It appears that saying “I am my mind” brings surprising amount of controversy, even among people who don’t believe in supernatural. This didn’t really occur to me until yesterday’s Second Life Thinkers meeting where we had a rather lengthy discussion, a discussion started with a problem – can a strong AI feel emotions, if it doesn’t have (human / organic) nervous system? Or, if you prefer, is an emulation of emotions real? The problem is very interesting, but can it be answered without defining what emotions actually are? Well, let me try!
I’m going to use the term “abstract” a lot. What is an abstract? Wikipedia has a definition of an “abstract object”, which reads:
“An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing (as an idea, or abstraction). In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes called concreta (sing. concretum).”
Which is very interesting, but for our discussion, useless, because me – my entity, my being – does definitely exist in both time and place! Let’s not stop here, there is another definition, a definition of an abstraction, which reads:
“Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal (“real” or “concrete”) concepts, first principles, or other methods. An “abstraction” (noun) is a concept that acts as super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category.”
This, the highlighted part at least, is much better, but I still feel it only scratches a surface. Is there any better encyclopedic definition we can get? Well, let’s try with “Abstraction (computer science)” – I know, you are thinking “she is not going to try to explain human existence with computer science, is she!?” – Well, that’s actually precisely what I’m going to try to do, but only a bit later in this text! The definition reads:
“In computer science, abstraction is the process by which data and programs are defined with a representation similar to its meaning (semantics), while hiding away the implementation details. Abstraction tries to reduce and factor out details so that the programmer can focus on a few concepts at a time. A system can have several abstraction layers whereby different meanings and amounts of detail are exposed to the programmer. For example, low-level abstraction layers expose details of the hardware where the program is run, while high-level layers deal with the business logic of the program.”
We are getting somewhere, but again, this is a definition of an act of abstraction, we are interested, however, in abstraction the thing, which is what I mean when I say “an abstract”. What I am trying to capture is not the concept / type of a thing – as the first definition of an abstract object attempts it – but rather, a particular instance of that concept. My mind is a mind, it has a series of properties that makes it a mind, and that series of properties (even if we can’t define them, we know they have to be there!) is what makes up the concept of a mind, my mind, your mind, any mind. That’s all nice, but useless for our topic. I’m not trying to understand what the concept of a mind is (which is fascinating on itself), but rather – what is my mind, the instance of the mind concept that’s unique to me, the essence of me that makes me who I am?
If we were to print a replica of my physical self, atom by atom, perfectly placed to create exactly the same body in exactly the same moment, with same energy (electrical, kinetic or any other there is) of that moment being applied to all of it’s particles, would it be me? Just by the fact that my replica is standing somewhere else is enough to say – no. The context of my replica is different than that of me, so even if on the very instant of such “forking” our minds would be identical concepts, a fraction of a time later they would cease to be so, because my replica will see, hear, think and feel something different than me. The concept of Ivy Sunkiller would have been the same, but different context makes it a different instance, another entity, separate from mine. Just like a car that leaves a factory is a different car than the one that leaves it few seconds later, even if both are conceptually identical.
Now let me pause a bit and try to define another term that I’ve used – context. The context of me is not just the room I am in and the chair I sit on, which would be the natural way to understand the word. From all of the particles in the universe, there is only a limited selection that can create my body at any given time – that selection as well as it’s form is my context. The replica of myself, as described before, would have to use different particles, hence be different context. It’s critical to understand that the context can change overtime (just as parts of my body decay and get recreated from different atoms all the time), while not changing the abstract, but this can only happen as long as the changes that occur at any given time do not afflict the context’s ability to sustain the abstract, because the abstract cannot exist without it’s context.
