From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 23:34:00 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>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.
That must be true or we wouldn't have qualia, that's also why I think the
Turing Test works for consciousness as well as intelligence.
>The mysterious ineffable stuff was probably just a computational
>speedup - like Penrose's quantum computing, for example.
I have three problems with Penrose:
1) There is not one scrap of experimental evidence that it's happening
and there should be if it were true.
2) The inside of a neuron seems to be far too hot and noisy for
quantum coherence to be possible, much less quantum computation.
You'd need new fundamental laws of physics for this to work,
that's another way of saying you'd need magic and I don't like
to invoke magic if I don't need to. I don't need to.
3) If it were true you'd think people would be good at solving some of the
known non computational problems, that is, problems that can only be
solved in a time proportional to 2^N where N is the number of elements
in the problem. However, human beings aren't one bit better at solving
these sort of problems than computers are, actually computers are
better at it than people but still, I admit, not very good.
>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.
Then if you want to make an AI with a certain intelligence, average
human level for example, it would be easier to make an AI that experiences
qualia than one that doesn't. That really shouldn't surprise you,
considering Evolution's experience in building such things, you could make a
much stronger case that a computer might be able to feel emotions but it could
never be intelligent.
Nature found it much easier to come up with feeling than the ability to
reason, it certainly came up with it first. The most ancient part of the
brain, the spinal cord, the medulla and the pons is similar to the brain of
a fish or amphibian and first made an appearance on the earth about 400 million
years ago, it deals in aggressive behavior, territoriality and social hierarchies.
The Limbic System is about 150 million years old and ours is very similar to that
found in other mammals. Some think the Limbic system is the source of awe and
exhilaration because it's the active sight of many psychotropic drugs,
there's little doubt that the amygdala, a part of the Limbic system, has much
to do with fear. After some animals developed a Limbic system they started to
spend much more time taking care of their young, so it probably has something
to do with love too.
It's our grossly enlarged neocortex that makes the human brain so unusual
and so recent, it only started to get ridiculously large about 3 million
years ago. It deals in deliberation, spatial perception, speaking, reading,
writing and mathematics. The one new emotion we got was worry, probably
because the neocortex is also the place where we plan for the future.
If nature came up with feeling first and high level intelligence much later,
I don't see why the opposite would be true for our computers. It must be
one a hell of a lot easier to make something that feels but doesn't think than
something that thinks but doesn't feel.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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