From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 19:55:38 MDT
John Clark wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>
> >it's probably necessary on a low level for some computations, and
> >on a high level for qualia, but not intrinsically necessary to intelligence
>
> That does not compute. We know qualia exists, or rather, I know that
> at least one example of it does, it must have come about somehow.
> If the weird mysterious ineffable stuff was not necessary for
> intelligence then Evolution would have no way of producing it.
I tend to assume that qualia started out as a spandrel (like
bug-catchers becoming wings), then got tied in to reflectivity or the
"system bus" that ties the senses together. The mysterious ineffable
stuff was probably just a computational speedup - like Penrose's quantum
computing, for example.
> We may value our internal states but to Evolution it's a byproduct,
> behavior is the only thing that's important. Even if we were insanely
> lucky and we got this weird mysterious ineffable stuff by pure
> chance genetic drift would soon make it vanish, and anything
> else that's irrelevant to survival too, just like the eyes of fish that lived
> in dark caves for thousands of generations.
I agree. Obviously, both the ineffable computational shortcut and
qualia-based sensory integration (or reflectivity or whatever) either
promote fitness, or are the hard-to-get-rid-of byproducts of an
adaptation that does.
> Your only way out is to argue that it just provides a short cut to
> intelligence that could be produced in other more complicated ways,
Less complicated, but also less efficient.
> but that would mean it's easier to make a AI that experiences qualia than
> one that doesn't.
No; it would mean that, all else being equal, an ineffable AI is smarter
or more efficient than a computational one. It doesn't mean you can't
get equally good or better improvements with more computational power or
better programming.
> I don't see any need for weird mysterious ineffable stuff.
Need for, no; benefit from, yes.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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