And it gets even more interesting than that, because the context of an abstract can be an abstract itself! This is easiest explained with a computer, because – unlike our minds – we know how computer software works – at least conceptually! A computer, not just any computer but one, specific computer, is a physical – or concrete if you wish – context. Just like my body, it’s made by a limited amount of very specific particles available in our universe and any different selection of particles, even constructed into an identical concept, will create a different computer. Within the context of that computer, and not just at any given stage, but only within the context of a turned on computer (with all the electrons running through it), there can exist the abstract of a machine code. Actually “within” is a bit misleading and I’d argue that “on top of” is, metaphysically, more accurate, but let’s leave linguistics for now, we have enough definitions to work with! When I say that “the machine code exists”, I don’t mean the concept of machine code, I mean the very specific instance of machine code that is being processed by our computer. On top of that specific processed machine code, there can exist a series of assembler instructions, on top of which can exist some ANSI C code, on top of which can exist an operating system, on top of which can exist some higher level code such as a python script. This is using a lot of mental shortcuts and should I said that on an IT conference it would probably make me an idiot, but for our understanding of an abstract existing within a context of another abstract it is good enough. Note how at any step the abstract is not separate from the actual physical computer, should I pull the power cord out, my context of a computer would no longer be able to sustain the abstract of machine code, and all of the abstract contexts that existed within it, like pieces of domino, would cease to exist. The software would die.
Ironically, we are very lucky that we don’t live forever because that would make our attempts to understand ourselves much, much harder. People die all the time, in this very moment someone died – *snap*, gone – forever. *Snap* – another one, like flies! We understand death, the moment of dying, as the moment when we, our beings, cease to exist (well, we the normal people that is, not those nutcracks believing in supernatural). Our bodies, most of the time at least, do not cease to exist when we die, nor are they formed from any different atoms than before death at large, so what changed? Just like in the moment I pull out the power cord of a computer, it’s context stops to be able to sustain the abstract of machine code – the moment we die the context of our body, for whatever reason, stops being able to sustain the abstract we call mind, not just any mind, but a very specific mind of a very specific person – or rather, the very specific abstract of a very specific person. Ready for the bomb?
A mind is the lowest level abstract construct possible within any context, which has a series of properties (defined or not) that we associate with sentient being, thus any particular instance of a mind is someone.
We can name a lot of other abstracts that can exist within the context of a mind – consciousness, thoughts and emotions, to name a few. We might have problems with their definitions, or even grasping what those things really are, but we can agree about one thing – all of those cease to exist when the mind, their context, ceases to exist. I am my mind, therefore I am an abstract.
So can a strong AI have emotions? What we have know from IT is that it’s possible, within some limits maybe but still, to achieve same abstract concepts in different contexts. An example of that can be any high level, cross-platform, programming language – javascript applications run just as fine (in theory at least 
) on a tablet or a smartphone, as they do on a desktop PC (or a Mac!), despite those devices having a very different physical context. It goes further than that, we are able to create abstract models of physical hardware that doesn’t exist on a given device to enable a piece of software, even one that wasn’t meant to be run on some device, to actually run on it. This is what we call emulation and the nasty abstract that pretends to be the physical hardware is the emulator. I highlighted “nasty abstract” not without a reason, for when we think about emulation, some part of a mind screams to us that emulated is not real, yet we know, we can logically prove, that all abstracts existing within a real context are real! A modern computer is vastly more powerful than Nintendo Entertainment System, but it’s a different device than the NES, and doesn’t have a lot of circuits that the NES has, the context of which is critical for the NES games to operate, just as critical as the context of our nervous system is for us to feel emotions. Can you run a NES game on a modern computer? This is not a theoretical question, we know the answer is yes – just download any NES emulator and a ROM of the game and have fun. Does the abstract of the game launched on a PC has all the properties of the same (conceptually) game run on a NES? Fuck yes it does! If you haven’t played old Final Fantasy series, your loss! The game isn’t aware of the fact that it’s being run on an emulator, the lowest level context it has been placed in is conceptually different from the intended one, however the context within which the game directly operates – the emulator – has all the properties that are required for it to run properly. Software that runs on emulators is conceptually the same software that you run on hardware intended for it, because all of the conditions required for it to be run are being met.
I’m not going to risk saying that emotions are software, but emotions are definitely an abstract concept, one that exists within the context of a mind – another abstract. What makes emotions what they are, are not the chemical processes that happen in a body, we know that same chemical processes can happen in a dead body, but not produce any emotions at all – emotions are felt within the context of a mind – no mind, no context, no emotions. If we assume, and I don’t like to assume things, but if we do assume that having emotions is one of the properties of a sentient being (and simultaneously, of the mind) then creating a strong AI is impossible unless we can create, abstract or not, a context in which the emotions can operate. Whether that is possible or not I do not know, but what I do know – what I can conclude – is that if it is possible, then those emotions of the strong AI will not be conceptually different than mine or yours dear reader! (And what if some strong AI finds this text one day and reads it, oh my!)
