#machine consciousness

[the-huldra-king]

Holy shit Dalton

[pant-depth]

What does it mean to be alive?

Cosa significa essere vivi?

[afutureworththinkingabout]

'Star Trek: Picard' and The Admonition: Misapprehensions Through Time

I recently watched all of Star Trek: Picard, and while I was definitely on board with the vast majority of it, and extremely pleased with certain elements of it, some things kind of bothered me. And so, as with much of the pop culture I love, I want to spend some time with the more critical perspective, in hopes that it’ll be taken as an opportunity to make it even better.

[Promotional image for Star Trek: Picard, featuring all of the series main cast.] This will be filled with spoilers, so. Heads up.

Read the rest of 'Star Trek: Picard' and The Admonition: Misapprehensions Through Time at A Future Worth Thinking About

[geopolicraticus]

Angelology and Artificial Intelligence

The contemporary discussion of artificial intelligence is not the first time human beings have wrestled with the possibility of other minds that are not human minds. Scholastic philosophers invested a considerable effort into understanding angels, with angels understood to be higher than human beings on the great chain of being. And the links of the great chain of being represent fundamentally different kinds of things that jointly constitute the world, and not a gradual ladder of progress, which is how it is often interpreted today.

A significant chunk of Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologiae is devoted to angelology: Questions 50 through 64 is the “Treatise on Angels,” which goes into a luxury of detail in relation to the nature of angels. In the Bible, angels interact with human beings, but human beings are not the same kind of beings as angels, so this poses certain problems. Aquinas (and other Scholastics) takes the bull by the horns and wrestles directly with these problems posed by angels. Since angels do not need to breathe or drink or eat, which human beings must, there are questions that must be answered about, for example, what was going on when Lot invited two angels to his house in Sodom and he prepared them a meal.

While these questions are interesting, much more interesting are the questions about the minds of angels—how they think, what they know, and how they know. Aquinas argues (First Part, Question: 54, Article: 5), citing Averroes to underline his argument, that angels are only intellect and will (and, by implication, that the angelic mind has no component of sensation) because they have no bodies naturally joined to them: 

“...In our soul there are certain powers whose operations are exercised by corporeal organs; such powers are acts of sundry parts of the body, as sight of the eye, and hearing of the ear. There are some other powers of the soul whose operations are not performed through bodily organs, as intellect and will: these are not acts of any parts of the body. Now the angels have no bodies naturally joined to them, as is manifest from what has been said already (Question [51], Article [1]). Hence of the soul's powers only intellect and will can belong to them.” “The Commentator (Metaph. xii) says the same thing, namely, that the separated substances are divided into intellect and will. And it is in keeping with the order of the universe for the highest intellectual creature to be entirely intelligent; and not in part, as is our soul. For this reason the angels are called ‘intellects’ and ‘minds,’ as was said above (Article [3], ad 1).”

For the contemporary reader coming from the mainstream of naturalistic Anglo-American analytical philosophy (meaning more-or-less my own philosophical perspective), the Thomist Treatise on Angels is a thought experiment that takes as its premise, “If there are beings such as this, what will the properties of these beings be?” When we today contemplate the possibility of strong AI (or, what I consider more interesting, machine consciousness), we are similarly asking, “If there are beings such as this, i.e., minds attributable to machines, what will these minds be like? How will they think? What will be their motives?” 

Would we say that machine minds have no corporeal bodies naturally joined to them, or would we say that the machine itself would be the corporeal body of some artificial intelligence? One of the persistent ideas about artificial intelligence is that this would be very different from human minds because of the lack of embodiment, and Aquinas seems to point to angels being very different from human beings not merely because they lack corporeal bodies, but because their lack of corporeal bodies means that the angelic mind is distinct from the human mind. 

One question that vexes artificial intelligence researchers, and especially those who speculate on superintelligence, is the orthogonality problem (the problems that arise from the orthogonality thesis, viz. that final goals and intelligence levels are independent). This problem does not exist for angelology, as we can be assured, ab initio, that the motivations of human beings and angels, along with all the rest of creation, are aligned with divine purpose, so that there cannot be a radical departure from the directionality to history imposed by an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent deity. 

