disclosures about my work in the near future. In the meantime, you should know that there are quite capable and industry proven individuals working on this. They aren't quacks, maintain graduate degrees from the top universities of America, and have a proven track record in the industry. The spotlight just doesn't shine in their direction. Of course, once a functional model is proof'd, I'm sure that will change. Such is the history of new paradigms and those who, through deep and new understanding, seek to usher them in...

king_magic 10y ago

I've had somewhat similar thoughts, and I am entirely unqualified (and highly likely not the first) to put forth the idea that consciousness's killer app is the ability to rapidly assembly abstract models of experiences (present from current sensory input, past from short/long-term memory or future from mental simulation) and be able to query/manipulate those models, and my (admittedly potentially naive) suspicion is that whatever does "that" is the machinery behind consciousness. This is also why I think that deep learning / neural networks are only going to take us so far. I think there is more to the story of how the brain works than only neural networks that make predictions, and frankly I do not think that any system that does not at least attempt to do "that" (simulating consciousness's model building/manipulation feature) will have much better luck at language processing/understanding.

marcoperaza 10y ago
One possibility about the machinery of consciousness that would help address the Hard Problem is that the brain is not creating consciousness from scratch, but tapping into some currently misunderstood or unknown physical phenomenon. It's hard to see how information processing alone (which can be done by monks with paper and pencil, if incredibly slowly) can give rise to subjective experience. It seems that this phenomenon, whatever it is, plays a central role in sensory perception, and there's reason to think that it's present even in animals with simple brains. So I suspect that we're looking for some kind of simple operation that can happen on the scale of a small number of neurons, maybe even a single neuron. This is all speculation of course, informed by some knowledge and intuition, but speculation nonetheless. But it's the only way to push the frontier, and the unwillingness to engage with consciousness as a matter of serious study seems to be a major failing of brain science and AI.

outsideline 10y ago

It won't remain a taboo when someone proofs a functional computational model for it. It seems that will need to occur to silence the idea that its quackery. Nothing short of that will suffice. Seeing will indeed be believing. I was partly inspired to pursue the path I took in R&D by observing that the industry didn't seem to want to consider someone thinking different or working on the true foundation of A.I (the hard problems). I figured, if I was able to write software up and down the stack for the billion dollar network infrastructure equipment that powers and services the internet, I probably knew what I was doing w.r.t to engineering. A networked system with a missing foundation...The rest is history and I look forward to making disclosures about my work in the near future. In the meantime, you should know that there are quite capable and industry proven individuals working on this. They aren't quacks, maintain graduate degrees from the top universities of America, and have a proven track record in the industry. The spotlight just doesn't shine in their direction. Of course, once a functional model is proof'd, I'm sure that will change. Such is the history of new paradigms and those who, through deep and new understanding, seek to usher them in...