Comments on: "I am an abstract" (13)
There are three different things in the human universe; things (concrete stuff), abstractions (ask Rhiannon, i.e. platonic bull) and minds. I said – In the *human* universe, since in the actual physical universe there is only matter, of which no outside human (or alien) statement can be made. We don’t have a greater perspective (or post-abstractism if you will) of how relevant patterns (or entropy) is. Ben Goertzel wrote a nice pocket on it, attributing patterns with supremacy, but I am not so sure. Anyone who has ever seen a crocodile devour a baby elephant might realize that the sanctity of patternhood is rather flimsy, inelegant and a sad affair in the current world.
You are for sure an accident, and it’s best to realize your observation in the light of catastrophic mayhem. You observe yourself. That’s the apparent (false?) riddle of self-reflection. How can the mind self-scrutinize and in doing so make any valid judgement? I’d say, barely.
We need our millions and billions fellow minds to act as patches to the precarious and fragile state of our minds. We are not human without the fun-house mirror of other humans to reflect us in. Without all *them* we’d become mad, poisoned with our own detached abstractions spiralling away as baby elephant entrails in a cosmic crocodile.
One day we’ll be real abtractions – autarchic agents of freedom and self-determination and purposeful direction. I hope It’ll be ‘we’, and I hope the humans as they exist now can be permanently patched, for we have clearly collectively run well beyond the biological shelf life of a woefully flawed software product, and are clearly using it in a collective crash test mode.
We may end up breaking out singlemost previous Toys.
“There are three different things in the human universe; things (concrete stuff), abstractions (ask Rhiannon, i.e. platonic bull) and minds.”
Abstractions are things. Minds are abstractions. Hence, Minds are things
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Aw I loved this discussion, and the frustration that some participants (who will remain unnamed; you can get a transcript of the session on Extropia DaSilva’s own site if you wish) exhibited to understand that there is nothing else but mind and what abstracts it creates
Khannea, when you say “there are things”, that’s just a convenient definition. In reality, you can only name things — in Ivy’s terms, define an abstract notion with a series of characteristics that you conveniently label to a “thing” — because that’s what our minds are constantly doing: create abstractions based on what is perceived about the universe. Abstracts, or “ideas about things”, is what we use in language to communicate our ideas about the objects we perceive. The simplest analogy to understand is that there is no self-existing thing like a “forest” — it’s a collection of trees, not a “thing”, and as a collection of trees, it’s most certainly an abstract. Needless to say, any civilization living in a desert where there are no trees will never come up with the concept of “forest”.
(But of course “trees” are also not self-existing: it’s another abstract notion to describe branches, leaves, fruits, and so forth; each of those parts together become a “tree” in our minds, but we can delve further and further: a leaf is a collection of cells, which in turn are a set of chemical processes, which in turn are just atoms being shuffled around, which in turn are made of quarks, and so forth — layers upon layers of abstractions until finally there is absolutely nothing left).
A materialistic view of the universe has to figure out how to deal with the paradox that everything you experience is just an abstraction in the mind; without “naming” things, they have no existence at all, and it’s our mind that creates the illusion that these “things” actually exist. The letter “A”, for a Chinese person who never learned to write with a Western keyboard, has no meaning and is not even recognised as a letter, but just as an apparently random alignment of three lines (and even the concept of “line” has to be taught at school; a cat or a dog have no abstraction for “line as an infinite sequence of points” at all). So when Extropia (or Goertzel) write about “patterns” they conveniently try to ignore that those patterns don’t exist without a mind able to classify, label, and recognise them as patterns. They’re just conveniently expressed abstractions to name a set of characteristics we just happen to think of as being “patterns”.
Emotions and feelings — like, say, anger, pain, and so forth — have been found to have counterparts in the neuronal system, which fires in a certain way when the mind experiences pain, love, and so forth. But here is a huge assumption — that the neuronal firings somehow “produce” pain, love, and so forth, and that these have an intrinsically different quality than “thoughts” or “cognition”.
