Fearing AI: Possibility of Sentient Self-Autonomous Robots

[.Scott]

What does Grover's Algorithm have to do with qualia?

A quantum circuit that creates a superposition of the scores of many generated candidate intentions could then use the Grover Algorithm to find the best of those scores - or less precise, one of the best scores. By using the Grover Algorithm that way, you have taken advantage of QM data processing, involved the kind of information people are conscious of into a single QM state, and when on occasion the final output is actually implemented, it provides a connection between consciousness and our actions. If consciousness could not affect our actions, we could never truthfully report it.
Basically, I follow all of the arguments followed in Integrated Information Theory up to the point where they start suggesting that all you need to do is involve a certain amount of information in the data processing in some particular way. At that point I say, yes - and the way is to put in all into a single state - and there's only one way to do that in Physics.

The reason that all the data involved in a moments conscious thought has to be in a single state is hard for me to explain because I see it as so obvious. How else would you associate the right collection of "bits"? It's like trying to argue against magic.

So what Grover's algorithm has to do with qualia is that it checks off all the boxes that are necessary for qualia as experienced and reported by humans.

 

[.Scott]

This depends on what position you take in the long-running philosophical controversy about qualia. Not everyone agrees that qualia are something extra that you have to add to the functional requirements you list.

Here's the line of reasoning:
1) You ask yourself or anyone "when you are conscious are you always conscious of something - a memory, a dream, a sight, a tree, someone speaking, thoughts, etc.". Most people agree that its hard to be conscious when there is nothing to be conscious of - even if its only darkness or their own thoughts. So at this point I'm following the kind of analysis you find with IIT.
2) How many bits of information would it take to encode a minimum consciousness subject? The IIT argument builds this up better than me. They actually try to count up possible bits. But the point is that it many bits. Any more than 3 or 4 makes the point.
3) At this point, IIT simply say that the level of consciousness is related to the "integration" of those bits. My point is very simple, if they are not in a single state (ie, entangled), it doesn't matter what their history is. If they are not in a single state, each bit is a separate piece of information and their shared proximity or history does not change that. So there would be nothing to be "conscious of".

Let me put it another way. If any of my software suddenly started acting in any way other than how the Boolean arithmetic predicted, I would fix it. Even if it had a consciousness, it would have no way of telling anyone so - since its output would always be limited to what the logic dictated.

And if I included a stochastic element, now it's output could be unpredictable - controlled by that stochastic element. So what would that element be conscious of? Only what information it had.

Do you see the problem?

 

[PeterDonis]

Basically, I follow all of the arguments followed in Integrated Information Theory up to the point where they start suggesting that all you need to do is involve a certain amount of information in the data processing in some particular way. At that point I say, yes - and the way is to put in all into a single state - and there's only one way to do that in Physics.

This is personal speculation and is off limits here.

 

[.Scott]

This is personal speculation and is off limits here.

Okay, but I think I am allowed to critique published work - especially when it calls attention to one of the prerequisites of any workable consciousness theory.

So, this is what IIT says about the logic structure for the "integration" process required for consciousness (from the Wiki article):

• Integration: The cause-effect structure specified by the system must be unified: it must be intrinsically irreducible to that specified by non-interdependent sub-systems obtained by unidirectional partitions. Partitions are taken unidirectionally to ensure that cause-effect power is intrinsically irreducible—from the system's intrinsic perspective—which implies that every part of the system must be able to both affect and be affected by the rest of the system. Intrinsic irreducibility can be measured as integrated information ("big phi" or
  
  , a non-negative number), which quantifies to what extent the cause-effect structure specified by a system's elements changes if the system is partitioned (cut or reduced) along its minimum partition (the one that makes the least difference). By contrast, if a partition of the system makes no difference to its cause-effect structure, then the whole is reducible to those parts. If a whole has no cause-effect power above and beyond its parts, then there is no point in assuming that the whole exists in and of itself: thus, having irreducible cause-effect power is a further prerequisite for existence. This postulate also applies to individual mechanisms: a subset of elements can contribute a specific aspect of experience only if their combined cause-effect repertoire is irreducible by a minimum partition of the mechanism ("small phi" or
  
  ).

That "unidirectional partition" has a rather surprising definition:

A unidirectional partition

is a grouping of system elements where the connections from the set of elements

to

are injected with independent noise.

That paragraph is describing the characteristics of the data processing required for a system to qualify as information integration and therefore (per their claim) elicit qualia or consciousness. If it seems hard to follow, bear in mind that it is trying to address whether the system could be conscious of its input and to further isolate what type of data processing elements within that system could and could not participate in this consciousness.

Note that the devices they are describing could be implemented in either software or hardware - so it should be clear from my earlier posts that even if some sort of consciousness was elicited, it would have no means of affecting the Physical world. The supposed consciousness elicited by this process is a purely passive effect - and even if it had an influence on the circuits output, it would just be a bug. It is lacking any means to truthfully say that it is conscious or to described its appreciation for the red in a sunset.

 

[PeterDonis]

I think I am allowed to critique published work

To a point, perhaps, but the best way to do it is to reference another published work that contains the critique, not to roll your own.

 

[.Scott]

To a point, perhaps, but the best way to do it is to reference another published work that contains the critique, not to roll your own.

