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Robo-Souls ... PREdux
FOREthoughts of the Event & 'robo-soul' review
( - Ceptual Institute)
of
"Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by
2100?" A Symposium at Stanford, April
1, 2000
A symposium organized and headed by Douglas Hofstadter.
Participants included:
Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Bill Joy, John Holland, Ralph Merkle, Kevin Kelly,
Frank Drake, John Koza.
Thermo-Quantum Neurons
and the required
'architecture' of consciousness
Considerations of what Robo-souls are all about. A year before Hofstader's year 2000 Symposium.
Ceptual Institute
ceptualinstitute.com
Saturday, May 22, 1999
In 1996 at Tucson-II, and again in 1997 at the first ASSC conference, I tried to bring
to the Science of Consciousness community's attention, the need to carefully parse out
even more clearly, definitions of what 'consciousness' ('cs.') may or may not be .. what
the "qualities of the 'qualia of consciousness' " are, so to speak.
There was, and still is I see, so much emphasis on the markers of cs.--the
correlates--that breakthroughs are stymied from happening.
Part of the problem is due to limitations of current Artificial Intelligence paradigms. Without a better understanding of the exact dynamics involved, the best science can do is try to mimic observed behaviors using crude mechanisms--which are sometimes effective, though not always--to re-enact at least the "symptoms" of the processes. Short of simply replicating what nature already had produced ... like: 'structures that act like atoms' .. it will be difficult to match existing sentient systems with systems which that are 'just as sentient'.
From my own small analysis of what differences distinguish natural from contrived systems, the secret isn't to be found in the components that systems are composed of per se. As I see it, the difference comes down to whether the parts of the system are as "adaptive while remaining functional" as the whole of the system is. That is, conscious systems satisfy the requirement : existentially maintain and continue conveyance of fine-tuned, meaningful, pertinent information and energies .. even when undergoing radical somatic changes at any level .. atomic, biochemical, organelle, organ/limb, and so on.
The companion requirement is : those structures of systems must be information enactors, not just carriers. That is, they must be multi-tasked - where changes constitute information shifts at more than one level at the same time.
A simple wall switch for electric lights would not rank as a component of a conscious system. It is too rigid and insensitive and non-integrated ... self-referentially 'numb' ... to what passes through it--current or data. Make that switch of a chemical soup which assembles one way when a flowing current is present, and quite another way when the current isn't, and you come a step closer to having the component of a conscious system. Have that soup participate in determining when and the extent of how much current flows--say, by being light, heat, or agitation sensitive--and you come closer still.
It isn't the form or architecture per se that matters. Its the integrated and functional sensitivity of all aspects that comprise an entity which makes the difference and therefore hallmarks its rank of sentience and consciousness.
This is a whole new way of appreciating what sentience and
consciousness is. It is subtle, complete, does not limit cs. to the human experience
of it, and essentially extends the likelihood to all animates. It also allows
the
probability--if not necessity--that the universe in its totality is
essentially "a sentience", and, the possibility that contrived devices
can be sufficiently, even if not completely, 'mindful'.
There are at least three empirical understandings which cs. research has to amend if there is any hope of re-associating the experiences of cs. with the processes of cs.
The first is recursive-unity. Recalling Maxwell's 'demon scenario', I suggest it's been mistakenly interpreted as the 'chinese theater' relationship ... the demon being a cs. one step removed from the information/energy of the gas-chambers-valve...a single snap-shot example of the infinite regresses possible of 'mind' observing some separate 'information'. Rather than that relation, I suggest that the 'demon-gas-chamber-valve' unity .. where there is a continuum of information feeding back again and again through the four components, is what constitutes the 'consciousness' of the whole system. The demon is not an external cs.
Assume that the demon was incapable of experiencing any information/energy except that of the gas-chamber-valve. If it wasn't in direct contact with those parts, where it was acting as a conduit for processing the information or energy, it would harbor no 'consciousness' at all since no flowing information would be 'in it itself', inherently and innate. If it didn't experience/process the information of the gas's momentum/placements, it would experience nothing and be sentient of nothing. Ergo, it would not be "conscious".