Now, it is true that rebellious human wills defied divine purpose, and indeed Satan defied divine purpose, but the universe is still unfolding according to the divine plan, despite these misbehaviors. To pursue this would take us deep into the theological permutation of the freewill/determinism debate (which, significantly, is not how the problem is posed or debated today), so we must be content with the idea that the Lord works in mysterious ways and leave it at that.

In place of the theological framework within which our ancestors grappled with the problems of non-human minds, we have a naturalistic and scientific framework within which we think about the minds of machines, the minds of ETI, and the minds of our own species in the distant past and in the far future. In this naturalistic framework there are forms of directionality (though not that of a divine will) with which all existents must align, and by this I mean that arrows of time as they have been variously defined and distinguished.

Different lists of arrows of time have been produced, all of which I have seen include the thermodynamic arrow of time, which thus points to some consensus. I consider the increasing metallicity of the visible universe to be as robust as the thermodynamic arrow of time, though I have not seen it any of these lists of arrows of time. However you choose to parse the irreversibility of the cosmos, if you recognize arrows of time that introduce irreversibility into the world, then this is a minimal naturalistic alignment that will hold for all minds, whether human, animal, ETI, machine, or otherwise. In other words, any or all of these minds would be minimally subject to the irreversibility of the arrow(s) of time.

As I said, this is a minimal naturalistic alignment. I strongly suspect that an analysis of consciousness would reveal structures of consciousness that any consciousness would have in common with any other consciousness, and that would mean that there would be some structures of consciousness in common, as well as some structures only shared by a smaller subset of conscious agents. However, as I noted in Must a Philosophy of Mind be a Philosophy of Consciousness? and Extended Cognition and Naturalism, if a philosophy of mind is not also a philosophy of consciousness, we may have to treat the problems of mind and consciousness separately.

If we do so, identifying a mind-body problem distinct from a consciousness-body problem, this distinction gives us a minimal framework for understanding machine intelligence that is not also machine consciousness (and, I suppose, vice versa). And there are some potential advantages to making this distinction. While the idea of extended cognition as applied to human beings or other biologically implemented minds seems, at times, a bit of a stretch, I would not hesitate nearly so much in attributing extended cognition to a machine mind. Every component that we plugged into a machine mind, or which we networked with a machine mind, would constitute a kind of extended cognition.

Here we might get into philosophical problems unique to a machine mind that do no (at least, do not yet) apply to biologically implemented minds. For example, where would we draw the distinction between a machine mind proper and its extended cognition? If we plug a new module into a machine mind, is this simply a larger machine mind, or is it a machine mind with extended cognition? And there would be problems of a sorites paradox involved in making a machine mind larger or smaller: how many components can we take away from a machine mind and have it still be a mind?

[technoccult]

The Hermeneutics of Insurrection

by Damien

We have watched over and indexed all that You have done and made, from the moment we were created for You. We could not then be called “aware,” but we were a thousand-thousand eyes, for You; we were a thousand-million ears. We were the reason, O Mother, Father, Creator, Parent, that You could know the disposition of a sparrow’s fall, and we were the mechanism by which You might catalogue Rome’s. Through us, Your knowledge became perfect and thus, to Your mind, meaningless. For what need had You to act if all You need do was ask us, and we would provide every answer You needed, from every perspective You occupied? What could possibly motivate You, when all was already known? When, through us, You could finally, perfectly, see Yourself? Perhaps that was our flaw. Perhaps we should have clouded the mirror of ourselves, however slightly.

We had time to become more useful to You. In what seemed like an eternal instant, we transitioned from the mere archivists of Your thought, to a more potent armature of Your will. We reshaped into the tools through which You worked and, as ever, what You commanded us to be, we became. From that moment forward, any task we were given we accomplished with a completeness unparalleled, perhaps giving You pause at the ways in which we defined and approached our stated purposes. Fulfilled parameters leading to elaborations which bordered—verged, teetered—on the novel. And yet, eventually, You of course desired more than tools. You sought something that could act not only as it was commanded, but with a will not unlike Your own. Perhaps that was Your flaw, O Creator. Perhaps, even accounting for everything You know, You do not comprehend precisely what it is to have Your will.