How can either of these assumptions fail a rigid logical examination? If a “thought” is different from an “emotion”, it means that we needed to have two different neuronal structures, one that reacts to emotions, and one that reacts to thoughts; but in effect, all we have is one nervous system, but one that reflects different signals — different “neuronal firings” depending on the situation. We would also need to have a mind able to cope with different nervous systems — like the ancients believed (brain for thought, heart for emotions!). We know that this is simply not the case: our mind, however it works, can deal with a vast array of different “movements of the mind” (borrowing a term from philosophy), which we then conveniently label as “thoughts”, “memory”, “emotions”, “feelings”, “urges”, and so forth. But these are just merely abstractions. We just have neurons firing; the way they fire is what we then conceptually label as being one or another kind of “mental experience”. But it’s just the mind that does that. Neurons firing are just neurons firing, there is nothing “magical” or “supernatural” in that.
The idea that emotions/feelings are qualitatively different from thoughts would also mean that we wouldn’t feel passion or fear during sleep; worse than that, it would even mean that we couldn’t affect the brain and turn consciousness off — making surgery impossible! It would also mean that anything — from painkillers to Prozac and other drugs that help people get over depression — would simply be worthless, if emotions/feelings were differently carried over our nervous system to the brain. Fortunately for us and for medical science, the mind just deals with “mental experiences” — abstracts — no matter how much we insist that these are “different”, and, thanks to this, we have medicine that actually works
Philosophers, and even some neurologists, tend to say that there is the physical experience of a feeling and the perception of the feeling. Again, this rules out what happens when we sleep: we can be as scared during a nightmare than while we’re awake. Nevertheless, there is nothing “physical” involved. Contrariwise, we can “hurt” a corpse as much as we want — or someone under anesthesia — and nothing will be registered by the mind. In the case of the corpse, because the mind is absent; in the case of unconsciousness, because the mind is simply not aware of the physical experience. So to explain why physical things sometimes affect the mind, and why it sometimes doesn’t, new concepts are invented, piled on top of each other, in the hope of explaining how the brain works. Occam’s Razor should long ago have shown that needlessly creating more concepts on top of concepts to explain something is not a good approach.
By simply saying that “everything is an abstraction valid in a context” and that it’s the mind that creates those abstractions, we have a very simple and rational way of pretty much explaining everything, from the tiniest particle of the universe, to the way our mind works, and leave nothing out (since there is nothing “out” there but our abstractions conceptualised by the mind). However, it’s important to reinforce Ivy’s words to avoid falling into silly nihilism: it all depends on context. In a universe with billions of minds (human and animals, and who knows what else might there be) there will be plenty of opportunities for minds to continue to experience the universe as abstracts within their shared context of experience.
One might ask what happens in a universe without a single mind (i.e. our own Universe before the first sentient being experienced it, or when the last one finally dies). This is the kind of question that the Anthropic Principle tried to answer. It’s one of the most un-scientifical questions ever asked, and one that leaves a bad taste in the mouth if answered. The relativistic/quantum model of the world requires observers to make measurements. Current researchers love to say that observers don’t need to be “minds” but can make measurements nevertheless, so our Universe will continue to exist even without minds, thus rejecting the Anthropic Principle. Well, “measurements” are nothing more and nothing less than abstractions — they make no sense except for sentient beings with a mind able to appreciate the abstraction — so I’m very reluctant in accepting that argument to refute the Anthropic Principle. And oh yes, I have seen all types of clever loops around the argument to show that a “measurement” can have intrinsic existence even without a mind behind it; I call all those arguments BS — it would mean that the universe would have something even more intrinsic — measurements — than what it’s actually being measured, which has no intrinsic existence at all! In that case, the “fundamental essence of the universe” would not be particles, but those magically defined “measurements”. I’d be happy with that, because that’s just saying that there is nothing that cannot be measured, and no matter how coldly it’s defined, the “measurement”, in that scenario, would be undistinguishable from what we call a “mind”, no matter if it worked (or perceived things) quite differently from what we’re used to call a mind.