'Sentience' is a recursive reinforcing flow, gradient or active variability that's part of the form of a system. Sentient systems are sensorally affected systems. They are tuned and responsive to holistic flows and performance .... full performance, not partial 'information'. The 'quality of this qualia' is continuity/continuance ... and that is something that quantum wave-collapse versions of cs. have difficulty dealing with.
I had a brief correspondence with Henry Stapp a few years ago and he asked me if I had any musings on how to resolve the quantum problem of cs. being defined as the collapse of the wave function? He was struggling with the issue of how an idea 'sustains' when it seems to come into existence by congealing into an isolated node, stopping in its tracks and unassociated with 'going on'.
In counterpoint, many recent theorists disavow any importance on wave collapse and toss out considerations of wave-functions at all. That is too harsh, too reactionary, in my way of thinking. What's required is that wave collapse does play a role, but no more and no less than wave-reconstitution also. There is a continuum at work here, continuum rather than quantum ... or some other hidden variable process that binds quantum nodes together.
I do have a model that seems to account for this, but I won't trouble you with details here. They are enunciated in other available writings online. For general discussion purposes though the best explanation can be achieve using the phenomenon of Josephson Junctions.
Josephson Junctions are real events in which energy/information tunnels (transits in a non-interfering way ... that has no reactive effect on anything that exists spatially between where the effect starts and where it ends up) from one location to another. This is a quantum-jump event from one locus to another with no effective 'presence' at locations in between. The 'information' effectively disappears in one place and then re-appears in another. But what specifically happens to the information during the process?
Several years ago I propose that it is still present, but simply re-coded (compressed), during transit ... in a way that assumes we live in dimensions of space and time where there are at least three Time dimensions, not just one, and that the apparent 'disappearance' occurs when one or two of those time dimensions/directions reduces to a length of 'zero'. Information is basically 'zipped' - coded by what's essentially an act of compression - or 'collapse', if you will - from 6N (phasespace) into 4N (normal space) ... or tighter compressions (3N or 2N) ... and then 'unzipped' back again after the jump. Essentially, we live in a universe where dimensions are convenient - but optional. The number of dimensions can vary and existing things or energy can re-mold to many alternative dimension numbers/states.
This proposed model retains all the observations of quantum behavior, and yet provides an underscoring platform of 'continuum', on which sustained and recursible sentience can reside and maintain a presence. I listened to Walker's presentation at Tucson-II about the absolute naturalness of quantum events at synaptic junctions, and they seemed to me for all the world to be descriptions of synaptic junctions each being many-multiple Josephson Junctions, firing and interacting spherically at each node. If you extrapolate this for all the synaptic junctions in a brain, the behavioral options are hyper-exponential, with the brain thriving on its own signals and becoming Bernard Baars' Global Workspace.
Neural tissue is integratively affected by impulses, and isn't just a hard matriced substrate, the way the AI paradigm models it. So, the matrix is affected by the information/energy and is not merely a 'carrier'. In this way, as much information and reactive behaviors are visceral as they are cognitive. And this is just the area that cs. researchers have tried to deal with, but haven't had a satisfying model to blend with. Hormonal dynamics in living organisms in fact are indicators that living sentience systems don't simply carry/process extraneous information/energy but are sensitive/responsive to the information/energy that pass thought them .... the systems responsive to itself ... the "demon with chambers with valve with gasses" unity.
Then, we can go on, as Michel Cabanac (Lavalle University, Canada) has done, and explore the real and ongoing interconnections between the visceral and the cognitive ... which together - bound - form the totality called mind/sentience.
Information without the processing, is inert and is not sentience/consciousness.
And processed information, which is not pertinent to the system doing the processing, does
not contribute to the creation of sentience/consciousness. Sentience/consciousness
is information/energy which is sensitive/responsive to itself ... cendently and
transcendently.
Ceptual Institute
===
addendum May 24, 1999
The demon can also be dispensed with ... transformed actually ... if we consider the 'demon' to actually be a group of behavior rules, rather than an holistic entity (external-mind). The recursive loop ... gasses/chambers/valves ... can be a self-referenced entity on its own ... self emersive and self-sentient. The process 'rules' are the directives of the system, the behavior guides, with the rest of the aspects being the effectors of action and performance.
Enactment of performance is the identical with sentience. There are most likely many levels of sentience and different degrees of competence and extent, but it is all sentience. The universe is an emersive sentient conscious 'whole'.
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