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Does human learning have anything to do with consciousness?
by eutectic 10y ago
Does human learning have anything to do with consciousness?
- visarga 10y agoI don't think there is something magical in flesh. Consciousness is a process of constructing compact and effective representations of the external world which are necessary in order to learn behavior that maximizes rewards (survival). More sophisticated organisms also develop a model of the world and operate on it by imagination or memory recall, so there is also consciousness of internal mental processes. Such mental processes look like a neural turing machine (read from memory, write to memory, focus on specific parts of sensory field / attention). The mental programs to operate over memory and attention are learned by reinforcement learning. Physical control and operating in the external environment are learned by RL too. The notion of self and language emerge naturally from the need to cooperatively solve problems together with other agents. The teaching signal (reward) is based on the environment and inborn instincts (such as hunger, sleep, defense, sex, cooperation) which are evolutionarily evolved. Part of the perception process is based on unsupervised learning, where raw sense data is encoded in the latent semantic space and then, by a top-down process, is tested by regenerating the original input data. It learns by propagating the error (differences) from the data it generates compared to the original sense data. All these processes have been already implemented, albeit crudely, by machine learning. Deep Mind has stated that their purpose this year is to build a rat level AI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAMuNUixKJ8). That would entail rat-level consciousness too.