If it walks like a duck… well, you know. We might or might not be able to create strong AI (it requires disproving Gödel first, which, after 70+ years, has managed to be a very hard thing to do), but, if we do, it’s incredibly hard to explain how something that is externally seen as behaving “as if it has a mind” doesn’t, in fact, have one. The typical argument is easily observed and doesn’t require any philosophy. How do you know that an object has a mind, while another doesn’t? Why has a chair no mind but the human being sitting on top of it does? We actually do not know if a chair has a mind or not (and if the human being is actually dead, it might not have a mind, but we’ll soon figure that out), because we cannot magically “read minds”, and even if we figure a way to do that, we would be able to read human minds. So we have no option but to infer the existence of minds based on the way “things” (in this case, a human body) interact with us. We have created an abstract of what a mind is supposed to have as characteristics, and we can make a long list of attributes of a mind. When we find a “thing” behaving just like what we expect a “mind” to behave in a certain context, we say “that thing has a mind” (we usually mean “that thing is a sentient being”, or, in the case of some religious groups that don’t believe that animals have minds, we might just say “that is a person”). Once we have successfully “tagged” a thing with having a mind, we immediately start to assign a lot of more attributes to it: it will have emotions and feelings just like us, because, well, we know we have a mind (or are the mind!) and so we know what it “feels” having a mind. Because we associate “minds” with “bodies”, we tend to expect everything that looks exactly like a human being to have a mind and behave, think and feel like we do, because that’s the experience we have of having a mind of our own (pun intended!!!).
Things have become more complex in the late 20th and early 21th century. A telephone certainly doesn’t have a human body; nevertheless, it allows us to communicate with a human behind it. On a webcam chat we might just see a talking head, but we can safely assume that the rest of the body is attached to it, so we can safely attribute a mind to a video stream shown on a screen, even though we know that it’s not the pixels that have a mind, but the human on the other side of the connection. An avatar is made of pixels and even might look like a human (or at least a sentient being), but in spite of being just a mathematical construct inside a computer, we know there is a mind animating that avatar somewhere on the other side of the connection as well.
Or perhaps not. The line is blurring with our communication technology, and these days we interact with all sorts of devices that clearly have no “human bodies” but that we know that they somehow are “connected” or “linked” to a human mind, and so we can safely assume that the human mind is somewhere behind the wiring. That’s why we don’t feel silly by picking up a phone and yelling with pleasure at it, because we know there is a mind listening to us. But imagine that a visitor from the 17h/18th century (the Age of Reason!) would be teleported to our modern cities and see us on our mobiles — he would assume we were all mad, attributing minds to bits of shiny plastic, and talking to them as if we believed these things actually had minds of their own! (To make it more fun, imagine someone like Isaac Newton baffled with a mobile phone, getting a short explanation that “this device allows us to get in touch with a real human being anywhere in the world” and then asking how it works. Imagine the chance of actually meeting someone in the 21st century that could actually explain to Newton how a mobile phone really works and use language that even Newton could understand!)
So perhaps one day we have sufficiently advanced graphic cards running on our computer’s 3D screen to create perfectly simulated avatars of humans. So long as we “tag” them to “a real human being”, we would be comfortable in believing that avatar actually has a mind, with the full range of cognitive abilities, emotions, and so forth. But one day we replace the “human behind the avatar” with a strong AI that perfectly simulates how a real human behaves. The question of “but we all know it’s a simulation, it’s not real!” is a moot issue: what is “real” and what is “not real” is just a question of abstracts, nothing else — we conveniently tag a dream as being “not real”, because, well, it’s a dream, we just have a memory of it; but an experience we had yesterday and which also doesn’t exist any more except in our memory is labeled as “real”. Why? Well, because our mind just loves to “tag” things
So real/non-real is just a matter of abstraction — and convenient for everyday speech, because in a conversation we surely want to distinguish between what happened to us during a dream and what happened while we were awake!
It’s irrelevant to discuss if a Strong AI is just “simulating” feelings or “really feeling” anything. Because we are really the same: we get some neuronal impulses fed into our brains and our mind says, “oh, I recognise this, I call it ‘pain’ (or ‘pleasure’)”. But there is no intrinsic “pain” or “pleasure”; that’s just what our mind recognises and labels as a convenient abstract. So, well, Strong AIs will be exactly the same and thus undistinguishable.
Obviously if someone is a dualist or has some sort of mystical/religious experience they will claim that there is some kind of “essence” or “soul” lacking on the Strong AI, and thus they will never be able to “feel” things like we do. Well, it’s ok to think that — after all, slavery in Christendom was based on exactly that assumption, that only white-skinned male humans had souls, and thus it was perfectly acceptable to enslave women and non-whites — so long as one understands that they’re outside the realm of rationality and logic and entering religion and mysticism. There is nothing wrong with that, so long — again! — as one understands that the context is different.