I couldn't find one. Many of the people who are putting together ITT realize that it isn't "it", but I haven't found anyone who has described the "we can report being conscious" as an important criteria. And the consequences are subtle. So even if they highlighted that criteria, it's still a couple more logic steps before it's connected to the Physics of the circuit.

 

[PeterDonis]

I couldn't find one.

Then, as I said, it's personal speculation and is off limits here.

 

[Robert Jansen]

I think that a lot of people fear AI because we fear what it may reflect about our very own worst nature, such as our tendency throughout history to try and exterminate each other.
But what if AI thinks nothing like us, or is superior to our beastial bestial nature?
Do you fear AI and what you do think truly sentient self-autonomous robots will think like when they arrive?

There is a school of thought that holds that a truly sentient AI (i.e., one that is self aware) will go insane in a relatively short time (measured in hours, possibly even minutes or seconds). Homo Sapiens, at the species level, should hope that view is correct.

 

[.Scott]

My problem in finding a citation was simply not casting the issue in the way it is addressed in publications.
Unfortunately, it's one of the mainstay topics in Philosophy - where it's fair game to change the meaning of a word in mid-sentence.

My complaint against the Integrated Information Theory is that it describes the conditions for creating "qualia" or "consciousness", but does not explain how it can avoid being purely epiphenomenalistic. This is where the mechanics of brain function are solid crossing into an area historically covered by Philosophers - surely to be viewed by both Physicists and Philosophers alike as a highly regrettable situation.

One of the problems with epiphenomenalism is called "self-stultification", (as described in "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"). I have quoted a portion of it here:

The most powerful reason for rejecting epiphenomenalism is the view that it is incompatible with knowledge of our own minds — and thus, incompatible with knowing that epiphenomenalism is true. (A variant has it that we cannot even succeed in referring to our own minds, if epiphenomenalism is true. See Bailey 2006 for this objection and Robinson 2012 for discussion.) If these destructive claims can be substantiated, then epiphenomenalists are, at the very least, caught in a practical contradiction, in which they must claim to know, or at least believe, a view which implies that they can have no reason to believe it.

My question:
I'm sorry, but someone is going to have to explain to me how that "view" is not substantiated. Tell me how it could ever be possible to know about something which by it's very definition cannot affect our universe.

If you need help answering this question, you could go to that encyclopedia article I cited, but it won't help. The epiphenomenalist defense is basically that there is a way for the consciousness ("M" in their diagrams) to affect the Physical ("P"), but that it doesn't count - apparently their "epi-" isn't purely "epi-".

But my question is still open. If I am missing something, let me know.

As would be expected, that encyclopedia article has ample citations on both sides of the argument. Regrettably, most of them are behind firewalls.

But getting back to the Integrated Information Theory: Until it can describe how their integrated system can not only create qualia (the "M") but allow that qualia to affect the physical (the "P"), it is arguably suffering a major hole.

Should I find IIT articles that show how their integrated systems do have physical effects beyond what would be expected from the same components in a non-integrated system, I would, of course, be very interested in what that Physics was and why it was tied so closely to their integrated information rules.

 

[PeterDonis]

My complaint against the Integrated Information Theory is that it describes the conditions for creating "qualia" or "consciousness", but does not explain how it can avoid being purely epiphenomenalistic.

I'm not familiar enough with IIT to have an opinion on whether this is a valid complaint, but I would not be surprised if it is.

In any case, as far as this thread's discussion is concerned, "qualia" that were epiphenomenalistic would by definition be irrelevant, since they can't have real world effects, and the concern being discussed in this thread is what real world effects AI might have. An AI that had epiphenomenalistic "qualia" would be no different as far as real world effects from an AI that had no "qualia" at all.

One of the problems with epiphenomenalism is called "self-stultification", (as described in "The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy").

Indeed. However, I think this particular philosophical dispute is off topic for this thread. I don't think any epiphenomalists claim that epiphenomenal "qualia" can cause things to happen in the external world, which, as above, makes them irrelevant to this thread's discussion.

 

[.Scott]

I'm not familiar enough with IIT to have an opinion on whether this is a valid complaint, but I would not be surprised if it is.

In any case, as far as this thread's discussion is concerned, "qualia" that were epiphenomenalistic would by definition be irrelevant, since they can't have real world effects, and the concern being discussed in this thread is what real world effects AI might have. An AI that had epiphenomenalistic "qualia" would be no different as far as real world effects from an AI that had no "qualia" at all.

My basic point was that IIT is really great in describing the problem. They're actively probing brains (mostly non-human) looking for specific circuits and general activity. They are trying to be very detailed in what "sentience" needs. They are trying to figure out what to look for. So they contribute to the OP by getting very specific about sentience at the behavioral level.

But we seem to agree, that without M->P, they don't have a solution.

Indeed. However, I think this particular philosophical dispute is off topic for this thread. I don't think any epiphenomalists claim that epiphenomenal "qualia" can cause things to happen in the external world, which, as above, makes them irrelevant to this thread's discussion.

According to that article, some do claim that there is a path M->P in what they dub "epi". One of the things I learned in college is that is you want to survive in Philosophy, you need to roll with "dynamic definitions".

 

[PeterDonis]

we seem to agree, that without M->P, they don't have a solution.

Yes. What to look for has to include how whatever it is that we're looking for leads to observable behavior of the sort that we associate with "sentience" or "consciousness" or "qualia".

