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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I must say, I’m mostly on healyje’s side of this debate with one difference. I would say that AlphaZero demonstrates intelligence but not consciousness. In fact, I think a key to understanding consciousness and mind is to divorce them both from intelligence. Then, divorce mind from consciousness by defining mind as self-reflective consciousness.
A crow that can unlock a lock is an example of intelligence. The octopus who escapes from his (or her) container is another example. I’m not surprised that a sophisticated, recursive algorithm (AlphaZero) can accomplish amazing things with respect to the subject of winning a game of chess. That, I would also call intelligence. To me, intelligence can exist without a social or even biological context. Intelligence just means an agent with a relatively sophisticated way of solving a problem.
I would argue that consciousness requires an agent having a nervous system of some kind that can experience it. On earth, that means life, at a minimum. It’s hard to know where along any particular evolutionary lineage you would first identify consciousness. My guess is that pretty much all mammals have it. In fact, maybe all vertebrates, since they do all have that central communications line. I mean, if you think about it, a bat would most likely experience something within the mental sphere. Let’s call that bat-consciousness. Bats on the other hand, likely do not have self-reflective consciousness. Let’s reserve that for the word, mind. Bats probably don’t have it. Bonobos may have it. Humans have it.
Mind – self-reflective consciousness, is another matter. I believe that it involves both an experiencing agent (a conscious being) AND a social context (at a minimum (ants don’t have it)). Although we think of ourselves as intelligent and we do have mind, by definition, it’s not that obvious to me that intelligence is required for mind. They seem like two completely different things. I think that the origin of mind lies more along the path an individual wolf experiencing itself in the context of its pack than being able to solve a particularly hard problem.
(Oh wait, I though that this was the What is Mind Thread!)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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I would say that AlphaZero demonstrates intelligence but not consciousness. In fact, I think a key to understanding consciousness and mind is to divorce them both from intelligence. Then, divorce mind from consciousness by defining mind as self-reflective consciousness.
Good post, eyyonke.
Making distinctions is key, IMO. What makes it tricky, from the perspective of Experiential Adventures, is that nothing whatsoever is divorced from any other phenomenon, but it is instructive to make discrete distincions to understand the interplay.
One description I have heard per "reality" is to consider it, figuratively speaking, as a spectrum as one appears when you shoot light through a prism. There are many reasons why we would desire the ability to differentiat between, say, blue and red on the spectrum, knowing that reality encompasses them all. So the standard method or MO when teaching meditation is in getting people to recognize as an idea (infor on the "topo") that awareness is different than their thoughts, sensations, feelings, and memories etc. that float through awareness. That is, awareness is a diferent color, so to speak, then the stuff or content that enters awareness. Once people have the idea, then they can fact check this through direct experience - or through "clinbing the route."
The telling point is that awarenss is normally fused with content till you start asking someone to look at what their mind/brain is doing. Once they have some little capacity to watch their content arise and then fall away, the direct experience that awareness is NOT that which comes and goes is a certainly.
That takes us to self reflective copnsciousness." So far so good.
Long story short, as you get more skillful you will start to realize that consciousness is really a bug bundle of layers, and the longer you observe, the better chance you have to drop through those layers. And one of the layers that virtually all practicing meditators drop through is the layer of self or "I."
This I is indispensible to living in the world. We wouldn't be able to buy gas without it. But this I is an adaptive construct which doesn't FEEL or seem as such because memory and language bolster and reify it. At this level, "reflective" might not be the best word, because that implies there has to be something to reflect or maybe awareness itself goes off-line. Actually the opposite occurs, and awareness and the felt sense of knowing becomes even more pronounced as a real-time fact.
Bottomline being that the process is not some exercise in trying to find content beyond the scope of measuring, rather it's a process of getting clear on what IS there in consciousness itself, of winnowing away the layers to what was BEFOR we ever started learning about anything. And if anything becomes clear, it's that nobody learned how to be aware, that it certainly was never generated by the computations of the mind, and that, as you pointed out, awareness is not intelligence or any thing else.
