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I think trying to understand "the mind" by way of the brain is like trying to understand Windows OS by way of the CPU. It's just not the way to do it. Having s

I think trying to understand "the mind" by way of the brain is like trying to understand Windows OS by way of the CPU. It's just not the way to do it. Having said that it seems like the book reviewer's central complaint was To create a mind one needs at a minimum to create consciousness.... I'm quite skeptical of this claim simply because "consciousness" is such a sketchy concept: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-27/ http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-27/

mtrimpe 14y ago
I couldn't agree more. It seems that whenever computers become able to do something that we previously used to define consciousness, we just create a new definition of what it means to be human/conscious that doesn't include that new capability. Essentially we're continuously redefining consciousness as "that which humans can that machines can't." My guess is that we'll keep expanding that until human consciousness is just "the version that operates in flesh and blood rather than silicon".
- seiji 14y ago
  That's one of those clever things people seem to bring up -- "oh, we used to think playing checkers required consciousness, but it doesn't." At no point did someone think a computer would wake up, sing Hallelujah, and start composing public policy when it finished playing checkers. Consciousness is clearly: the ability to have directed agency in the world (i.e. "wanting" to do something), following an action path to create a desirable outcome, and forming opinions/judgements/actions based on prior experience ("memories"). Fun thought experiment: when does a baby become conscious and not just a bundle of predefined cry-poop-eat behaviors? Every animal walking around in the world is consciousness (if you can "turn off agency" in the form of sedation during surgery, the thing was consciousness), but human-level intelligence consciousness only forms in our squishy brains at this point in our world line.
  - mtrimpe 14y ago
    My point is more that computers are already conscious, but that we're constantly redefining our definition of consciousness to exclude it. From a philosophical perspective it's saying that consciousness is a property of reality rather than of humans / animals and that we're merely choosing to define an essentially arbitrary subset of it that's sufficiently similar to our own as 'true consciousness'.
    - seiji 14y ago
      My point is more that computers are already conscious Saywhatnow? consciousness is a property of reality Again, saywhatnow? Perhaps your usage of 'reality' is throwing me off. Consciousness is just a very high dimensional aggregation of "stuff" (e.g. synaptic connections) with a processing framework (e.g. neural architecture) for recall/storage/action based on outward perception and internal state. We're both agreed that consciousness doesn't require squishy brains. I'm just saying human level consciousness, at this point in time, only exists in our squishy brains. We'll figure out different ways of creating computational consciousness in the future, but we aren't there yet. Our tiny recommender systems, search engines, face detectors/recognizers, and "my first backprop neural net 101" aren't conscious.
      - mtrimpe 14y ago
        I can tell that the full gist of what I'm trying to explain will be hard to do in an HN comment, but for simplicity's sake let's just say that I'm defining consciousness as a scale which includes "my first backprop neural net 101" (and your table, but that's the saywahtnow part of a would-be philosophical discussion ;) Given that assumption, all I'm saying is that as computers progress along that scale we are currently continually moving the point on that scale at which something becomes "human level" to specifically exclude computers.
      - omarchowdhury 14y ago
        Any time I see someone that thinks they can put conciousness into words, and they start off by saying "Consciousness is just..." I know that person has no clue.
- AJ007 14y ago
  Did you read the book? Because that is one of the points Kurzweil makes. The book review in question is crap. I'm happy to read Kurzweil critics but claiming something is too complex to understand to does not make for legitimate criticism, in any field. Pattern recognition is a given, how to do it is not. That is really what the book is about (hint: hierarchical hidden markov models.) As for the philosophical stuff, I read The Age of Spiritual Machines many years ago when it came out (and I was barely in high school), so there was nothing in How to Create A Mind that challenged views I've had over a decade to think about. The whole issue of consciousness I think is minor. Which, I personally would explain consciousness as "living" awareness ( in the book Kurzweil says even the smartest people start to sound stupid when trying to describe this.) The good news is our industry is not going to get dull anytime soon.
  - mtrimpe 14y ago
    Just to be clear, I didn't read the book. I even just skimmed the original post. I was just responding to the parent comment and it's claim about the sketchiness of (the definition of) consciousness. Perhaps I should read Kurzweil once even if just to see how much our views are aligned..
pbw 14y ago
You absolutely could understand Windows by studying the CPU, you latch on to some of the traces and record all the signals going by. That's what electrophysiology is. Oh, there's KERNEL32.DLL, I wonder if that's important, let's look at the contents. We constantly study signals within the brain, not just the dry physical connectivity.
worfly 14y ago
The CPU, RAM and non-volatile storage architecture do tell you a lot about what a program can and cannot do. Furthermore, if your Windows OS does something magical on the screen over the course of a minute, you can be confident that there is a definable limit to the amount and type of code that could have been executed in order to achieve that "magical" result. A more accurate question might be, "can you recreate the running code of the Windows OS, given an installed desktop running Windows OS". Oh, and we also have some copies of the source code--if that helps (but it is hand-written in Mandarin). :)

mtrimpe 14y ago

I couldn't agree more. It seems that whenever computers become able to do something that we previously used to define consciousness, we just create a new definition of what it means to be human/conscious that doesn't include that new capability. Essentially we're continuously redefining consciousness as "that which humans can that machines can't." My guess is that we'll keep expanding that until human consciousness is just "the version that operates in flesh and blood rather than silicon".

