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IIT is a nice intuition pump, but it's missing essential parts. Consciousness should be related to survival, replication of information and its own energy costs

IIT is a nice intuition pump, but it's missing essential parts. Consciousness should be related to survival, replication of information and its own energy costs. It's not just some integrated information for no purpose at all. The purpose is survival if it is conscious. If you add that to IIT, then you suddenly get a new filter for what could be conscious - something that competes for information replication, not just something with high IIT score.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
It sounds like you've maybe read Steve Grand's book, Creation: Life and How To make It? That is his entire pitch; if you've not read it I wholly recommend it.
sgillen 5y ago
>> Consciousness should be related to survival Is that not just your intuition too? Is it not possible to imagine an artificial consciousness that does not care one way or the other for its own survival?
- visarga 5y ago
  No because survival is closely tied to evolution. By mere survival an agent creates its own structure and values. It can't evolve if it doesn't risk its skin in the game. The price of our present day intelligence has been very high. But you can piggyback AI training on human culture and embody the agent in our environment so it can still function like a conscious biological agent. The AI is just passing the buck to humans, without us it wouldn't even have a goal. On the other hand all living things have goals without human help. Maybe when AIs can self replicate their information into the future like us, without external help, they could be eventually conscious. We don't know yet how to make physical self replicators that evolve. Only nature solved this riddle so far. BTW, AlphaGo was subjected to evolutionary techniques, and it shows. The agents had to duel with clones and past versions of themselves. Survival was conditioned on win rate. Suddenly AI can surpass humans in this little environment, but that came at the price of discarding so many unfit earlier versions.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago

It sounds like you've maybe read Steve Grand's book, Creation: Life and How To make It? That is his entire pitch; if you've not read it I wholly recommend it.

sgillen 5y ago

>> Consciousness should be related to survival Is that not just your intuition too? Is it not possible to imagine an artificial consciousness that does not care one way or the other for its own survival?

visarga 5y ago
No because survival is closely tied to evolution. By mere survival an agent creates its own structure and values. It can't evolve if it doesn't risk its skin in the game. The price of our present day intelligence has been very high. But you can piggyback AI training on human culture and embody the agent in our environment so it can still function like a conscious biological agent. The AI is just passing the buck to humans, without us it wouldn't even have a goal. On the other hand all living things have goals without human help. Maybe when AIs can self replicate their information into the future like us, without external help, they could be eventually conscious. We don't know yet how to make physical self replicators that evolve. Only nature solved this riddle so far. BTW, AlphaGo was subjected to evolutionary techniques, and it shows. The agents had to duel with clones and past versions of themselves. Survival was conditioned on win rate. Suddenly AI can surpass humans in this little environment, but that came at the price of discarding so many unfit earlier versions.