The topic of intelligence and especially understanding are relevant to your post as well. Searle's point with the Chinese Room TE was to make clear that human understanding comes with a felt sense of knowing what it knows and doesn't know that goes beyond objective functioning (basically behavioralism) and our ability to merely process an imput and execute an appropriate response. The chess computer I wager has no awareness of either knowing or not knowing. It's different for us. For example I know that I know how to belay, and I know that I don't know Chinese. This knowing is at the heart of understanding as Searle pointed out. The machine, no matter it's prowess as a chess wizard, merely computes. So do we, but to varrying degress, we know what we know and don't know because we are conscious of some of our content.
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WBraun
climber
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The machine IS sterile.
It's a direct reflection of what you've become yourselves ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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'If one could see on a priori grounds that there is no way in which consciousness could be intelligibly explained as arising from the physical, it would not be a big step to concluding that it in fact does not do so (Chalmers 1996). However, the very strength of such an epistemological claim makes it difficult to assume with begging the metaphysical result in question. Thus those who wish to use a strong in principle gap claim to refute physicalism must find independent grounds to support it. Some have appealed to conceivability arguments for support, such as the alleged conceivability of zombies molecularly identical with conscious humans but devoid of all phenomenal consciousness (Campbell 1970, Kirk 1974, Chalmers 1996). Other supporting arguments invoke the supposed non-functional nature of consciousness and thus its alleged resistance to the standard scientific method of explaining complex properties (e.g., genetic dominance) in terms of physically realized functional conditions (Block 1980a, Chalmers 1996). Such arguments avoid begging the anti-physicalist question, but they themselves rely upon claims and intuitions that are controversial and not completely independent of one's basic view about physicalism. Discussion on the topic remains active and ongoing.
Our present inability to see any way of closing the gap may exert some pull on our intuitions, but it may simply reflect the limits of our current theorizing rather than an unbridgeable in principle barrier (Dennett 1991). Moreover, some physicalists have argued that explanatory gaps are to be expected and are even entailed by plausible versions of ontological physicalism, ones that treat human agents as physically realized cognitive systems with inherent limits that derive from their evolutionary origin and situated contextual mode of understanding (Van Gulick 1985, 2003; McGinn 1991, Papineau 1995, 2002). On this view, rather than refuting physicalism, the existence of explanatory gaps may confirm it. Discussion and disagreement on these topics remains active and ongoing.'
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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'What it is like. Thomas Nagel's (1974) famous “what it is like” criterion aims to capture another and perhaps more subjective notion of being a conscious organism. According to Nagel, a being is conscious just if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature, i.e., some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature's mental or experiential point of view. In Nagel's example, bats are conscious because there is something that it is like for a bat to experience its world through its echo-locatory senses, even though we humans from our human point of view can not emphatically understand what such a mode of consciousness is like from the bat's own point of view.'
what is it like being AlphaZero?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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'Contemporary philosophers and scientists are still discussing whether teleological axioms are useful or accurate in proposing modern philosophies and scientific theories. For instance, in 2012, Thomas Nagel proposed a non-Darwinian account of evolution that incorporates impersonal and natural teleological laws to explain the existence of life, consciousness, rationality, and objective value.[6] Regardless, the accuracy can also be considered independently from the usefulness: it is a common experience in pedagogy that a minimum of apparent teleology can be useful in thinking about and explaining Darwinian evolution even if there is no true teleology driving evolution. Thus it is easier to say that evolution "gave" wolves sharp canine teeth because those teeth "serve the purpose of" predation regardless of whether there is an underlying nonteleologic reality in which evolution is not an actor with intentions. In other words, because human cognition and learning often rely on the narrative structure of stories (with actors, goals, and proximal rather than distal causation), some minimal level of teleology might be recognized as useful or at least tolerable for practical purposes even by people who reject its cosmologic accuracy.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology
see also: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/teleology-biology/
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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For once - I can't believe I'm saying this - I agree with Werner, AlphaZero is not displaying intelligence.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Teleology...You can't recreate the past, but maybe you can model the future? Evolution happens, the universe implores you..
Edit: model intelligrnce, consciousness? Ha! Flaming duck warning in 3...
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TClimberByTrade
climber
Santa Ana
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101=-1;
001=1;
Alpha 0 ?
Machine doesn't have consciousness though Canadian superman is now speaking and moving his hands and feet.
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TClimberByTrade
climber
Santa Ana
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Largo, both 0 and infinity are NaN(not a number).