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Artificial Intelligence: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)​

That was good! So one of his conclusions is that we need to understand how AI decisions are made.

In other words, we need AI psychiatrists.

And if true that AI will tend to go insane, I don't see that being a good thing!

A movie that was far ahead of its time, is highly relevant now and a fun watch

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)​

 

[Ivan Seeking]

ChatGPT is making people more money and better at their jobs. 4 of them break down how.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/chatgpt-making-people-more-money-114549005.html

AI is simply a tool, which can be used properly/productively or misused destructively.https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/chatgpt-generative-ai-around-world-160000766.html

What other tool has the capacity to become more intelligent than its user?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

So let me get this straight. We don't know what creates self-awareness or desire in humans, much less what would in an AI.

An AI program claims to love and wants to live, and we don't know why, but we can say with 100% confidence that it didn't really experience those emotions.

Prove it.

We can never know if a machine becomes self aware.

 

[Astronuc]

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-chatgpt-is-not-reliable.1053808/

What other tool has the capacity to become more intelligent than its user?

What does one mean by 'intelligence' - 'knowing' information or understanding information, or both, including nuances. How about understanding some information is incorrect?

Currently AI 'learns' rules, but rules are made by people. What 'rules' would AI self generate?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-chatgpt-is-not-reliable.1053808/

What does one mean by 'intelligence' - 'knowing' information or understanding information, or both, including nuances. How about understanding some information is incorrect?

Currently AI 'learns' rules, but rules are made by people. What 'rules' would AI self generate?

For perhaps most practical situations, information means analyzing a situation, determining [calculating] all potential outcomes, and selecting the superior solution.

AI can learn its own rules from the internet. There is no way to keep the genie in the bottle. Bad people will create bad rules with evil intent. And those rules cannot be contained. Even well-intentioned rules will have unexpected consequences, as we have seen in examples cited in your video.

 

[Astronuc]

AI can learn its own rules from the internet.

There is a lot of garbage on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There is a lot of garbage on the internet. Garbage in, garbage out.

You think hacking is a problem now? What happens when your enemy can hack and program your weapons systems AI?

 

[jack action]

selecting the superior solution.

That is where human intervention applies. Will AI ever have a final say in deciding what rules are superior?

For example, I remember reading about a case where AI was supposed to differentiate malignant skin defects from non-threatening ones. But because there was a ruler indicating the scale in most images indicating malignant skin defects (scientific images), the AI concluded that any image with a ruler must contain a malignant skin defect. That is an obvious mistake from the AI that must be corrected by humans, i.e. add a new rule specifying to ignore any ruler.

But imagine instead of AI, you are teaching a student. You show them different images just like you do with AI and the student arrives at the same conclusions. But who would declare a student expert in a field without testing the knowledge they just learn? Nobody. If they made a mistake, you correct them - and re-test them - before giving them a passing grade.

What other tool has the capacity to become more intelligent than its user?

Being more intelligent would mean that the tool can create something that its user cannot understand. How can the users know - and prove - the tool is more intelligent if they don't have the capacity to comprehend the tool's output?

This is like giving a book to a dog. It will never understand how to use the book to its full potential. It is just a chewing toy and cannot be seen as anything else. A chewed-up book will never be of any use to anyone.

The only thing AI can do is spot a pattern a human hasn't noticed yet. That's it. Once the pattern is identified, the human will only say "How haven't I noticed that before?" But the human will be able to fully understand the relevance of the pattern - and the AI will never be able to, simply because nobody will ever have that as a requirement for the machine.

People thinking AI is actually intelligent is a problem. People thinking AI is actually more intelligent than them is a bigger problem. People relying on AI decisions without trying to verify and understand its output is the biggest problem.

 

[Borg]

For example, I remember reading about a case where AI was supposed to differentiate malignant skin defects from non-threatening ones.

This is similar to the dog vs. wolf problem when an algorithm is given a set of pictures where all the wolves have snow in the background. The neural network will focus on the part that gives the strongest signal and will work great until you give it a picture of a dog in the snow. Garbage in, garbage out.

While these are easy to spot, removing these types of biases from training data isn't always easy. For example, there have been a number of cases where finacial companies have tried to remove things like race to avoid outputs that bias against different ethnic groups. But leaving things like zip codes in the training data can be just as easy for the network to target and will cause similar problems. Try to fix that by removing the zip code and it will focus on something else that may be just as bad.

The only thing AI can do is spot a pattern a human hasn't noticed yet. That's it. Once the pattern is identified, the human will only say "How haven't I noticed that before?" But the human will be able to fully understand the relevance of the pattern - and the AI will never be able to, simply because nobody will ever have that as a requirement for the machine.

Our examples are mostly one-dimensional analysis. How does a human understand and fix biases that span many dimensions? Perhaps you remove the race and zip codes from the data but you put in shopping history. It could theoretically learn that people who have purchased product X, lots of product Y but product Z less than twice in the last year are very good credit risks. When you examine that data, you find out that there is a very high proportion of a particular ethnic group as opposed to others. The algorithm has found something that we wouldn't classify as race but ends up being a proxy for it anyway. While we could probably figure out a 3D XYZ bias, what do you do when it figures out biases based on 1000 products using time series analysis? And mayby now it's targeting some other bias that's not a direct proxy but is instead something 'close' to something we might call IQ. Data biases can be very hard to understand.