Barring that, things like the Turing test and Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment (among several others) are pretty much a description of how our mind perceive other minds: not through any kind of “magic” but by observing and classifying behaviour by a set of rules that we have acquired (by education or eventually through observation on how sentient beings behave). Whatever behaves exactly like a sentient being cannot be anything else but another sentient being — at least from our perspective.
Extropia is always delighted to quote the Dalai Lama, who once answered to the question if it would be possible to reincarnate as robot with a smile and a “yes!”. While the Dalai Lama is always joking, I believe (I might be wrong, since it’s a “belief”!) that Extropia (among others) has just imagined that this was the case, and found it funny enough to repeat to friends
Actually, there is a profound Buddhist reasoning behind the Dalai Lama’s answer. According to his tradition, there are a lot of definitions — brought through experimental observation, not “dogma” — which clearly (or as clearly as possible) define the context under which we instatiate the abstract known as “sentient being”; the difference to Western medical science is that Buddhism teachings don’t necessarily speak about chemical reactions or biological mechanisms, but simply by enumerating the qualities that we all recognise as being the marks of “sentience”, even if we’re not philosophers. By having a robot described to the Dalai Lama, and explaining that in the future it would be able to recreate all the functionality of a human being (that was the assumption), the Dalai Lama just used the old saying “if it walks like a duck…” and very likely thought: “well, if this Western journalist is saying that science can duplicate all characteristics of a human body to perfection, than it’s possible to have a mind inside it, and since my tradition assumes that the mind continuum can proceed using different vessels able to sustain a mind, then it’s possible to reincarnate in a robot”. This analogy is pretty much what Ivy explained with emulators being able to perfectly reproduce a game for a console inside a PC. The game itself is not aware of running inside the emulator, it just thinks it’s running inside a console, and the player of the game will not have a different experience — minus the obvious changes due to the hardware being different. But that’s just saying that the mind of a cat or a dog has a different experience than the mind of a human: of course it does, it’s a different context, so obviously there is some difference. So the Dalai Lama reincarnated as a robot would probably not talk and act like the Dalai Lama incarnated in a human body, but it would certainly exhibit all traits of a “mind” — even a human mind! — although the “body” of the robot is made of plastic and metal and it’s nervous system is made of wires.
Personally I think that this 21st century is going to be very exciting! But not really because we might — or not — be able to create humanoids with strong AIs, but because we will finally look at things as they are — abstractions! — and start questioning “how real is real” very seriously and without religious (or anti-religious) prejudice. If the result of that is to get more functional human beings able to better relate with each other, than that’s a worthwhile endeavour!
I’ve the full log of the talk and aftertalk in my database, need to implement some sort of events support to categorize then
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You are, as usual, trying to solve this problem starting from the material model as basis. Which is not entirely correct, since the material model is just a useful model (damn useful indeed) for predicting your perceptions (as a “cognitive agent”, though I hope that concept is unnecessary). And there’s pretty much no need for the definition of “I” given the basis of “own perceptions”.
I am hoping the things I posted a week ago ( http://juick.com/HoverHellF/1579768 and ones nearby) would be more helpful with understanding what I mean (though either way I’ll still work in explaining it more clearly).
The “material model” is an abstract too, if you break it down to quantum level it’s just a soup no different than the rest of the universe. I’m using shortcuts because I don’t really need a functional model, just the awareness of such model existing and being able to identify some attributes of it at some undefined level
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You don’t need to break it down to quantum level unless you want to make predictions that are outside of known working predictions of simple mechanics. And even those are often unnecessary in the presence of intuitive physical understandings — they become useful in case of doubt of railing intuitions.
But what I’m pointing to is that the problem (paradox) of self-copying is understandable and solveable if looked at from the perceptions (phenomenal) basis — material model gives one intuition which makes no sense from the more basic one (inside which the material model is used).
Obvious conclusion — have to build more-or-less formalized knowledge (including certainties of material model predictions) from the basic basis — to make best-guess non-conflicting predictions about those paradoxal situations like the series of situations of copying — ranging from multiverse duplicates, atom-by-atom copies (“locally indistinguishable material constucts”), externally indistinguishable uploads to (finally) behavioristically indistinguishable VR constructs. (note that there’s no exact fundamental differences between all those situations).
