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Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorit

Why AGI and not "Artificial Consciousness" ? Is it because people think that consciousness is a by-product emerging from many kinds of pattern detection algorithms that suit all cases? (if so, what is the evidence for that?)

tedivm 9y ago
I think it's just because intelligence is better defined and easier to test than consciousness.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Intelligence is one of the most poorly defined words there is; I can't even begin to imagine what you have in mind. Consciousness is usually only one of two things; either "being aware" or "the experience of having an inner voice".
  - Smaug123 9y ago
    Neither of those is a concrete definition. Defining "consciousness" as "being aware" is just punting the question on to "how do you define the word AWARE?". And some people don't have an inner monologue. It's not specifically mentioned in http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... but it's of that same class of thing; there are certainly hits on Google for people claiming not to have an inner voice, and I didn't even bother reading the article on psychologytoday about it.
    - Filligree 9y ago
      Yup, I'm one of them. Let me set the record straight, though. I'm not claiming to not have an inner life; I'm claiming to not have an inner voice, except if I'm reading "out loud" internally or whatnot. (Which is useful when writing, but not necessary.) I just use other modalities. To the best of my knowledge there's only one guy, a philosopher, who's claimed to have no inner life at all--and I don't think I believe him.
    - akvadrako 9y ago
      "Being aware" is a common phrase understood by most native english speakers as a synonym of "conscious". If you are asleep, you are not aware of much. If you get hit by a car as you cross the road it's probably because you weren't aware of it. You can do some actions, like driving, either consciously or unconsciously. I didn't say that all "people" have inner voices (by which I meant inner life). But by that definition, it's a requirement to be conscious.
MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
No, if anything it's the opposite. Too many people who are irrevocably hung up on the "hard problem of consciousness" would object to the language.
simonh 9y ago
A conscious system might be unintelligent, while it’s possible to imagine a highly intelligent system with no consciousness. They’re just different things. Also pattern detection is often raised in the way you just did, but it’s realy a distraction. Pattern detection just helps recognise things, it’s not inherently related to the ability to reason about things. So you need both, but they are not the same thing either.
- nurettin 9y ago
  But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept?
  - edanm 9y ago
    Short answer - we don't know, but probably? We don't really know what consciousness is or how it happens. We believe that it's possible to be highly intelligent without being conscious. I mean, I really hope that's true, personally, since we would hope to one day make an AGI that will carry out human desires, and we'd hope we weren't making a conscious entity which would be the equivalent of a slave.
  - pixl97 9y ago
    Where consciousness arises is not the interesting question. Why is. Biologically, brain structures spend a lot of effort predicting what state they will be in soon. Essentially they are always trying to predict the future. As minds evolved this ability separated from processing what was going on to what could be going on (dreams in more advanced creatures). The next important concept is self versus not-self. If you can change the world around you via intelligence you'll want to avoid unnecessary energy inefficient feedback loops. Being able to model your actions and their effects is the first step of defining 'you'.
  - eli_gottlieb 9y ago
    > But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept? "Who cares?" and "yes".
johncolanduoni 9y ago
Probably because it's best to not use terms that are likely to spark debate just by word choice unless you actually want to have that debate? If you're concerned with AI risk, it doesn't really matter the precise nature of your philosophy of mind as long as it allows artificial devices capable of reasoning with possibly adversarial goals.
- nurettin 9y ago
  Ah, so the AGI term users are like "ha-ha I chose a vague term, now you can't argue semantics, take that!"
  - frooxie 9y ago
    We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.
    - nurettin 9y ago
      Not sure what you mean. I've seen some hacker news people argue the exact opposite and downvote me for exploring the exact opposite concept, now the opposite happens. I guess this is not the right place to ask or think.
      - frooxie 9y ago
        > Not sure what you mean. I mean that e.g. if we create a machine that can solve every thinking-related problem that humans can solve, then we can be certain that we have created artificial intelligence. But how are we supposed to ascertain that we have created something conscious, as in a machine with subjective experience? Strictly speaking I can't be certain that _you_ are conscious. (Also, why would we replace "AGI" with "AC", when people are looking to build something intelligent, irrespective of whether it has internal subjective experience?) > I guess this is not the right place to ask or think. That has not been my experience.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
I don't have any way to prove that you're conscious. It seems premature to assume that a hypothetical future AGI will necessarily possess consciousness, even if we could agree on what exactly "consciousness" is.
- pizza 9y ago
  OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. (if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentiously) prove if a person were conscious or not. But the thing about humans is that they cannot simulate 2 consciousnesses simultaneously (apart from culturally-designated illness known as multiple personality disorder), nor can we import another's consciousness. Nor do we even particularly (barring Totoni's work, or Tegmark's work] know what consciousness is. Those two properties are (probably) never going to be human-capable. In that regard, humans are unlikely to be able to ever be a (or 'the') kind of being used to determine whether or not something is conscious; if ever it will be possible, that will be a machine's task.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    > Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. How? You say "query", but what would the query look like?
    - pizza 9y ago
      subsumption followed by introspection
  - leakydropout 9y ago
    "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology
leakydropout 9y ago
Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. [...] In 1870, Huxley conducted a case study on a French soldier who had sustained a shot in the Franco-Prussian War that fractured his left parietal bone. Every few weeks the soldier would enter a trance-like state, smoking, dressing himself, and aiming his cane like a rifle all while being insensitive to pins, electric shocks, odorous substances, vinegar, noise, and certain light conditions. Huxley used this study to show that consciousness was not necessary to execute these purposeful actions, justifying the assumption that humans are insensible machines. Huxley’s mechanistic attitude towards the body convinced him that the brain alone causes behavior. [...] A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the Bereitschaftspotential or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism
sullyj3 9y ago
Because when I'm worried about a machine recycling the atoms that make up my body, I'm not particularly interested in whether it has conscious experience. There's no particular reason to suppose that something needs to be conscious in order to be very effective at achieving arbitrary goals.