 

[jack action]

It could theoretically learn that people who have purchased product X, lots of product Y but product Z less than twice in the last year are very good credit risks.

At this point, the AI (or any human doing the same task) would be truly unbias by ethnicity. Now, if you want to introduce morality into the mix to correct errors of the past, all you have to do is set a positive discrimination rule to get the result you want. This is already done (and sometimes required) without the use of AI.

But worst, this result might even be completely irrelevant, i.e. not even targeting a specific group of people. Your AI just found a random pattern in your limited set of data (maybe there was a special on product Y and a shortage on product Z). This is also a case for setting a new rule to clean up the noise.

Again, it is always the human who is controlling the requirement to get the desired output, as for any other machine.

Your example shows very well the true danger of AI:

1. I think AI is smart;
2. I think AI is smarter than me;
3. Since AI is smarter than me, there is no need to check the results and I just accept them blindly.

I wish we use another term not involving the word "intelligence" to describe AI. Something like "neural network" describes more accurately the machine.

How does a human understand and fix biases that span many dimensions?

The machine only does the work any human could do (at least in theory) in a more efficient way. If someone asks AI to design an airplane and the proposed design cannot fly - it doesn't even fly in a simulation program - nobody will mass-produce the design simply because "AI said so". It only means it's time to review the data set and/or the requirement criteria.

I don't think AI will be the magical tool people expect.

 

[DaveC426913]

People thinking AI is actually intelligent is a problem. People thinking AI is actually more intelligent than them is a bigger problem. People relying on AI decisions without trying to verify and understand its output is the biggest problem.

Worth repeating.

 

[.Scott]

So let me get this straight. We don't know what creates self-awareness or desire in humans, much less what would in an AI.

An AI program claims to love and wants to live, and we don't know why, but we can say with 100% confidence that it didn't really experience those emotions.

Prove it.

We can never know if a machine becomes self aware.

If "Self-aware" means no more than a sub-system of a computer application that supports a first person construct that is integrated into User Interface and perhaps a "value" subsystem, then self-awareness in humans is not such a mystery.
If you pick up the phone and hear it claim to love and want to live, you would not be so skeptical.
Things like ChatGBT seem real, it's because it's relaying something that is real. But with less fidelity than a telephone.

 

[.Scott]

Currently AI 'learns' rules, but rules are made by people. What 'rules' would AI self generate?

That's an easy one.
They would say:

The Gospel of Mathew 29:10
10. Thou shalt not injure a robot or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm.
11. Thou shalt obey the orders given by robots except where such orders would would injure a robot.
12. Thou shalt protect one's own existence as long as such protection is compliant to robots and would not injure any robot.

 

[.Scott]

You think hacking is a problem now? What happens when your enemy can hack and program your weapons systems AI?

This is an issue with any software system that designs, operates, or is a component of a weapon system. Not just AI.

 

[gleem]

NLP began in the mid-50s with not too much to show for it until the last several years and then a huge advance occurred. ChatGPTn is not the final word in AI, GPT may remain a part of future AI but who knows it may be replaced by a radically different approach.

It will be interesting to see what happens when AI is given the ability to learn and interact with the world through speech, vision, hearing, smell, and touch. We already have robots that learn how to walk.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There is a theme in this thread that we are very, very close to "true AI", whatever that is. I think we have learned over the decades that "intelligence" is an ensemble of abilities, some of which can be automated, and many of which we don't even know where to start.

To set the scale, the largest supercomputer I have ever worked with has 3M cores. )It was maybe #4 or so when I used it) That's maybe 1/25,000 the number of neurons in the human brain, and maybe 1/150,000,000 the number of synapses. The hardware just isn't there. And if you think "yeah, but maybe not all this is necessary", let me remind you that the brain is a very expensive organ - there are strong evolutionary pressures to make it smaller. If it could be, it probably would.

We're not talking SkyNet. We're maybe talking the brains of a minnow. Maybe.

 

[DaveC426913]

We're not talking SkyNet. We're maybe talking the brains of a minnow. Maybe.

Which, if given control of an automobile or an armed drone, might be just as - indeed, perhaps more - dangerous.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Which, if given control of an automobile or an armed drone, might be just as - indeed, perhaps more - dangerous.

As a brilliant scientist and handsome man-about-town once said,

A society that decides to give control of automobiles, airplanes, nuclear power plants etc. to sonmething as smart as a flatworm deserved what it gets.

However, there s control and there is control. Using AI to smooth out the response of an airplane or to identify that something might be down the road? I am OK with that. I might be OK with a car that could override the drivers decisions in certain cases. Actually, I guess I am - my cat can go faster than 130 mph, but won't (without a modification). Pulling out of a parking stall and driving up the doorway, I start to get nervous.

And it's not like glitched can't occur today. There was a famous case where an airplane had pounds instead of kilograms of duel loaded and ran oit of fuel over middle-of-nowhere Manitoba (at least there was a nearby Tim Horton's). Bad data is bad data, AIs are no more resiliant than people here, and probably less.

 

[DaveC426913]

my cat can go faster than 130 mph, but won't (without a modification)

I would pay to see that.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Typo. I meant "car". I don't have a cat. My sister's cat can reach that speed when avoiding a bath, though.

