A holy grail of computer science has been replicating the human consciousness—creating artificial intelligence. In today’s world, most computers are a processing unit with memory in which case data is stored, accessed, manipulated, and then stored again. Almost all machines have some set of rules or actions by which they operate, which are specified by the user. Through most of this, we consider the machine as a unit, which operates according to the criteria specified for it, but lacking any consciousness. The computer itself does not innovate our act outside of its protocols and from our perspective it appears to lack any “self awareness” of itself.
For a long time, science has hoped to uncover what makes humans different from the computer. How we understand ourselves and our surroundings and can think of things which seemingly come from nowhere. Our innovation builds on itself and we are able to “create” things that have little to do with the inputs we were provided. We consider ourselves self aware and conscious and radically different from any machine. But how different are we from a computer or any other creature.
One study done recently which can be found referenced here http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm, concerns the conscious decision to act. The study comes to the conclusion that our “decisions” are actually pre-consciously conceived and that in many ways we are only “viewers” of our actions, which we then attribute to our conscious decision to act. Now this could mean we have some sort of unconscious capacity, which thinks of our decisions before we become conscious of them. It could mean a lot of things, but I began to wonder could our idea of “self awareness” be an illusion. Specifically, do we attribute to our own minds and selves what are really only a protocol being fulfilled. In many ways, if you think to what motivates yourself we commonly attribute our likes, dislikes, dreams and aspirations to ourselves, but would it be impossible for our thoughts to be from something outside ourselves.
I think of this as similar to the game The Sims. In this game, you the player decide all the decisions of The Sim and accordingly the Sim acts out these actions. Now I wonder what would it be like if the Sim were a conscious being. Without any contact with its controller, it would believe and think that all of its wants, dislikes, dreams, and aspirations were somehow coming from him. There are only two instances in which the Sim would ever feel that it was not in control of itself: 1) If it had some order from the program that it wished not to fulfill but was forced to fulfill it or 2) If it had something that came from itself that it wanted to do but was unable to do it. In this case, they both require that the Sim has a conscious ability itself, which we from the start assumed it did not have The Sim, in this case, only perceives itself as conscious. Without communication between the controller and the controlled, which requires both to be separate thinking entities, there would never be any reason to suppose that the life the Sim lived was just a program telling it what to do.
As Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom points out in his paper on living within a computer simulation http://www.simulation-argument.com/ , it seems more likely that we do live in a simulation as opposed to a naturally occurring reality (whatever naturally occurring reality might mean). In this case, I go one step further to ask whether then we would consider the participants as “conscious self-aware beings” or ones which are only acting as computers which store information, access and manipulate it according to rules, and then store the new information again. From the creators of our simulation we may appear no more self-aware than The Sims game appears. Because of this, it may never be possible to create a machine that innovates, only ones that seem more and more human-like.
3 responses so far ↓
insomniac // June 8, 2008 at 9:21 am |
Working on a book that fits in here.
LifeOS: in search of the system that executes DNA
The way we perceive reality is much like a computer simulation.
All that our eyes believe to be true, they learned. The learning process is built on the interaction between our mind and the environment thru the the senses. Our senses reach a sort of consensus by comparring touch with sight and hearing and thinking about it. Yet there is never any real contact with the environment except thru the senses. Therefore, the mind creates an illusion that we believe to be reality, but it can never be the real thing.
cheers,
jim
jneuhaus // June 10, 2008 at 2:27 am |
I’ve been throwing out some of my ideas regarding whether or not true AI is possible on my new blog. Basically I believe that unless the free will that enables conscious decision processes is an illusion, free will has to originate with the fundamental uncertainty of quantum events. Quantum events are the only source of true uncertainty, everything else in the universe follow deterministic, causal relationships and therefore can have only a single possible outcome.
The problem with current software AI programs is that none of their cognitive states are directly derived from quantum events, so no matter how convincingly it may act like a conscious entity, it will always be a ‘zombie’ in the philosophical sense because all of its cognitive events are deterministic in nature and so can only have one possible outcomes. An act of free will requires that the final arbiter of how the act occurs be the actor itself, so that there is always at least some chance of at least 2 discrete outcomes possible for an act all the way up to the time the act actually occurs.
True acts of free will cannot exist in a purely predetermined environment because there is never more than a single effect for a given cause and so the subject can never ‘choose’ one outcome rather than another because, whether or not the subject is aware of it, there’s only a single possible outcome
joer1986 // June 10, 2008 at 12:41 pm |
There have been some articles that believe that our minds do, in fact, involve quantum processes, specifically its been thought that the collapse of the wave-function for humans occurs within our brains. In this case, since all particles are both wave and particle…. the point in which the wave collapses into the particle state (the many possibilities collapse into one actuality) occurs in our minds. This has been thought of to solve the paradox that many systems do not collapse into a particle behavior until we observe them. Now while quantum physical processes are the only ones to remain “non deterministic” these processes are only “non deterministic” in that we do not fully understand the basis by which these systems act. In fact, it is more our ignorance and inability to understand how these systems act and so we consider then “non deterministic” since we cant determine them.
The problem is, is that on the most fundamental level there is no cause and effect. In fact, cause and effect seem not to exist in most quantum systems. Our minds, unfortunately, are not random. For example, if you think of anything, there is at no point in which you can conceive of anything truly random. All of your thoughts and ideas are constructs of things you have been introduced to. Perhaps you think of some new ideas, yet this is really only a reshuffling and cross application of old ideas. In many ways, you are merely a reactor to your environment. Perhaps it is random in the way you reshuffle and cross apply the ideas, but still on a basic level your mind is applying the rules of cause and effect. This is why quantum effects continue to seem so strange to us, because our conscious experience is so completely different from the quantum reality.
I do think, however, that quantum computing is the only way in which any system may allow for the amount of complexity necessary to create the complex system of AI. This does not mean that the system has “free will” or that it is any more “free” than a person is. All this means is that there is enough computing power and enough memory space that the machine can reach the processing and capacity that humans have. If only we could manufacture biological machines…