tedivm 9y ago

I think it's just because intelligence is better defined and easier to test than consciousness.

akvadrako 9y ago
Intelligence is one of the most poorly defined words there is; I can't even begin to imagine what you have in mind. Consciousness is usually only one of two things; either "being aware" or "the experience of having an inner voice".
- Smaug123 9y ago
  Neither of those is a concrete definition. Defining "consciousness" as "being aware" is just punting the question on to "how do you define the word AWARE?". And some people don't have an inner monologue. It's not specifically mentioned in http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex... but it's of that same class of thing; there are certainly hits on Google for people claiming not to have an inner voice, and I didn't even bother reading the article on psychologytoday about it.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    Yup, I'm one of them. Let me set the record straight, though. I'm not claiming to not have an inner life; I'm claiming to not have an inner voice, except if I'm reading "out loud" internally or whatnot. (Which is useful when writing, but not necessary.) I just use other modalities. To the best of my knowledge there's only one guy, a philosopher, who's claimed to have no inner life at all--and I don't think I believe him.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    "Being aware" is a common phrase understood by most native english speakers as a synonym of "conscious". If you are asleep, you are not aware of much. If you get hit by a car as you cross the road it's probably because you weren't aware of it. You can do some actions, like driving, either consciously or unconsciously. I didn't say that all "people" have inner voices (by which I meant inner life). But by that definition, it's a requirement to be conscious.

MaxfordAndSons 9y ago

No, if anything it's the opposite. Too many people who are irrevocably hung up on the "hard problem of consciousness" would object to the language.

simonh 9y ago

A conscious system might be unintelligent, while it’s possible to imagine a highly intelligent system with no consciousness. They’re just different things. Also pattern detection is often raised in the way you just did, but it’s realy a distraction. Pattern detection just helps recognise things, it’s not inherently related to the ability to reason about things. So you need both, but they are not the same thing either.

nurettin 9y ago
But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept?
- edanm 9y ago
  Short answer - we don't know, but probably? We don't really know what consciousness is or how it happens. We believe that it's possible to be highly intelligent without being conscious. I mean, I really hope that's true, personally, since we would hope to one day make an AGI that will carry out human desires, and we'd hope we weren't making a conscious entity which would be the equivalent of a slave.
- pixl97 9y ago
  Where consciousness arises is not the interesting question. Why is. Biologically, brain structures spend a lot of effort predicting what state they will be in soon. Essentially they are always trying to predict the future. As minds evolved this ability separated from processing what was going on to what could be going on (dreams in more advanced creatures). The next important concept is self versus not-self. If you can change the world around you via intelligence you'll want to avoid unnecessary energy inefficient feedback loops. Being able to model your actions and their effects is the first step of defining 'you'.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  > But where does consciousness arise? Is the ability to reason about things independent of this concept? "Who cares?" and "yes".