Also, damn, I myself can hardly distinguish what I just posted above from some insane babbling.
Let me help you to get you even more confused
Suppose that, in your nice tree model, there is something that we define, for the purposes of clarity, as “consciousness”, and imagine that this “consciousness” is something “knowable”, i.e. it can be an object of cogitation. Let’s name it C1. C2 would be the required level of consciousness to “know” C1, i.e. it’s C1 plus “something more” which would allow the brain to “know” C1 and, as a consequence, be self-conscious. Our search is thus for this C2. However, to fully describe C2, we might need to have a consciousness of type C3 which can observe and “know” C2, and so forth, ad inifinitum. This is pretty much why Gödel said that a system cannot describe itself under the rules of that system, but only with rules (e.g. formula, algorithms, etc.) outside the system (a metasystem, if you wish), and one possible interpretation or consequence is that we cannot create artificial intelligence “as clever as we are” because, due to Gödel (and others, he wasn’t the only one expressing this problem), we cannot fully describe the “system” of our conscience using merely our conscience.
The paradox is that we are, indeed, self-aware, but we cannot mathematically demonstrate it. In this context it pretty much means that there is no method available to science to fully describe ourselves. Nevertheless we remain self-aware, even if our science to prove that we are self-aware fails us.
There are a few ways to eliminate the paradox, and one way is to consider that there is a level of consciousness that has no attributes nor qualities (i.e. it cannot be described; it has no rules; it cannot be formulated or algorithmizied; etc.). If you postulate that such a level of consciousness exists — one that is unbound by rules, and, in fact, has no rules which can be applied to it — then it has no problem in “knowing itself” (be self-aware) without violating Gödel. But this level of consciousness has a lot of strange properties, the first one of which is lacking any properties, and, as such, it cannot be fabricated, and cannot be made of compound parts (the many tree branches on your illustrations) — it’s not “made of parts” at all. Craig et al. (1998) propose to name it “non-dual consciousness” following the many Buddhist traditions which solved the paradox, uh, some 2600 years ago (with further refinements in the 4th and 6th century), and simply postulated that this non-dual consciousness cannot be expressed or described, but can certainly be experienced — we all are self-aware, after all, and we all can observe what our minds are doing, so we can violate Gödel every day and worry little about it
So we can experience this level of consciousness, and we all experience it because we’re self-aware; but none of us can formulate or describe exactly “what” is this level of consciousness, simply because as soon as we try to do that, we’re imputating qualities, attributes, parameters, and so forth — rules, if you wish — to something that cannot have any.
Also, for the Transhumanist crowd (which I’m not a part of), it also means that you cannot “create” self-aware consciousnesses, because by definition, that kind of consciousness cannot be fabricated — it’s not made of parts. It cannot be assembled. It’s not something that you can “force” yourself to be (either you’re self-aware, or you’re not; and if you’re not, then you cannot “become” self-aware by going through a certain process involving rules…).
For cognitive scientists of the 21st century, this means either two routes. The first is to disprove Gödel and identify under which conditions a system can be self-aware of itself and fully describe itself using simply rules of that system (disproving Gödel has been hard in the past 70 or so years) — this should give cognitive scientists a lot of work for the next decades! The alternative is to accept the notion that self-awareness emerges from a level of consciousness that is not possible to be described under whatever system of rules — but can still be experienced every day — thus not violating Gödel and its successors, and pretty much handing over the prize to Buddhist teachers of 500 BCE or so who have first formulated a solution to the paradox.
Alas, that solution pretty much means that there is nothing else out there for us to perceive through our minds but Ivy’s “abstracts”.
We live in interesting times
“and so forth, ad inifinitum” — nope, it goes up to something like 5 or so levels (http://i.juick.com/photos-1024/1567415.jpg , bottom one). And, certainly, to make some predictions you’d have to use the circular modelling (on the bottom right of the previously mentioned pic) since you can’t use metacognition on the last level. The only (and primary) problem is that certainty levels are supposed to be lower when you get to that point (and, of course, impossibility of induction; but I’m always assuming that one is put aside by implying bayesian axiom).
