Will Google Create The First Conscious Computer? Expert Claims The Tech Giant Will Beat Rivals Apple

Consciousness in a computer is not a desirable characteristic. You can have computers that work out the same problems, and computers that convince people they're not computers, without having consciousness.

If you actually create it, though, it causes all sorts of really nasty ethical problems.

 

yes, it's hard to explain something simply, yet accurately in a way that isn't ambiguous or be interpreted in a unintended way.

 

So, the quote is exploring "diagnosis of altered states of consciousness" but is that information also being used to create an intelligent, conscious computer? I'm a bit confused how diagnosing an altered state of consciousness, with a mention of schizophrenia (split-mind), relates to creating a computer with consciousness.

But, in thinking, Higher Self comes to mind. (a conscious computer should be able to produce thoughts, as I have just done, while not relying on tags to correlate information).


Here is one form of information for Higher Self and here is another form of information for Higher Self

How would a conscious computer process those two links? Could a conscious computer read, analyze, interpret, understand and ... write its own response to my post?

Also, would it make typos and if it did would it obsess about its typos? Self-correcting. Would it scour the entire internet and ultra-perfect the whole thing?

 

Uuuhhmm .... I think you're mixing too many things together. Also I wouldn't necessarily use conscious and aware in the same manner (although most of that is semantics).

The other thing is that being conscious doesn't necessarily mean being self-aware. Not even all primates are self-aware.

And if you can't use the behavior of a system to determine wether it's conscious then how do you test for it?

 

the ghost:

it seems you would only be able to test for features that are shared by systems that are known to be conscious, such as the human brain and then make an assumption based on that. I am conscious so I assume that you and other humans with a brain must also be based on observation of behavior. when I say behavior here I am referring to what it does externally, the ultimate output of the system and not the mechanics and states of the elements that comprise the system internally. I can reason that a system, machine, program etc could exist that was sufficiently complex to be able to duplicate all of these features and by interacting with it would appear to be a conscious entity, but is infact just a very complex system programmed to behave in such a way without it having any kind of experience of its own.

i probably shouldn't have used aware in that context, but it seemed like the word consciousness had been used too many times. I guess I mean an experience, whether or not it feels like anything to be that system. does this experience mean anything to it? does it "know" anything? sure computers store huge amounts of data but I'm sure if it meant anything to the machines mind it wouldn't be the same meaning as for us, and i would think anything that's just sitting in memory somewhere doesn't mean anything because it's not being accessed and processed at whatever the current moment happens to be, so it really has no effect on the systems behavior until it happened to be called upon.

I suppose that if it knew english plus whatever knowledge required as a prerequisite to understand what it was reading it could start to understand things in a different way or more than before. of course this would probably only apply if this information isn't part of the system itself, if it were a large network which became conscious, which is highly integrated then messages traveling over individual wires within it would be similar to to individual nerve impulses in neurons and the interactions between individual synapses in the brain .. and of course if someone were to specify a particular neuron in an exact area of your brain and ask you what it's current state is you wouldn't know, because it's the overall state of the system as a whole that creates the experience that you currently feel.

in general though, computers are pretty picky about their syntax since they process things In such a strict literal way and don't attemot to guess what is intended. a missing or unmatched bracket, quote mark or lack of a semicolon in code will cause a lot of trouble, of course computers can also be programmed to check the syntax and tell you everything that went wrong before processing it as well. it mostly comes down to intention, sometimes people do things that might be seen as not a good idea, sometimes they might misspell things or use bad grammar intentionally for various reasons.

if computers saw bugs in code before actually running it and automatically fixing it, that would seem like a good idea but how does it know what's really intended? maybe the programmer wants the program to behave that way, might as well just tell the machine what you want it to do and have it write the code I guess so it can make sure no mistakes are made, but how do u tell it and in what language? I would imagine C, Python, php, w/e would be the best way to specify the desired behavior because english would be really ambiguous. unless of course you're okay with the computer completely coming up with its own ideas, which you may or may not like .. not because it doesn't function well but because of personal preference. would the computer maybe "like" running certain programs more than others?

maybe it has its own personal preferences. maybe it would really dislike running something like windows vista because it doesn't feel good to it so it would decide to consciously fuck with the user so they'd pick something different that it likes .. that last parts a joke i didn't really mean to write this much, that happens in a small screen sometimes.

 

Still I think you can test the behaviour. If you actually had a conscious AI you could observe it make decisions and implementing them. Without you pushing any buttons. The problematic thing - as you said - is determining what actually IS a conscious computer and what is just pre-programmed behavior.

Right there on the line. It probably knows stuff (heck my laptop "knows" stuff) but if it doesn't mean anything then there is no consciousness. It's just another set of instructions written by a clever programmer.

