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Is your definition actually accurate enough to capture instances of intuitive judgements that "this is a conscious being" without being overly broad to include
by xelxebar 6y ago
Is your definition actually accurate enough to capture instances of intuitive judgements that "this is a conscious being" without being overly broad to include "obviously non-conscious" things?
By calling it a spectrum, the already fuzzy definition becomes so broad as to be almost useless. Your spectrum and "knowing" model admits conscious GPS, albeit "low consciousness." What about spiders or GPT-3 or suitibly chosen digits out of an RNG? At best these all fail the intuitive answer test for most people.
Perhaps you have a mental model of Yudkowsian self-optimizers? Or maybe you are thinking more classically along the lines of Kant?
The whole problem I am trying to communicate is that your are playing and refining a model without defining exactly what your are modeling.
- mojuba 6y agoSelf-awareness is paradoxical, I am aware of that. What I'm trying to model at least mentally for now, is something that has a chance of becoming self-aware unless we are missing something else. In other words, let's say these are the necessary but not necessarily sufficient conditions for the emergence of self-awareness: (1) having some model of the world (MOTW), (2) maintaing a relative position of Self in MOTW, (3) maintining a history of positions in time. The level of self-awareness then becomes a function of the complexity of MOTW and the complexity of the system's interfaces. For example is the model good enough to help it survive or reach whatever goals it's programmed to achieve? Is the system flexible and adaptible enough? Can it discover and learn by itself? So again, in this regard a GPS system is so primitive that it may be comparable to that of an amoeba or even worse. A coordinate space alone is not a useful or interesting MOTW that would help your GPS box achieve its goals.
- xelxebar 6y agoI don't think it's paradoxical. I just get the impression you may have jumped to building models without carefully considering the exact phenomenon you claim to deconstruct. "Self-awareness" or "consciousness" are just words. What do they point to in the world?
- mojuba 6y agoI experience some sort of an illusion of existence. Then I look at other creatures that look like me and act like me and I generalize, I say: maybe they exist the same way as I do. Then I hear from others that the generalization seems to be called "counsciousness" or sometimes "self-awareness". It's paradoxical because "I" doesn't exist the same way as a rock or any object and yet its continuity creates a resemblance, an illusion of existence. Try to think of your exact quantum copies - what happens the moment you are cloned? What happens to your "I"? Nothing. The "I" never existed in the first place and therefore nothing happens to it when it's physically copied ;) That's the paradox.
- opless 6y agoHi, can you explain what a ' Yudkowsian self-optimizer ' is? I've googled it and the only page that it comes up with is this one! :-)
- xelxebar 6y agoLooks like I mispelled the name. I was simply referring informally to Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong-style thoughts on optimization processes. You can read the initial idea here[0]. If you haven't heard of LessWrong before, then you have hit the motherload of all rabbit holes! That site is definitely worth the dive. [0]:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFTn3bAT6uXSNwv4m/optimization-and-the-singularity https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HFTn3bAT6uXSNwv4m/optimizati...
- opless 6y agoThanks! I know about lesswrong, and you’re not wrong