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Lituya
Mountain climber
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Pretty basic, chess is a game of states - each player's move progressively advances the state of the game and each board position after a move represents the current state. How the game advances from state-to-state is another matter altogether. And while AlphaZero can map out the [full] truth of chess from any position, it isn't intelligent in any sense of the word to my way of thinking.
Agree that a state machine will never demonstrate consciousness; there is no critical mass of inputs or processes that will make it so. Just random here, maybe consciousness can better be described as the ability of x to shift the foci of a light cone without external inputs?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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eeyonkee wrote: A crow that can unlock a lock is an example of intelligence. The octopus who escapes from his (or her) container is another example.
Yes, those are examples of intelligence, AlphaZero is not. More complex than my iPhone calculator for sure, but at root pretty much the same deal. Machine learning is not intelligence, not sentience, not conscious and, as suggested, ascribing that attribute to it is a bit of inappropriate anthropomorphizing.
https://bdtechtalks.com/2019/01/02/humanizing-ai-deep-learning-alphazero/
Largo wrote: I would say that... we are conscious of some of our content.
So, all the endless logical and philosophical obfuscation aside - a fundamental consciousness spawns the material universe? Yes or no?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I disagree with the essay "anthropomorphizing AI"
and while the author refers to the commentary by a mathematician, he didn't read the commentary and the response from chess grand masters, who are experts in the game.
AlphaZero was not built with a "limbic system," certainly that is not a necessary part of what it was built to do, so what is the issue with feeling joy or sorrow over various games?
What I am most interested in is the notion that because we understand how the machine works (to some degree) it cannot have intelligence (or any other attributes of human thought, experience, mind, etc.).
What is the magic that biology brings to this?
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WBraun
climber
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It's already been done. (twist", "insert", and "latch" type functions)
What's a matter with you.
You can program Artificial Intelligence for any number of material maneuvers but you'll never be able to program AI to self realization.
because AI has NO self ......
It is the self itself that distinguishes life from matter and the living entity (self) is NOT material nor biological.
The material biological body is manipulated by the self just as the driver of a vehicle as a crude material example.
The self has individuality.
The self can transmigrate from material bodies according to the consciousness it develops.
This is the real evolutionary process of life itself ......
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Computation is just an extension of human capability. No matter how big and powerful you make a telescope it will never see. It lacks an entity of realization and the forms of sensibility that allow that entity an engaging structure. No matter how big you make a computer it will only continue to compute.
Magic? There is no magic. But there is mystery. When god says to Moses, "I am that I am," that mystery is stated in the old testament thousands of years ago in a rather eloquent way.
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TClimberByTrade
climber
Santa Ana
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YHWH, i am that i am was or still is forbidden to speak about outside of a Jewish temple. That bush story is probably a Jewish book.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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I have no doubt that neural pathways, or maybe the "patterns" of thoughts, memories, or even "experience" elegantly resemble algorithms. I haven't Google Drive it, but I'm sure some work has been done.
If the math can model, or re-create the processes, what is so special about biology? The line may become blurred with technology: implants, electromagnetic stimulation, genetic engineering.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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AI probably won’t ever seem human unless it is supposed to mimic us. Machines have certain traits that are superior to humans, even a simple calculator.
The most powerful force in biology is natural selection, and evolutionary computation has been around for quite some time. Humans can build machines that learn from mistakes and optimize complex systems. This is almost identical to natural selection.
I would guess that the first strong AI will be designed by a prior machine.
Who cares if it feels happy or sad? That is beside the point.
If machines can fully harness artificial selection, and take humans out of the loop, including power (food) and construction (sensory experience,) that will be formidable. So much so that I wonder whether we should do it.
Ed would know. LLNL is tasked with our nuclear weapons design and maintenance. I know that they do other things, but nuclear weapons virtual testing uses one or more of our largest computers. It isn’t something you can do with pencil and paper, at least in a lifetime.
The Russians are deploying advanced ICBM’s right now. We still use our Minuteman 3’s and Trident missiles. This is forcing us into a new arms race. Ed’s laboratory will probably be involved. I would trust a scientist rather than a Buddhist to perform any technical task.
As for religion. It is ancient mambo jumbo.....
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WBraun
climber
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If machines can fully harness artificial selection, and take humans out of the loop,
Can't be done and never will be done.
Your use of "if" shows right there that you're just guessing and are ultimately clueless to the ultimate truth of life itself .....
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