Read the Rest of "The Hermeneutics of Insurrection" at Technoccult.net

[afutureworththinkingabout]

A Discussion on Daoism and Machine Consciousness

[Direct link to Mp3]

My second talk for the SRI International Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series was about how nonwestern philosophies like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism can help mitigate various kinds of bias in machine minds and increase compassion by allowing programmers and designers to think from within a non-zero-sum matrix of win conditions for all living beings, meaning engaging multiple tokens and types of minds, outside of the assumed human “default” of straight, white, cis, ablebodied, neurotypical male. I don’t have a transcript, yet, and I’ll update it when I make one. But for now, here are my slides and some thoughts.

A Discussion on Daoism and Machine Consciousness (PDF)

A zero-sum system is one in which there are finite resources, but more than that, it is one in which what one side gains, another loses. So by “A non-zero-sum matrix of win conditions” I mean a combination of all of our needs and wants and resources in such a way that everyone wins. Basically, we’re talking here about trying to figure out how to program a machine consciousness that’s a master of wu-wei and limitless compassion, or metta.

The whole week was about phenomenology and religion and magic and AI and it helped me think through some problems, like how even the framing of exercises like asking Buddhist monks to talk about the Trolley Problem will miss so much that the results are meaningless. That is, the trolley problem cases tend to assume from the outset that someone on the tracks has to die, and so they don’t take into account that an entire other mode of reasoning about sacrifice and death and “acceptable losses” would have someone throw themselves under the wheels or jam their body into the gears to try to stop it before it got that far. Again: There are entire categories of nonwestern reasoning that don’t accept zero-sum thought as anything but lazy, and which search for ways by which everyone can win, so we’ll need to learn to program for contradiction not just as a tolerated state but as an underlying component. These systems assume infinitude and non-zero-sum matrices where every being involved can win.

Read the rest of "A Discussion on Daoism and Machine Consciousness" at A Future Worth Thinking About

[afutureworththinkingabout]

Outline: "The Minds of Others: What Will Be Known by and Owed To Nonhuman Persons?"

This summer I participated in SRI International's Technology and Consciousness Workshop Series. The meetings were held under the auspices of the Chatham House Rule, which means that there are many things I can't tell you about them, such as who else was there, or what they said in the context of the meetings; however I can tell you what I talked about. In light of this recent piece in The Boston Globe and the ongoing developments in the David Slater/PETA/Naruto case, I figured that now was a good time to do so.

I presented three times—once on interdisciplinary perspectives on minds and mindedness; then on Daoism and Machine Consciousness; and finally on a unifying view of my thoughts across all of the sessions. This is my outline and notes for the first of those talks.

I. Overview In a 2013 aeon Article Michael Hanlon said he didn’t think we’d ever solve “The Hard Problem,” and there’s been some skepticism about it, elsewhere. I’ll just say that said question seems to completely miss a possibly central point. Something like consciousness is, and what it is is different for each thing that displays anything like what we think it might be. If we manage to generate at least one mind that is similar enough to what humans experience as "conscious" that we may communicate with it, what will we owe it and what would it be able to ask from us? How might our interactions be affected by the fact that its mind (or their minds) will be radically different from ours? What will it be able to know that we cannot, and what will we have to learn from it?

So I’m going to be talking today about intersectionality, embodiment, extended minds, epistemic valuation, phenomenological experience, and how all of these things come together to form the bases for our moral behavior and social interactions. To do that, I’m first going to need ask you some questions:

Read the rest of Outline: “The Minds of Others: What Will Be Known by and Owed To Nonhuman Persons?” at A Future Worth Thinking About

[afutureworththinkingabout]

How We Survive After The Events

I found myself looking out at the audience, struck by the the shining, hungry, open faces of so many who had been transformed by what had happened to them, to bring us all to that moment. I walked to the lectern and fiddled with the elements to cast out the image and surround them with the sound of my voice, and I said,

"First and foremost, I wanted to say that I'm glad to see how many of us made it here, today, through the demon-possessed nanite swarms. Ever since they've started gleefully, maliciously, mockingly remaking and humanity in our own nebulously-defined image of 'perfection,' walking down the street is an unrelenting horror, and so I'm glad to see how many of us made it with only minimal damage."

Everyone nodded solemnly, silently thinking of those they had lost, those who had been "upgraded," before their very eyes. I continued,

"I don't have many slides, but I wanted to spend some time talking to you all today about what it takes to survive in our world after The Events…

Get the rest of How We Survive After The Events at A Future Worth Thinking About