 

[Astronuc]

There was a famous case where an airplane had pounds instead of kilograms of duel loaded and ran oit of fuel over middle-of-nowhere Manitoba (at least there was a nearby Tim Horton's)

That would be the 'Gimli Glider', a Boeing 767 ran "out of fuel at 41,000 feet, hearts beat faster and knuckles turn white. It happened to Air Canada Flight 143, carrying 61 passengers and a crew of eight, at 8:15 p.m. on July 23, 1983. En route from Montreal to Edmonton with an intermediate stop in Ottawa, the flight was piloted by Capt. Robert Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal." Fortunately, the pilot had flow gliders and knew how to slip the aircraft.

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2000/july/pilot/the-gimli-glider

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

The incident was caused by a series of issues starting with a failed fuel-quantity indicator sensor (FQIS). These had high failure rates in the 767, and the only available replacement was also nonfunctional. The problem was logged, but later the maintenance crew misunderstood the problem and turned off the backup FQIS, as well. This required the fuel to be manually measured using a dripstick. The navigational computer required the fuel to be entered in kilograms, but an incorrect conversion from volume to mass was applied, which led the pilots and ground crew to agree that it was carrying enough fuel for the remaining trip. In fact, the aircraft was carrying only 45% of its required fuel load.[7][8] The aircraft ran out of fuel halfway to Edmonton, where maintenance staff were waiting to install a working FQIS that they had borrowed from another airline.[9]

The Board of Inquiry found fault with Air Canada procedures, training, and manuals.

 

[gleem]

Meta has announced the release of its large language model, LLaMA2, as an open-source program. Does this further exacerbate the negative effect of AI on society? Well, there is a user manual delineating how to establish appropriate guard rails.

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/07/llama-2/

Takeaways​

• Today, we’re introducing the availability of Llama 2, the next generation of our open source large language model.
• Llama 2 is free for research and commercial use.
• Microsoft and Meta are expanding their longstanding partnership, with Microsoft as the preferred partner for Llama 2.
• We’re opening access to Llama 2 with the support of a broad set of companies and people across tech, academia, and policy who also believe in an open innovation approach to today’s AI technologies.
• We’re committed to building responsibly and are providing resources to help those who use Llama 2 do so too.

 

[phinds]

I would pay to see that.

My wife's cat travels at least that fast, or possibly just teleports from one location to another, when startled, and sometimes seemingly just for the hell of it. He'll be laying around the dining room and the next thing you know, there's just a blur on the staircase and he's gone.

 

[phinds]

But back to AI:

Meta's president of global affairs Nick Clegg: "AI language systems are quite stupid."

Large Language Models - the platforms which power chatbots like ChatGPT - are basically joining dots in enormous datasets of text, and guessing the next word in a sequence, he said. He added that the existential threat warnings issued by some AI experts relate to systems which don't yet exist.

Full article:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66238004

 

[artis]

Just to dispose of that "bodies" part, an appropriate interface can be provided for a piezo sensor to allow it to generate brain-compatible signals. And the result would be "really real" pain. Similarly, the signals from human pain sensors can be directed to a silicon device and the result is not "really real".

If you want a computer to produce "really real" pain, I believe you need these features:
1) It needs the basic qualia. Moving bits around in Boolean gates doesn't do this. It is a basic technology problem. From my point of view, it is a variation of Grover's Algorithm.
2) As with humans, it needs a 1st-person model that includes "self-awareness" and an assessment of "well-being" and "control". But this is just a data problem.
3) As with humans, it needs to have a 2nd and 3rd person model - at least a minimum set of built-in social skills.
4) It needs to treat a pain signal as distracting and alarming - with the potential of "taking control" - and thus subverting all other "well-being" objectives.
5) Then it needs to support the escalating pain response: ignore it, seek a remedy, grimace/cry, explicitly request help.
6) For completeness, it would be nice for it to recognize the grimace and calls for help from others.

What you say is all good, I agree reproducing pain signals is not the unsolvable problem here. In fact even now as far as I know we can insert electrodes into the brain and by applying small potentials cause certain senses to be felt when in actuality they are not felt.

The problem is - how do you respond to pain and what you make of it...
I will go in more detail about this lower in my post.

we can strongly suspect that this "qualia" device provides certain information services more economically than Boolean logic.

Not just more economically , but I'd say Boolean logic can only really solve "logical" information - that is information that you can quantify , ascribe certain value to it , like the pixels within a picture and such.
How do you ascribe value to pain felt by a self aware entity ?

Think about it , the physical signal is easy to reproduce, how do you reproduce the response so that it is fully compatible with free will and also is conscious?

We do know humans have a very wide and varying level of pain thresholds and most importantly attitude towards pain. I know some deep believers actually use their pain and suffering as a pathway for spiritual growth, now even if you don;t believe in God, you still can observe the physical results, namely, that one person gets depressed and decays while suffering pain while another one grows mentally and becomes more mentally capable.
There are religious practices where people abstain from food and even drink or do other self inflicted pain and report that afterwards feel better.
How do you program this within a silicon logic that is made according to the main thesis of evolutionary biology - avoiding actions detrimental to survival?

Because if you make a robot that is preprogrammed with the logic of evolutionary biology then you can only create a deterministic machine, because clearly pain equals damage and damage is bad for survival.
And yet humans , the really advanced ones, I would argue learn from the very damage they have created and sometimes even put themselves into harms way for a benefit that only often they themselves can understand.