johncolanduoni 9y ago

Probably because it's best to not use terms that are likely to spark debate just by word choice unless you actually want to have that debate? If you're concerned with AI risk, it doesn't really matter the precise nature of your philosophy of mind as long as it allows artificial devices capable of reasoning with possibly adversarial goals.

nurettin 9y ago
Ah, so the AGI term users are like "ha-ha I chose a vague term, now you can't argue semantics, take that!"
- frooxie 9y ago
  We understand what intelligence is better than we understand what consciousness is. "Artificial Consciousness" would be the vague term.
  - nurettin 9y ago
    Not sure what you mean. I've seen some hacker news people argue the exact opposite and downvote me for exploring the exact opposite concept, now the opposite happens. I guess this is not the right place to ask or think.
    - frooxie 9y ago
      > Not sure what you mean. I mean that e.g. if we create a machine that can solve every thinking-related problem that humans can solve, then we can be certain that we have created artificial intelligence. But how are we supposed to ascertain that we have created something conscious, as in a machine with subjective experience? Strictly speaking I can't be certain that _you_ are conscious. (Also, why would we replace "AGI" with "AC", when people are looking to build something intelligent, irrespective of whether it has internal subjective experience?) > I guess this is not the right place to ask or think. That has not been my experience.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

I don't have any way to prove that you're conscious. It seems premature to assume that a hypothetical future AGI will necessarily possess consciousness, even if we could agree on what exactly "consciousness" is.

pizza 9y ago
OK but here's a little gedankenexperiment: suppose I had a machine that could simultaneously simulate 2 consciousnesses (either parent/child configuration or sibling), (bear with me) import recordings from conscious beings, and allowed one consciousness to query the other. Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. (if I am getting this right) those would be the minimal criteria for being able to (contentiously) prove if a person were conscious or not. But the thing about humans is that they cannot simulate 2 consciousnesses simultaneously (apart from culturally-designated illness known as multiple personality disorder), nor can we import another's consciousness. Nor do we even particularly (barring Totoni's work, or Tegmark's work] know what consciousness is. Those two properties are (probably) never going to be human-capable. In that regard, humans are unlikely to be able to ever be a (or 'the') kind of being used to determine whether or not something is conscious; if ever it will be possible, that will be a machine's task.
- yorwba 9y ago
  > Then it could know if someone were conscious or not. How? You say "query", but what would the query look like?
  - pizza 9y ago
    subsumption followed by introspection
- leakydropout 9y ago
  "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." Dennett denies Nagel's claim that the bat's consciousness is inaccessible, contending that any "interesting or theoretically important" features of a bat's consciousness would be amenable to third-person observation. For instance, it is clear that bats cannot detect objects more than a few meters away because echolocation has a limited range. He holds that any similar aspects of its experiences could be gleaned by further scientific experiments. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F Heterophenomenology ("phenomenology of another, not oneself") is a term coined by Daniel Dennett to describe an explicitly third-person, scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. It consists of applying the scientific method with an anthropological bent, combining the subject's self-reports with all other available evidence to determine their mental state. The goal is to discover how the subject sees the world him- or herself, without taking the accuracy of the subject's view for granted. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology

leakydropout 9y ago

Epiphenomenalism is a mind–body philosophy marked by the belief that basic physical events (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). Mental events are viewed as completely dependent on physical functions and, as such, have no independent existence or causal efficacy; it is a mere appearance. [...] In 1870, Huxley conducted a case study on a French soldier who had sustained a shot in the Franco-Prussian War that fractured his left parietal bone. Every few weeks the soldier would enter a trance-like state, smoking, dressing himself, and aiming his cane like a rifle all while being insensitive to pins, electric shocks, odorous substances, vinegar, noise, and certain light conditions. Huxley used this study to show that consciousness was not necessary to execute these purposeful actions, justifying the assumption that humans are insensible machines. Huxley’s mechanistic attitude towards the body convinced him that the brain alone causes behavior. [...] A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the Bereitschaftspotential or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism

sullyj3 9y ago

Because when I'm worried about a machine recycling the atoms that make up my body, I'm not particularly interested in whether it has conscious experience. There's no particular reason to suppose that something needs to be conscious in order to be very effective at achieving arbitrary goals.