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[Max™]

An ant can think in some sense of the word, trundling along with their little pedometers clicking away as they check inputs against an "is this food" filter.

A mouse can think better and learn that while you can eat an ant, they carry the risk of a nasty formic acid aftertaste.

A cat can think well enough to run a primitive model which it can try to use to predict how a mouse will behave if pounced at riiiiiight.... now!

I can think well enough to run a model of a cat mind of surprising power, and I do this sort of thing without needing to devote actual intent to trying.

I can not model your mind well enough to be certain that what you are thinking and planning to do is actually accurate, but I can do a surprisingly rich model of my own mind.

So: I can think about thinking, and I can out think the majority of species on the planet, except for you.

Accordingly I doubt the absurd contrivance necessary to produce an illusion that I am aware and similarly I doubt the absurdly complicated model of reality needed for you to merely appear aware, though I can not directly disprove it, I can ignore it and treat both my awareness and your awareness as true enough to bypass examination when convenient.

I seem to think, therefore we probably are.

[McTraveller]

An ant can think in some sense of the word, trundling along with their little pedometers clicking away as they check inputs against an "is this food" filter....

That's a general school of thought, yes.  The issue is that the more "primitive" versions of those things aren't necessarily considered "thinking".  After all, an ant trundling around is basically just a collection of biological control systems trying to obtain food, avoid danger, etc.  Does a thermostat "think"? It is also just some control loops.

Most of the complaints about the "AI" in the media today is that all we have so far are just really advanced control loops - yeah image recognition and language recognition and processing and patter matching, yeah - but they are just at core optimization solvers or control loops.

My thoughts on the "mechanics" of it is that "thinking" or "consciousness" is itself another kind of control loop or set of control loops that creates and modifies the other control loops, including itself.  That is, it's a controller for which the "goals" are very abstract.  I mean, it's not just a single loop saying "I'm hungry, must find food" but "Given that I'm hungry, thirsty, am attracted to that person over there, enjoy music, etc. what should I do in the next minute? 10 minutes? Day?"  It's a continually self-updating prioritization of all the other control loops, including adding and subtracting control loops.

Consciousness is that mechanism or ability or desire to decide what we are going to do.  Deep-learning chess machines, Go machines, or even autonomous driving machines don't have that - they can only do that one task. They can't even 'decide' to apply their learning and forecasting ideas onto any other problem space.  To get "general AI" I think all we need is to just put another deep learning machine whose job is to just manage several other deep learning machines.  The difficult part is - we don't have any idea what the learning data needs to be to train that.  For humans, it either came from survival pressure and/or divine influence (depending on your beliefs).  But what would such pressures even be for an AI? I mean, what is the point, other than mimicry, of an AI being able to choose between playing Go and looking for cancer markers?  An AI doesn't need rest, doesn't have to prioritize food, doesn't have reproduction pressure...

It's my belief that, for this reason, we won't have general AI except for specialized situations like companion AI that need to mimic humans.  In reality we'll just end up with specialized AI control logic for various specific tasks.

[scourge728]

I mean, AI's DO need to rest, or they will overheat and run slowly before melting, just like a normal computer

[KittyTac]

"Consciousness" is the same processes that happen in a simpler animal's mind, but more complex, and is an illusion. Therefore, general AI is possible with enough computational force.

[McTraveller]

"Consciousness" is the same processes that happen in a simpler animal's mind, but more complex, and is an illusion. Therefore, general AI is possible with enough computational force.

How is it an "illusion"?  A monitoring system that monitors and controls the other control loops and itself is "really" doing that stuff - it's not the case that it merely appears to be monitoring those things.

Or do you mean the "illusion" is that consciousness is something other than a control system?

And I agree that yes, it is likely technically possible to make an AI exhibit the behaviors associated with consciousness given enough computational resources.  I maintain though that it's not a question of computational power, but in the "arrangement" of that computational power. We don't yet know the form or parameters associated with that meta-control system to get one that appears conscious.

Actually an interesting approach to the question of "what is consciousness":  consciousness is that thing you lose when you are unconscious.  So consciousness has something to do with awareness.  I don't know what aspects of "awareness" though - although I suspect it likely has something to do with "awareness of causality".  That is - some internal model of causal relationships is a necessary (but maybe not sufficient) prerequisite for what we think of as consciousness.

Also random - isn't there a scale of... awareness. That is, "conscious" versus "lucid" kind of thing?

[Egan_BW]

As far as I can tell the social definition of consciousness is "works like how I think I think."

Consciousness tautologically cannot be an illusion.

Regarding modern AI, realize that all that we've accomplished so far are really sophisticated statistical regression models that can also isolate what parts of the data are worth trying to create a regression over. In other words, we've nested the regression model so that it calculates a regression over regressions over subsets of the data, and then spits out the best regression and the best subset to regress over.

[Lunardog15]

i love the fact that with 2 posts I have people debating existence
keep it going guys
btw what is the difference between artificial intelligence and organic intelligence  hrmm

[Egan_BW]

The first one is something created by a specific species of clever ape, who like to make things. The second one contains carbon.

[Lunardog15]

The first one is something created by a specific species of clever ape, who like to make things. The second one contains carbon.

no like in regards on intelligence

[scourge728]

currently quite a lot, as for the future.... who can say

[FallacyofUrist]

btw what is the difference between artificial intelligence and organic intelligence  hrmm

One runs on a machine of metal, one on a machine of fleshy stuff. Unless you define artificial as "deliberately created by another human". In which case artificial intelligence can run on a computer or a brain(on a side note, this may actually be a thing, I've read stuff about deliberately creating secondary consciousnesses with mind shenanigans).

Of course, that also depends on how we define intelligence. Which is another headache.

[KittyTac]

I meant that free will is not a thing, as the universe is (almost) deterministic. But it is so hard to compute that it would take billions of years to compute how a human being would act for 1 second.

[Egan_BW]

Is the opposite of determinism free will, or it it randomness? How do you define free will as being something other than either deterministic or random? I don't think that people who believe in free will think that that means that all their decisions are made by RNG, but I can't really think what else it could mean.

[KittyTac]

I meant that you're not actually making decisions, it just seems that you're making decisions, because the chunk of meat between your ears is wired that way. Both are pretty much the opposite of determinism, yeah.

[Egan_BW]

What's the difference between a lump of meat that's me making decisions and me making decisions? Even if it's deterministic I'm the deterministic thing that's calling the shots here.