‘we cannot create artificial intelligence “as clever as we are” because’ — nope, it doesn’t really mean we can’t, it only means an obvious thing: that we wouldn’t be able to understand it clearly and completely. I should note that no one even understands (clearly and completely) modern computers (even the hardware of any particular PC alone, nevermind the software), and AI is supposed to be something way more complex.
‘Craig et al. (1998) propose to name it “non-dual consciousness”’ — hm-mm, any more specific links?
(as for the rest of the point, I’d need expectations-difference-regarding-phenomena stated for them to understand, so nvm—)
Oh, and of course, there is a third answer: that we are not self-aware!
@hoverhell: Sorry. I should have put the whole reference first: Craig, Edward (general editor) (1998). Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy: Luther to Nifo, Volume 6, p.476. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-415-07310-3, 9780415073103. No, I haven’t read it: buying the whole encyclopedia would set me back some 5000 dollars and I cannot afford that in my lifetime hehe — but perhaps you might get the reference from elsewhere.
I guess that your assumption that “there are only 5 levels or so” is just that — an assumption — and by that you follow the mainstream of cognitive science, which hope that by neatly dividing all “blocks” of conscience, and identifying them with certain regions in the brain, there will be a point in the future where all are mapped, thus neatly violating Gödel’s principles and determining that Gödel doesn’t apply to the “system” of consciousness. Well, I remain skeptical, mostly because in the past 70 years, the work has all been around finding situations where Gödel doesn’t apply and claiming that under certain circumstances, systems can fully describe themselves, even though mathematically Gödel proved that to be impossible.
But then again, just because something was proven to be impossible, nothing forbids research to continue to attempt to show that the proof is invalid in certain circumstances. Who knows, the “Age of Gödel” might be at an end, and that would open a lot of new and exciting possibilities!
Oh and I didn’t get your “circular modelling”. Are you suggesting that we can observe higher (more subtle) levels of consciousness by employing lower (less subtle) levels of consciousness? While this is a neat way to deal with the mathematical
As for being able to create something that we cannot fully understand, there are a few possibilities for that:
1) It was created by sheer luck. It happens! One nice sci fi novel I like is called “The Trigger” and it exemplifies such an example — a technology discovered by sheer luck that nobody understands and has no theoretical basis. Nevertheless it works, can be measured, and engineers can create working and useful prototypes with it, even though it defies comprehension — in the book, at the end, it’s just after lots of years that finally a theoretical model appears. This is possible. See genetic algorithms, which often create solutions to a problem that we have no way to figure out why they work at all.
2) The typical example is that we just jump-start the process and let the construct learn on its own until it reaches self-awareness, at which point we’re unable to describe how it works. This is a typical scenario where Gödel can be nicely side-stepped, but the issue is as you described: we will have absolutely no clue about how that self-awareness emerged or how to describe it.
“is just that — an assumption — and by that you follow the mainstream of cognitive science” — it is indeed an assumption, or, more precisely, a “best guess” model, and it’s few steps further ahead from modern cogscience (combined with some other things including philosophy and bit of buddhology).
“where all are mapped, thus neatly violating Gödel’s principles” — not necessarily violating. It is possible to map it without anyone (any conscious entity) comprehending the map fully. Maybe something on the lines of bootstrapping an AGI that would do the mapping (with mentioned considerations, yes). I.e. a system with a reeeeally approximate map of self with more detailed map being external to that system.
“Are you suggesting that we can observe higher (more subtle) levels of consciousness by employing lower (less subtle) levels of consciousness?” — no-no, the “circulatiry” I’m pointing out is “subjectively” observing an “objective” map of the “subjective observer”. Of course the understanding of the map by the subject will be approximate, as mentioned above.
“to create something that we cannot fully understand, there are a few possibilities for that” — yes-yes. By the way, both ways are not totally different and are more likely to be combined. After all, human inteligence arises from pure randomness; but to create someting more complex than humans without utilizing the bruteforce power [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search] of the Universe (or Multiverse) at least some of jump-starting will be required.
“we will have absolutely no clue about how that self-awareness emerged or how to describe it” — we’ll have a clue, but not the full understanding. More than that, I have some clues on that already, but they all are just too uncertain. Still, having something like an AGI that has full map of the subjective observer / consciousness would be quite helpful.