seiji 14y ago
That's one of those clever things people seem to bring up -- "oh, we used to think playing checkers required consciousness, but it doesn't." At no point did someone think a computer would wake up, sing Hallelujah, and start composing public policy when it finished playing checkers. Consciousness is clearly: the ability to have directed agency in the world (i.e. "wanting" to do something), following an action path to create a desirable outcome, and forming opinions/judgements/actions based on prior experience ("memories"). Fun thought experiment: when does a baby become conscious and not just a bundle of predefined cry-poop-eat behaviors? Every animal walking around in the world is consciousness (if you can "turn off agency" in the form of sedation during surgery, the thing was consciousness), but human-level intelligence consciousness only forms in our squishy brains at this point in our world line.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  My point is more that computers are already conscious, but that we're constantly redefining our definition of consciousness to exclude it. From a philosophical perspective it's saying that consciousness is a property of reality rather than of humans / animals and that we're merely choosing to define an essentially arbitrary subset of it that's sufficiently similar to our own as 'true consciousness'.
  - seiji 14y ago
    My point is more that computers are already conscious Saywhatnow? consciousness is a property of reality Again, saywhatnow? Perhaps your usage of 'reality' is throwing me off. Consciousness is just a very high dimensional aggregation of "stuff" (e.g. synaptic connections) with a processing framework (e.g. neural architecture) for recall/storage/action based on outward perception and internal state. We're both agreed that consciousness doesn't require squishy brains. I'm just saying human level consciousness, at this point in time, only exists in our squishy brains. We'll figure out different ways of creating computational consciousness in the future, but we aren't there yet. Our tiny recommender systems, search engines, face detectors/recognizers, and "my first backprop neural net 101" aren't conscious.
    - mtrimpe 14y ago
      I can tell that the full gist of what I'm trying to explain will be hard to do in an HN comment, but for simplicity's sake let's just say that I'm defining consciousness as a scale which includes "my first backprop neural net 101" (and your table, but that's the saywahtnow part of a would-be philosophical discussion ;) Given that assumption, all I'm saying is that as computers progress along that scale we are currently continually moving the point on that scale at which something becomes "human level" to specifically exclude computers.
    - omarchowdhury 14y ago
      Any time I see someone that thinks they can put conciousness into words, and they start off by saying "Consciousness is just..." I know that person has no clue.
AJ007 14y ago
Did you read the book? Because that is one of the points Kurzweil makes. The book review in question is crap. I'm happy to read Kurzweil critics but claiming something is too complex to understand to does not make for legitimate criticism, in any field. Pattern recognition is a given, how to do it is not. That is really what the book is about (hint: hierarchical hidden markov models.) As for the philosophical stuff, I read The Age of Spiritual Machines many years ago when it came out (and I was barely in high school), so there was nothing in How to Create A Mind that challenged views I've had over a decade to think about. The whole issue of consciousness I think is minor. Which, I personally would explain consciousness as "living" awareness ( in the book Kurzweil says even the smartest people start to sound stupid when trying to describe this.) The good news is our industry is not going to get dull anytime soon.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  Just to be clear, I didn't read the book. I even just skimmed the original post. I was just responding to the parent comment and it's claim about the sketchiness of (the definition of) consciousness. Perhaps I should read Kurzweil once even if just to see how much our views are aligned..

pbw 14y ago

You absolutely could understand Windows by studying the CPU, you latch on to some of the traces and record all the signals going by. That's what electrophysiology is. Oh, there's KERNEL32.DLL, I wonder if that's important, let's look at the contents. We constantly study signals within the brain, not just the dry physical connectivity.

worfly 14y ago

The CPU, RAM and non-volatile storage architecture do tell you a lot about what a program can and cannot do. Furthermore, if your Windows OS does something magical on the screen over the course of a minute, you can be confident that there is a definable limit to the amount and type of code that could have been executed in order to achieve that "magical" result. A more accurate question might be, "can you recreate the running code of the Windows OS, given an installed desktop running Windows OS". Oh, and we also have some copies of the source code--if that helps (but it is hand-written in Mandarin). :)