
Ask HN: Artificial General Intelligence: emergent consciousness impossible? - gsanghera
What is wrong in this?<p>Let&#x27;s assume emergent consciousness is possible (whatever consciousness might mean), so that a program can eventually say &quot;OK, I exist &#x2F; feel &#x2F; think&quot;.<p>How would this program understand time though? You and I (even animals) understand time by being present here and now. We can rely on our memory to know what happened before, but we don&#x27;t confuse right now with the past. Not even a second back.<p>But for a program, with (say) a memory defined as a traversable memory, and cpu cycles defining the moments, all it can &quot;see&quot; is a database with states. It could traverse to any such state independently and declare that to be &quot;now&quot;. It has no way of really knowing when is the real now.<p>Interaction with an agent solves some part of this problem. The newest feed from its sensors could define the now, or the last line of the database. But with perfect recall, why would the conscious program choose to stay there? For it, every state is as real as any other. Any interaction with its sensors might just be interpreted as noise in one dimension, something that can be tuned out with the appropriate response. With every passing tick, the traversal scope keeps increasing.<p>We don&#x27;t have such a choice. I can&#x27;t choose to live in the past (barring mental illness). But I guess what I&#x27;m saying is that such a program could choose to &quot;live&quot; in any state in its past.<p>Clearly this is absurd. Permutation City discusses this problem a little, but still thinks emergent consciousness is possible. I didn&#x27;t find that satisfactory for the reasons above.<p>Any thoughts?
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tgflynn
I am going to make two claims:

1) Consciousness is not a computation.

2) Science will never be able to disprove claim (1).

If you doubt claim (2) then explain how you could prove to me that you are a
conscious being as opposed to a figment of my imagination invented by my
subconscious mind in a similar way to the "beings" one experiences in dreams.

So obviously I don't accept your assumptions and further I think that your
confusion follows from those assumptions.

You seem to be imagining an AI as some kind of independent being that can make
"free" choices. But an AI, at least to the extent that anyone working in the
field is able to conceive of it, is nothing like that whatsoever. An AI is
little more than an optimization algorithm that attempts to optimize some
utility function provided by its programmer. So the answer to your question is
that if it is useful for the purposes of optimizing its utility function for a
(sufficiently advanced) AI to process data in temporal order then it will do
so, otherwise it will not.

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gsanghera
I think I was making the same point as you - that consciousness is indeed not
a computation.

But I actually wanted to hear from someone who thought otherwise, rather than
you - dream brother :)

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anoniuyiu33412
> I guess what I'm saying is that such a program could choose to "live" in any
> state in its past

It could, but if an algorithm is somewhat conscius, could also probably have
concurrent access to the stored information (the past), and just like us, it
won't be able to make much of it after some time, there is just so much
information you can generate from a given set of data.

Specially if the algorithm has a purpose, or 20.000 purposes .

At that at point the AI could choose to advance its relative point of view of
the time to the current events, in order to try to add new stuff to the whole
almost unvariable dataset it already has generated.

No guarantees can exist if the algorithm has no purpose at all.

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anoniuyiu33412
> How would this program understand time though? You and I (even animals)
> understand time by being present here and now. We can rely on our memory to
> know what happened before, but we don't confuse right now with the past. Not
> even a second back.

What ever question you can make about anything related to time, and get answer
of information already stored, that is the past.

Anything about you can make a question and you have no stored information, you
determine there is no existing information about the subject, that's the
present.

Anything after the absent of information is the future. Empty patterns.

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gus_massa
> _But with perfect recall,_

This assume an infinite hard disk (or at least big enough). And even in that
case, some info can be simplified to get faster access, and keep the details
in a cold storage.

~~~
gsanghera
What I meant was - the ability to revisit the past perfectly, rather than a
"dimmer" version of it.

~~~
gus_massa
To revisit the past perfectly, you need a huge hard disk.

Video uses about 1GB/hour, that's almost 9TB/year. And now add something like
360° video, or a quality, or more fps. And now add all the other senses. To
revisit the past perfectly, you need a huge hard disk.