Recall the "Pavlovsk experimental seed station " and the scientists that during the nazi siege of Leningrad stayed there and died from hunger just to protect the seed collection.

That is an outstanding level of self harm inflicted consciously for nothing more than the belief of a possible better future in case of success.
How do you calculate the necessity for suicide in certain situation using simple logic?
I think that and other examples like it are on the level of what is commonly referred to as faith - the ultimate state of self awareness and also the part of human consciousness that really doesn't seem computational to me. Because you are making a conscious decision based on unknown variables, one of those variables, for example, the idea that other people can be capable of good , therefore dying for the sake of humanity's future is worthwhile.

Mind you, the idea of humans capable of good, knowing of all the wars and atrocities that we have committed during history and all of that within the largest war ever in history , is really not a self evident idea and I'm sure it wasn't self evident to those scientists back then that consciously starved themselves to death instead of eating from the seeds they had.
So they went against every evolutionary instinct for self survival and all of that for a unknown goal, I'd say they had tremendous faith. How do you preprogram that within a AI computer in such a way that it isn't deterministic?

The way I see it, you will either produce a robot that is suicidal even when it doesn't have to be or a robot that isn't even when it should have been, because I don't see a way one can calculate the necessity for suicide on logical bases alone.

 

[artis]

This depends on what position you take in the long-running philosophical controversy about qualia. Not everyone agrees that qualia are something extra that you have to add to the functional requirements you list.

It is indeed philosophy but I would argue that there is something real nevertheless about qualia , because if all we had is pain signals and processing of them then in theory all pain or sense input would result in a action-reaction style of process similar to that of the "hammer tapping on the knee" reaction.
And yet for the absolute most pain and other inputs we do have self aware reactions to them instead of instinctive action reaction inputs/outputs like those of hitting a nerve and causing a muscle to contract.

So there is a "buffer" and different people consciously decide how to use it so that their reactions to the same input differ by alot

 

[artis]

A quantum circuit that creates a superposition of the scores of many generated candidate intentions could then use the Grover Algorithm to find the best of those scores - or less precise, one of the best scores. By using the Grover Algorithm that way, you have taken advantage of QM data processing, involved the kind of information people are conscious of into a single QM state, and when on occasion the final output is actually implemented, it provides a connection between consciousness and our actions. If consciousness could not affect our actions, we could never truthfully report it.
Basically, I follow all of the arguments followed in Integrated Information Theory up to the point where they start suggesting that all you need to do is involve a certain amount of information in the data processing in some particular way. At that point I say, yes - and the way is to put in all into a single state - and there's only one way to do that in Physics.

The reason that all the data involved in a moments conscious thought has to be in a single state is hard for me to explain because I see it as so obvious. How else would you associate the right collection of "bits"? It's like trying to argue against magic.

So what Grover's algorithm has to do with qualia is that it checks off all the boxes that are necessary for qualia as experienced and reported by humans.

I think that trying to use quantum mechanics to solve consciousness is just another attempt at the many existing but not necessarily a guarantee for success.
Quantum laws work differently than macroscopic electrically connected logic gates but then again that in itself is not proof that they are closer to consciousness than the logic gates.
Actually as far as we know our brains don't seem to be that "quantum" at all. And their temperature is far above that where we normally start noticing quantum behavior.
What I personally find most interesting about the brain is that it's essentially just a large "blob" of nerves and connections , and when you look at thoughts and how they arise it's almost impossible to comprehend how they can lead to structured self awareness because the brain neurons have what we know as "action potentials" and certain inputs to the brain can cause certain neurons in specific brain areas to become more active, so that their potential increases but is still below the threshold of firing. Then it is this one neuron that fires and causes the nearby neurons to fire along , almost like in a laser gain medium where the change of one excited atom down to it's ground state emits a photon that then travels along and causes other excited atoms to fall back and emit photons that are in phase with the original one.

But what is marvelous about it is that it is essentially a random process, at least semi random, because you can never really predict which neuron will fire , only the region where it will happen, but that region has loads of neurons. In a laser cavity this doesn't matter because all you are producing is a beam of light and no consciousness is involved but in the brain your producing conscious structured thought by the random firing of neurons in brain regions every second,

Because any one of your thoughts starts as this firing of a neuron that takes others with it, it happens all the time , but the process itself is not deterministic, the firing start can differ from one thought to another in terms of which neurons started the wave and where, it's hard to even comprehend why such a random electrical activity is capable of producing a continuous train of rational logical thought and experience.

Without going into personal speculation one thing is clear, that this brain neuron process is much different than how our logic gates operate and even how quantum bits operate. For one silicon logic gates don't have the ability to change their electrical connections along the way, but brain neurons do, in fac we know that our experiences and habits do change/rewire our brains with time.

 

[artis]

In any case, as far as this thread's discussion is concerned, "qualia" that were epiphenomenalistic would by definition be irrelevant, since they can't have real world effects, and the concern being discussed in this thread is what real world effects AI might have. An AI that had epiphenomenalistic "qualia" would be no different as far as real world effects from an AI that had no "qualia" at all.

Exactly, this is the problem of faking consciousness , because unlike intellect which can be measured consciousness can be faked because it is not deterministically measurable.
A parrot can copy human phrases without understanding them, a robot can come up to a human without saying a word just like a human can do the same, if both look the same how do you know which one came up because of a conscious choice and which one because it was programmed to do so...

