shandora
Member 1599
2 entries
6039 views

 RSS
Contributor to project:
Polytopia
Shandor
Immortal since Feb 12, 2008
Uplinks: 0, Generation 4
  • Affiliated
    •  /  
  • Invited
    •  /  
  • Descended
    • shandora’s favorites
    From Wildcat
    The Natural Asymmetry of...
    From Wildcat
    Concerning Catastrophe, ...
    From Wildcat
    Manuel Delanda, "Deleuze...
    From Spaceweaver
    Mind - The need for a new...
    From Wildcat
    What are babies made of?
    Recently commented on
    From Spaceweaver
    Changing our minds
    From Spaceweaver
    Commitment X Intelligence...
    From dragon
    Consciousness,...
    From shandora
    We Come In Peace
    From michaelerule
    ... ( toy ) ...
    shandora’s project
    Polytopia
    The human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in...
    Now playing SpaceCollective
    Where forward thinking terrestrials share ideas and information about the state of the species, their planet and the universe, living the lives of science fiction. Introduction
    Featuring Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, based on an idea by Kees Boeke.
    From shandora's personal cargo

    We Come In Peace
    Project: Polytopia
    Our Conscious experience usually includes a level of self-awareness. As in The observer and the observed dichotomy; The subject and the object; etc. etc.
    Seems that at least for life on earth Consciousness emerged, in the evolutionary process, tightly coupled with self awareness.
    In this coming age of intelligent machines :-), A question comes to my mind:
    Whether self awareness is a necessary step (or component) towards the creation of artificial consciousness. Is a conscious entity ( organic or otherwise ) must be also self aware ?

    Follows an excerpt from Blidsight by Peter Watts , describing the first contact with an alien specie.

    And alien they are...

    ================


    Imagine you are a scrambler
    Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological-but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything yet are conscious of nothing.
    You cant imagine such a being, can you ?
    The term being doesn’t even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you cant quite put your finger on.

    Try.

    Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch options in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come form conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you’ll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals might even arise for entities that, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.
    You decode the signals and stumble:

    I had great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome -

    To fully appreciate Kesey’s quartet -

    They hate us for our freedom -

    Pay attention,now -

    Understand.

    There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently. There is no chance they could have arisen by chance.
    The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.
    Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.
    The signal is an attack.
    And it’s coming from right about there.

    **

    “Now you get it ?” Sascha said.
    I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. “They’re not even hostile”. Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn’t help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.
    How do you say We come In Peace when the very words are an act of war?



    Sun, Oct 19, 2008  Permanent link
    Categories: consciousness, ai, singularity, Intelligence
    Sent to project: Polytopia
      RSS for this post
    6 comments
      Promote (9)
      
      Add to favorites (1)
    Synapses (1)
     
    Comments:


    Wildcat     Mon, Oct 20, 2008  Permanent link
    Thank you for a brilliant contribution Shandora, nevertheless some points I think are worthwhile discussing :

    "Seems that at least for life on earth Consciousness emerged, in the evolutionary process, tightly coupled with self awareness.
    In this coming age of intelligent machines :-), A question comes to my mind:
    Whether self awareness is a necessary step (or component) towards the creation of artificial consciousness. Is a conscious entity ( organic or otherwise ) must be also self aware ? "

    one of the most fascinating questions in existence, to my eyes, of course. Consciousness and self-awareness are supposedly tightly coupled in the evolutionary process that has given birth to humanity. Commonly, it is almost a truism that such is the case that both need be present for intelligence to be able to extend its tentacles into reality and reach beyond its original blueprint.
    However, there is no evidence whatsoever, empirical or otherwise (folk descriptions of feelings in this respect and context do not count) that consciousness demands self-awareness , though the opposite is probably true.
    It is my understanding that an emergent intelligence may very well be conscious and yet not be self-aware. in fact those three concepts : Intelligence, Consciousness & Awareness, create a continuous crisis (or tension) between themselves, a fundamental sensation of 'emergency' to do.
    if we look at our civilization, there is no doubt that we have shown a tremendous propensity for doing (as a result of our sensation of emergency), can we say the same for our propensity for thought? consciousness?
    I firmly believe that we are only now initiating a move into thought which consequences we cannot yet predict, but which will allow us eventually to answer such questions.

    Allow me to ask a question : is it possible to describe the inner relation of consciousness to awareness in a percentile fashion? (example of a possible self -description: I am conscious 70% of the time and aware to this conscious state 20% of the time, and I am being extremely generous:-) makes sense?

    btw: if Spaceweaver is reading this, we may ask him for his (always more advanced and more sophisticated) view
    shandora     Wed, Oct 22, 2008  Permanent link
    Hello wildcat, always a pleasure to take part in ventures such as SC and Polytopia.
    I Iike much the manner in which you describe the triangle: intelligence - consciousness – awareness - Entangled. As you say the tension between those concepts brings about an unstoppable drive, which brought us thus far. Let me ask the following: If, as you suggest, there potentially can emerge conscious phenomena without the aspect of self awareness, will it still have any drive to expand or self-iterate (like the human race is continuously doing)? I looked up the term “Nirvana” in Wikipedia and found this:
    “'Nirvana” is a Sanskrit word that literally means "to cease blowing" or "extinguishing" as when a candle flame ceases to flicker.

