From: hal@rain.org
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 22:42:08 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, <sentience@pobox.com>, writes:
> I think we all agree that even if a million monkeys typing on a million
> typewriters generated the paragraph above, it wouldn't make the Hal who
> wrote it real. Only Hal's brain or a simulation thereof - being
> instantiated - can put actual qualia behind the statement. It's not
> enough to have the inputs and outputs in a Giant Lookup Table. So the
> question is, if the playback was generated by random chance, can the Hal
> it "records" be said to exist? Will he ever, even once, have said
> "cogito ergo sum", or is there only a text-based representation of the
> words? For the purposes of this argument we are *assuming* that an
> actual neuron-by-neuron simulation would make the Hal real; the question
> is, *given* that, does a randomly generated recording also make Hal real?
It seems that you are combining two ideas here: playback and randomness.
In speaking of "playback" it is simplest to consider making a record of
a calculation, and then somehow replaying that record. As you described,
there are a number of variations of that idea.
But the question of random actions which "just happen" to mimic (or
create) consciousness output is a different matter. This would not have
to be a replay of a previously existing consciousness.
You proposed a system with a little bit of randomness, one which is
usually lawful but occasionally makes an unplanned transition. We could
have a knob to vary the amount of randomness, from a totally deterministic
conscious calculation to a totally random, uncontrolled series of states.
Clearly, in practice, as we move the knob from the deterministic towards
the random position the consciousness is going to begin to go bad.
It would be like zapping the neurons in your brain more and more often,
perhaps taking stronger and stronger drugs. Eventually you go insane,
dissolve into total, chaotic madness, and (presumably) are no longer
what we would call conscious.
In practice, then, we have a clear relationship between determinism
and consciousness, controllable by the knob. A random machine is not
conscious.
Now, it is theoretically possible that, even though the knob has dialed
in a significant amount of randomness, that we "get lucky", and the
machine happens to continue to work right. As we move the knob more
towards the random position, this becomes less and less likely. With
the fully random position it is astronomically unlikely.
I have seen it suggested that exploring the behavior of systems so far
from "reasonableness" is outside the range of our intuition. Our common
sense fails as we move to the quantum level, or out to the range where
relativity holds sway. It may be equally true that when dealing with
events which are of such extraordinary low degree of probability, that
our common sense fails there as well.
It could be that a fully random state machine which nevertheless managed
to instantiate in full and complete detail the complexity of a human
mind, thinking thoughts over an extended period of time, would in fact
be conscious. Whatever intuition leads us to think otherwise must be
distrusted, in a realm so far from that where common sense is proven to
work.
Hal
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