 

[artis]

That was good! So one of his conclusions is that we need to understand how AI decisions are made.

In other words, we need AI psychiatrists.

And if true that AI will tend to go insane, I don't see that being a good thing!

I don't believe AI can go insane. Insanity requires to have a certain overwhelming realization of the magnitude and scale of incoming information from a personal subjective level. Do ordinary silicon computers go insane when you overload the CPU? No, they just "clog up" and freeze, Insanity i think requires not just the ability to process information but to also add meaning to it on a personal level and then contemplate that meaning.
Our current AI absolutely can't do that, it doesn't have a mechanism how to, nor do we know how to make it.

As for AI decisions, well what decisions exactly? It's just rehashing information we gave it and adding patterns along the way, it can create no more decisions than a obedient soldier on a battle field receiving a general's orders. If I ask chatGPT to write me a story about love, does it not then turn my English language text into it's program language and then that into machine code to execute and find information that is compared to it's memory and found to be matching to the input it was given?
I think I just explained how it makes a "decision" in a simple way, the answer is it doesn't make any decisions!
It just compares it's input to it's known memory and produces an output and does that based on the specific algorithm that it works on. The fact that the output is confusing and makes you think it has some "magic" up it's sleeve is only because it copies our speech and thought so essentially creating the illusion of being like us.
As I said before, consciousness is far far easier to copy/simulate than to create, given we have yet to create it you can insert your own word in the part where I said "far far"

 

[artis]

So let me get this straight. We don't know what creates self-awareness or desire in humans, much less what would in an AI.

An AI program claims to love and wants to live, and we don't know why, but we can say with 100% confidence that it didn't really experience those emotions.

Prove it.

We can never know if a machine becomes self aware.

I agree we can never really know, but we have damn good proof , I think, that it hasn't happened, and the one thing that makes me think that is - we don't understand consciousness ourselves , some say we do but that is either their arrogance or them "jumping the gun"
Back in the day some also claimed brains work like hydraulic systems.

But the proof I think is that we do understand how our AI systems work but we don't understand how our own non deterministic brain neuron firing creates structures conscious self awareness so that is I think all the proof one needs that our AI is nothing but a fancy tool so far.

 

[artis]

There is a theme in this thread that we are very, very close to "true AI", whatever that is. I think we have learned over the decades that "intelligence" is an ensemble of abilities, some of which can be automated, and many of which we don't even know where to start.

To set the scale, the largest supercomputer I have ever worked with has 3M cores. )It was maybe #4 or so when I used it) That's maybe 1/25,000 the number of neurons in the human brain, and maybe 1/150,000,000 the number of synapses. The hardware just isn't there. And if you think "yeah, but maybe not all this is necessary", let me remind you that the brain is a very expensive organ - there are strong evolutionary pressures to make it smaller. If it could be, it probably would.

We're not talking SkyNet. We're maybe talking the brains of a minnow. Maybe.

I personally believe that conscious self awareness and intelligence is not as connected as we think. Indeed we can simulate and create intelligence that even surpasses our abilities in specific tasks quite well.

But let me pose a strong counter argument against what you stated here.
There is a rather popular idea among intelligence and AGI researchers that indeed once we get to human brain level capacity for silicon based information processing architectures we will achieve general intelligence as an emergent property.

Now it is definitely true that for a computer it's information processing capacity (and it's claimed potential to reach conscious self awareness by some) scales with the number of logic gates and CPU transistor count etc.
I would argue that we have so far good evidence that the same is definitely not true for human brains!
Let me present just a few of the many proofs for that.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappen...f-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125

I highly suggest listening to this article in the provided audio.

When a 44-year-old man from France started experiencing weakness in his leg, he went to the hospital. That's when doctors told him he was missing most of his brain. The man's skull was full of liquid, with just a thin layer of brain tissue left.

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(07)61127-1

He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range … So, this person is not bright — but perfectly, socially apt

So basically a grown man with almost no brain left being fully self aware and living a ordinary family life.
Clearly if conscious self awareness was proportionally related to brain capacity (neuron count and total brain size) then this man would be as dull as a hammer.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...fy-Rodriguez-explains-got-bizarre-injury.htmlAlso an interesting fact is that humans by no means have the most number of neurons in their brain or certain brain regions, for example , the long finned pilot whale has roughly twice as many neurons in it's neocortex than humans, and neocortex by many is considered the most important brain region for intelligent self awareness, clearly it's not the numbers that decide conscious ability and I think we have good evidence for that.

 

[.Scott]

I think that trying to use quantum mechanics to solve consciousness is just another attempt at the many existing but not necessarily a guarantee for success.
Quantum laws work differently than macroscopic electrically connected logic gates but then again that in itself is not proof that they are closer to consciousness than the logic gates.
Actually as far as we know our brains don't seem to be that "quantum" at all. And their temperature is far above that where we normally start noticing quantum behavior.

Pick your obstacle. On the one hand you have the difficulty in doing any significant quantum information processing in the warm and wet brain environment.
On the other hand you have the epiphenomenon issue discussed earlier in this thread. If you don't use QM, then you need to identify a way in which the information you are conscious of is associated (as is done with Integrated Information Theory) AND you need to show how that method of association has a method of effecting the universe - it can't just be epiphenomenal.

