
How Bicameralism Helps Explain Westworld - fmihaila
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/how-bicameralism-helps-explain-westworld.html
======
visarga
> consciousness begins when a being (be it human or host) stops believing that
> the voice inside their own head is a message from the gods

Yep, let's define consciousness based on "gods" and "voices".

> People didn’t develop consciousness until about 3,000 years ago.

Consciousness is too flexible a word, it means whatever people want it to
mean. It has moral, religious, philosophical, neurological and even physical
definitions. It is almost as devoid of exact meaning as the concept of God. It
includes the waking and dream state, experience, mental states, emotions,
motor control and consciousness of consciousness. There is no commonly agreed
upon definition of it in neurology, psychology or related fields - not only we
can't explain it, we can't even define it. Let's not play ping-pong with
inexact concepts.

Instead of consciousness, we should use the reinforcement learning paradigm -
an agent, perceiving its state in the environment, selects an action as to
maximize its reward. From time to time, a reward/cost signal might come, and
that is used to learn better behavior rules.

That's it, all concrete and clear, no need for concepts that can't be defined.
We can explain human, animal and artificial agents with the same paradigm. The
three aspects of RL: perception, action selection and behavior learning
(credit assignment) are all expressible in terms of neural networks and can be
studied in biological and artificial systems.

Watching AI progress so much in the last 4 years, inventing mechanisms for
perception, attention, memory, behavior - I have come to realize that
consciousness really isn't magic, there's no ghost inside, no universal field,
no special quantum entanglement. It's not inexplicable, "what it's like to be
a bat?", "does the Chinese room have real understanding?", or "qualia is
irreducible" and a "hard problem" \- these are all armchair experiments.

The problem seems hard because brains are extremely complex in their minutia
and there is no intuitional pump to help us make the leap. Yet brains are not
really so complex in their general makeup, because the code for the brain +
body can be stored in 800 Mb of DNA, of which probably a very small portion
actually encodes the brain architecture.

~~~
internaut
I've started to think that a lot of what we are isn't present inside our heads
although it informs them. Things like books, culture which are all
intergenerational memories. We're constantly immersed from the earliest
developmental stage in what dawkins called our extended phenotype. Of all the
animals humans have the most extraordinary extended phenotype, particularly
our information infrastructure.

If we take the much vaunted abilities of humans over computers, such as
creativity, and we had a human being who was brought up without any contact
without any exterior sources of information such as reading materials or other
humans to play with then I doubt their 'human ability' would amount to much.
It'd be arguable whether they were a true human. They'd seem developmentally
disabled to other humans though biologically they could be in rude health.

When you look to monkeys and other animals like ravens you find they test
better than we do on a range of cognitive tasks and yet we are us and they are
them. I believe there really is something different about us but that may
exist at the collective level instead of the individual.

