From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 20:04:21 MDT
Dear Extropes,
I am in the process of exorcism of my AI ideas into words. I have a complete
top-middle-bottom set of ideas. However, I have started at the 'top'. When I
thought the whole thing through, and after having read reams of papers
(words words words...aaarrrgggghhh)...backing up a bit....
Throughout the literature, conferences and books on consciousness and
cognition one see endless cries "there's a hard problem, a hard problem.
Still a hard problem. Yep that's a hard problem. No progress. Tricky. Here's
another way to look at the hard problem. We need some sort of major change
in thinking - Subjective experience? Hard problem.... ...on and on and
on......"
Well I got a bit sick of the whole "I'm befuddled and I'm going to make a
living out of it" mindset and decided to fix it. Amongst other things I
ended up realising that to deal with the mind we have to perform a bit of a
surgical inside-out thingy with scientific method. It seems to be the method
itself which may be at the root of the whole issue. Maybe. It's a
wolfram-like view of the 'big picture', not just little CAs.
This is not a drill. I'm serious.
I wrote a short paper yesterday.
here: http://www.versalog.com.au/V509/Rocko_63_Science.pdf
BTW: my measure of success in writing this stuff? 1 page is too long. Every
word in excess of bare minimum is a walk away from a result. Well I failed.
It's 3 pages. Let me know if you have trouble downloading it.
When I started I did not know what I'd have at the end of it. You may find
my proposal probably resembles stuff you have read. Good. If so, let me know
where - I'd love to see where others went with this.
<< Robert J. Bradbury >> Your computronium is now real. It is a new family
of virtual particles (the Computrons) and the first member is the neuron!
Before you all call the persons-in-white-coats, think about this: When we
first tried to describe electricity we invented this funny thing called an
electron without having any real evidence of it. We kept it because of its
explanatory virtues. The computron is in the same vein and I contend that in
matters of the Mind we are in the 1800s, playing with things we can't quite
see, despite looking. I'm going to declare, for my own purposes (Strong-AI)
that a computron exists and then rework my thinking around it.
The immediate benefits?
1) The Zombie is real. I know when you get a zombie - there's no computrons
in the matter. Easy - a one liner!
2) There is no hard problem. Want to know what it is like to be a bat? Be a
Bat. That's the computationally perfect answer with mathematical rigour.
That's all you have to do!
It's the incredible preoccupation with 3rd person descriptions (for very
good reasons, of course) that has created the "problem". Turn it all inside
out - here's what I did:
At the beginning scientific method look like this....(colin-ised!)
=====================================================
1. Principle: “The Universe is Fundamentally Unknowable”
2. Principle: “Science makes theories about the universe describing the
universe in a particular context with validity in their predictive utility”
3. Corollary: “Scientific theories can never be proven, but wait on a knife
edge for one shred of contrary evidence”
=====================================================
it's classic hermeneutical realism.
At the end of my paper it looked like this:
=====================================================
1. Principle:The Universe and any subtended subset of it is recognised as
primarily a computational entity
2. Principle: A computational entity has a first person experience with the
status of a fundamental property of the universe. This first person
experience is determined by the organisational complexity and computational
capacity of the computational entity. The full description of this
experience is defined by the entity itself and is fundamentally private.
3. Principle: For purposes of communication, a computational entity may wish
to create models to characterise the nature of the universe in any context.
It is understood that such models, not consisting of the original
computation that created the context being modelled, are by nature
incomplete descriptions with limited predictive utility”
=======================================================
Note:
1) our original scientific method couched in the third principle.
2) We have a way of recognising the first person experience as fundamental
3) We are able to arrange a chunk of universe into the form of an artifical
mind and understand the nature of what it is doing from a computational
standpoint.
4) We have recognised the privacy of 1st person experience - we get to stop
arguing about what ‘subjective experience is’.
as I said in the paper:
We’re quite happy with mass, charge and spacetime, why not add ‘1st person
experience’ to it in some equivalent fashion – say awareness index or even
define a computational ‘atom’? Or a family of ‘computrons’, the notional
equivalents to sub-atomic particles, the carrier of ‘information’ in the
context of 1st person experience? We will, in time, be able to maniplate it
just like mass, charge and spacetime.
Well that's it. Humans are once again displaced as a central focus of our
descriptions of things (3rd person descriptions are a bunch of imperfect
cake recipes and the real cake is the computatonal view). I know others with
probably think it's a crock, but I have found it useful to think like this.
At first glance it looks like a slight-of-hand way of avoiding the problem.
After a while it seems kind of natural. Physicists invent these kind of
constructs all the time - which can't cogsci etc do the same thing? - it's
been very successful.
If there are any of you with academic links for whom this may be of interest
I would love to be connected with them. I am in a vacuum here. It's good - I
have freedom - but I have no sounding board and thats bad. I would love to
run a seminar on this somewhere. A serious airing.
I am open to other suggestions/rework of the wording .....but I think the
basic idea is in there adequately. Remember - no word fests! We have to get
this out of the hands of the Philosophers and into the labs. Speaking of
words - too many from me here. Far too many.
That feels better.
Time for lunch.
Cheers,
Colin Hales
*Catharsis....aaaahhhhhh*
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