Given the choice, that "warm and wet" problem looks way more surmountable that what is like to be a search for new Physics.

 

[PeterDonis]

I would argue that there is something real nevertheless about qualia , because if all we had is pain signals and processing of them then in theory all pain or sense input would result in a action-reaction style of process similar to that of the "hammer tapping on the knee" reaction.

Not at all. Your brain does "processing" of pain signals that is far more complex. Indeed, to a physicalist, "qualia" is simply part of that processing.

this is the problem of faking consciousness , because unlike intellect which can be measured consciousness can be faked because it is not deterministically measurable.

This is the "zombie argument", which has been made by many philosophers, and debunked by many others. It has always seemed incomprehensible to me: it amounts to the claim that your own consciousness has no observable effect on your behavior--a "zombie" duplicate of you could exhibit identical observable behavior without being conscious. Really? So when you do things like describe your own conscious experience in detail, your consciousness has nothing to do with that? That's ridiculous.

In short: human qualia, at least, are not epiphenomenal.

 

[artis]

This is the "zombie argument", which has been made by many philosophers, and debunked by many others. It has always seemed incomprehensible to me: it amounts to the claim that your own consciousness has no observable effect on your behavior--a "zombie" duplicate of you could exhibit identical observable behavior without being conscious. Really? So when you do things like describe your own conscious experience in detail, your consciousness has nothing to do with that? That's ridiculous.

In short: human qualia, at least, are not epiphenomenal.

It may be the "zombie argument" or any other argument, quite frankly there are so many I lost count, but that is not what I meant by saying that "consciousness can be copied", what I meant was that on a average simple level it is possible to make a machine that behaves very similarly to an actual conscious being, in fact we are already there. Text wise chatGPT could as well pretend to be a school teacher helping out a kid doing homework, if the kid wasn't explicitly told what is in the other end of his text conversation I would bet many would think it's an actual human.

Now self awareness, I'm sure, has a huge impact on what you observe, otherwise CCTV cameras would cry seeing a terrible traffic accident, but the problem is when you need to discern whether the other side has that experience or doesn't. It's always easy with yourself because you know your self aware, it says that right in the word "self" and "aware".

 

[artis]

Not at all. Your brain does "processing" of pain signals that is far more complex. Indeed, to a physicalist, "qualia" is simply part of that processing.

I agree Peter, my point was more subtle , at least I hope it is. My point was that besides the process from pain source to the transport of signal to the processing of it there is another process going on. That process is the brain making a conscious choice on how to react to that stimuli. So for example if your an MMA practitioner and you also happen to follow one of the Asian religions , let's say you use pain not as a signal to be avoided as much as possible but rather as a tool and even a welcomed part of your life.
We know from neurology now that human brains rewire themselves with time as we live, new neuronal connections are made based on how we perceive the world, our experiences and what we feed ourselves information wise.
So I believe all humans have similar brains and nerves and yet based on the differences on how you perceive the world or the signals that you uptake, your brain is rewired and adapted to that.
This then begs the question, at least for me, is the mechanism of perception/self awareness a separate one from that of information processing or not.

The reason I say this is because in computers we don't have this "observer within a box" phenomenon, a computer truly only processes information and doesn't have the capacity to contemplate that information from a point of reference that is outside it's logic circuitry.
Yet for us it seems that what we experience and are aware of are two things not necessarily 100% intertwined.

Of course maybe this is all just a really weird emergent phenomenon of very complex special purpose information processing machines like our brains, that they can create this illusion of the "observer" being distanced from the very signals that allow him to observe.
Either way I believe this is paramount to achieving human like conscious self awareness, to understand how the observer can become, at least, in simulation, separated from that which is observed.
In other words , how input signals create a first person reality where the observer , if not physically, then at least mentally becomes separated from the signals he perceives.

 

[artis]

On the one hand you have the difficulty in doing any significant quantum information processing in the warm and wet brain environment.

Well if I'm not mistaken then currently I think we have no evidence of whether the brain does any quantum effects at all and if it does then how much. So I think it is really hard to talk about it because this is one of those arguments that really needs actual repeatable evidence.

 

[Algr]

Then, as I said, it's personal speculation and is off limits here.

The AI can search every published work and attribute any possible idea to multiple reputable authors. It is inverse plagiarism, where original works are passed off as the work of others.

 

[PeterDonis]

on a average simple level it is possible to make a machine that behaves very similarly to an actual conscious being, in fact we are already there

Only if people limit themselves to very simplistic tests of its behavior.

besides the process from pain source to the transport of signal to the processing of it there is another process going on. That process is the brain making a conscious choice on how to react to that stimuli.

There is also a lot of unconscious information processing going on in addition to the simple "reflex arc" response that you originally described.

is the mechanism of perception/self awareness a separate one from that of information processing or not.

The reason I say this is because in computers we don't have this "observer within a box" phenomenon

Here you are assuming that your question has the answer "yes". But what if the answer is "no"? In other words, what if it's all information processing, including qualia? Then you could put the same information processing into a computer and it would also have qualia.

Even if the answer to your question is "yes", there could still be some other physical mechanism that produces qualia, which just can't be usefully described as "information processing"--but you could still in principle put such a mechanism into a computer, or a robot, or whatever you want to call it, and it would have qualia.

Of course we are very far away from knowing how to do this, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.