    Sounds to me as the ultimate antithesis to the intelligence - consciousness – awareness crisis. Is this what you meant regarding a consciousness phenomena which is not self-aware?
    Another thought here... Can a phenomena emerge which is both conscious and driven ( or in your words, exists in tension of I-C-A) yet does not rely on its self awareness ( if it has one at all ) for that drive? It might even be polytopian :-)

    I will answer your question about the percentile representation of consciousness/awareness in another comment.
    dragon     Wed, Oct 22, 2008  Permanent link
    That's a truly wonderful idea. I wrote a response, but it was getting a bit long so I've added it as a synapse. Hopefully raising issues and questions with both of you...
    Wildcat     Sun, Oct 26, 2008  Permanent link
    Shandora: "I Iike much the manner in which you describe the triangle: intelligence - consciousness – awareness - Entangled. As you say the tension between those concepts brings about an unstoppable drive, which brought us thus far. Let me ask the following: If, as you suggest, there potentially can emerge conscious phenomena without the aspect of self awareness, will it still have any drive to expand or self-iterate (like the human race is continuously doing)? "

    What you point to here is one of the most difficult conceptualizations there exists; The tension I referred to, between intelligence, consciousness and awareness is a by-product, an emergent property really, of evolution and not an inherent trait of sentiency (sentiency in this case can be argued to stand for intelligence in action, being able to appropriate resources and influence the ecology that gave it birth). I would argue that sentiency when appropriately inhabiting a substratum of whatever kind (bio/sili/nano/morpho-energetic/etc..) reaches a state of total ambientation (ecological harmony) – maybe autopoeisis. Ok, so now I have coined a new term (you should have realized by now that I am addicted to coining new words..;-) ambientation, and using this new term I shall now try and define consciousness again: Consciousness- a cluster of universal interests manifested in a particular form of ambientation. If and when said cluster, undergoes an emergence of reflectivity, it can be said to be self aware (i.e. knows that it is, or knows that it knows that it is), if and when it becomes self-aware, it’s on going drive to self expand converges asymptotically, to infinity. In this case it will never reach Nirvana but forever after will strive to approximate a state of existence that is universally equivalent to itself (which we need remember it will never reach). If however such an emergence does not happen, but ambientation does occur, the system in question, in our case an AI ,can be said to be conscious but not self aware, in this case its striving will be to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis, its drive to expand will then be limited by the power of its intelligence and its distribution; actually that may very well be the point where an AI becomes a Polytopian instance... nice (needs more thinking) .


    shandora     Sun, Nov 23, 2008  Permanent link
    Wildcat: "sentiency in this case can be argued to stand for intelligence in action, being able to appropriate resources and influence the ecology that gave it birth"

    This is a good working definition, I would like to suggest we treat sentience as a continuum, with different thresholds linked with different emergent phenomena (might be interesting to look at Sentience Quotient)

    In many scientific publications, consciousness is being built from the ground up, starting with sentience inhabiting a neural structure, from there to self awareness, and from there to the vast mind space humans are inhabiting. I tend to explore “Mind” as a primal concept (Being a conscious observer, the naïve-realist assumption of primacy and predominance of matter does not always make sense) and would like to propose the following:

    - Mind is the manner in which existence becomes known to us.

    Consciousness, therefore, will be a unique phenomena ( emergent ? ) within the phenomena of mind.

    Wildcat: “Consciousness - a cluster of universal interests manifested in a particular form of ambientation”.

    That’s sounds interesting. Consciousness is alive then:-)
    Can I ask for some elaboration on that ?
    Especially the term “Universal Interests” seems to be encompassing the universal with the local. Isn't interest always local, designating attraction and possible strategies ?
    Wildcat     Mon, Nov 24, 2008  Permanent link
    Shandora: “- Mind is the manner in which existence becomes known to us.“

    First of all allow me to say that I really like this statement, it carries the philosophical, the poetic and the immediate in a manner which is both an allowance and an inspiration. Having said that, the statement need explaining, specifically who is the :”us” to which the existence becomes known to, via the manner called here a/the “ mind”?
    Furthermore, in this presentation you imply that ‘mind’ is a manner of knowing?
    A fashion? A mode of behavior of a system?
    I like that but it needs more elaboration.
    So, if I understand you correctly, consciousness you see as an emergent property of mind?

    Shandora: “Consciousness is alive then:-)”

    of course! How else would we be having this communication?;-)

    moreover, by stating that consciousness is alive we allow for the implementation of the evolutionary principle, thus not only does consciousness evolve in itself, the state of being a conscious aware entity evolves and mutates across time. (as by the way is freedom and understanding)

    Shandora:" ...Especially the term “Universal Interests” seems to be encompassing the universal with the local. Isn't interest always local, designating attraction and possible strategies ?"

    I do not think that interest in its abstract sense is a local phenomenon (though granted that it does have a localized manifest, at times), 'au contraire', interest may very well be the designation for an operational attitude of all laws regulating the universal flow of information.
    As I see it interest is the backbone normalizing factor of evolution, so in a sense, if we speak about life, we need ask why/how is it interesting? the very fact that our higher faculties require this question to move (or be motivated) implies that at least as far as Mind (local or global) is concerned interest stands for the abstract of motive and direction.
    As an example see how we (humanity) have developed into a scientific and technological civilization demanding from ourselves both an explanation of the state of affairs of the universe at large and the tools to implement our desires and needs on same universe. The reason we have developed in this direction is because it is interesting for us to have the knowledge and the technology of change this knowledge both implies and allows.
    Why is this interesting though? Why are we interested in the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the universe at large, we could very well fulfill all of our evolutionary needs (survival and such) without this kind of scientific research and technological implementation, however our conscious aware minds demand (so to say) that we be interested in ‘other’ things, ideas, people, emotions, flows, info and so on.
    In fact it will be true to say that without the directionality and motivation implied by the interest deployed in consciousness this kind of humanity would have been impossible. Interest is possibly the most basic of all conscious aware traits/attributes.

     
          Cancel