 

I think eventually there will be computers with full artificial intelligence that will be able to vocalize and we will be able to hold intelligible conversations with them.This will undoubtedly hail many practical applications but I think the knowledge we are talking to a machine would make this a somewhat thankless experience.What is more interesting to me is where we stand on the question of the biochemistry of the brain/consciousness dichotomy.Do we believe in some kind of numinous soul/spirit or is consciousness an holistic emergent function of neurons and synapses.Everything for me has a material basis.I do not believe in non-materiality.Even the super-numinous must have a materiality,albeit one that we do not as yet understand.Consciousness is biological,having evolved over billions of years.If you are a pure mechanist,which I am not,you may believe that fully conscious machines are possible.Trans-humanism,that is the merging of mind and machine,is much more feasible,but is not something With which I would personally like to engage.

 

Technically, consciousness exists before the Universe itself does.

 

i found an article once where some programmers ran a "digital petri-dish" type experiment. i can't locate it right now, but it was kind of interesting. more of less, they set it up where several peices of code would compete with each other for finite "resources" and in this case, computer resources .. memory, processor time, that sort of thing. the code was such that the "programs" could learn, and "breed" by producing more copies or instances of itself. the case was that they could observe the "evolution" of these programs .. certain behaviors were beneficial to the program, and programs would receive "rewards" for certain things, such as getting more cpu cycles so that each instance of the program would have a longer time to run and reproduce itself, and a better chance of survival compared to the others. program features that were beneficial were more likely to be passed on to the child processes.

basically in a very darwinist way, the "fittest" programs ended up ahead of the others making more copies and receiving more "resources". some "behaviors" however were detrimental, or not beneficial to survival and would not be passed on to the offspring, also some programs became extinct as well.

 

Don't really see the value in it myself, just another high technology toy that would make mankind that much lazier.

 

The reason so many think a "conscious" computer may never happen, or at least one like a human brain may never happen are becuase the inputs are the bottleneck and with backpropagating ( the human brain works mostly like a backpropagating neural net) the outputs are supervised, that is you need to know the answer to then go back change the weight of inputs


An example with inputs: I can speak english, but have an impossible time understanding some from scotland if they are using a local cultural reference or inflexion. A cultural reference can be dependant on one moment in time. That is the inputs just arent language, tone, pitch, body laguage, mood of the speaker and in the case of some bizarre cultural reference a specific point in time at one location. You cant program all of that cos its dependant on the perspective of the speaker, so computer would have to learn, how fast it learns would depend solely on inputs in that case, other humans at one time and in one locaton....so would be just as useless and dependant as us. That kind of thing is the real reason they have pretty much gotten nowhere with voice recognition


An example with outputs: How many times does a child touch a hot surface before it works out within reason all the hot surfaces not to touch. You could try program every model hotplate, toaster, car exhaust that ever existed into a computer, but then you'd have to still make it be able to learn so it could work out if it was on or off. Then there is still the problem of weights of learning. If it undoes a hot radiator cap and not have permanent facial injuries ( because you can just send of to google to get new face spare parts) then its not going to learn the same way

There are a whole bunch of logic principles that have to be overcome before before we get a "conscious" computer, some of those conflict directly with each other, so may indeed never happen

 

^ in any case, how would you know for sure whether it was conscious or not? i've seen bots in irc channels fill the channel with conversation that superficially appeared human.

how do you tell the difference between programmed behavior and conscious behavior? is there any difference? i guess the person who programmed it could say "i programmed it to do this, so its not conscious" so maybe the ability of the system to be set up with some initial program in such a way that the program could learn new things, and actually acquire new functions in an adaptive way.

maybe the criteria would include that this ability extend further than just collecting more and more data, and processing it using the same functions and algoriths it's been programmed with from the beginning? maybe if it could collect data, analyze the data, and then based on the data, and particular needs actually edit it's own code, the functions and logic itself (how it processes data) to adapt functionally in this way. pretty much all computers keep a process' "code" in read-only memory, so this doesn't really happen because it's undesirable to have the code be overwritten accidentally in the case of a bug that attempts to write to such memory location.

it would seem that the human would lose a lot of control over the behavior of the system in this case, and it would be difficult to troubleshoot errors and debug. it would be autonomous, sort of doing its own thing.

it would probably be difficult to set something like this up in a way that guarantees an results will be useful or beneficial to humans. i could see how it could begin in a pretty chaotic way until the system finally reached a stable state.

 

Basically,if I smash a computer,it will not feel pain,but if I were to smash a person,they certainly would.I think that's a pretty good definition of consciousness.

 

Yes, or it is that simple

To paraphrase Agent Smith, humans are defined by their suffering.

To be allowed to walk amongst us and treated as sort of equal, it has to give a fuck, about its and others suffering

 

how would we know if the machine is suffering ?

 

I have a computer that seems to have a mind of it's own...I'm hauling the damn thing to the dumpster today, lol

 

hmmmm...a mind of its own computer. Who has heard of such a thing.....?
I know that ghost in the machine thing a computer can do, too, though....

I was going to say....you can program computers, but can you really program people?
but with these mind of their own computers, I don't know now......lol

 

It's important to recycle electronics, for the precious metals they contain.

 

I don't think there's going to be any real conscious electronics any time soon. First I'd like to see an operating system that can actually detect and automatically install drivers for EVERY single device I plug into it...

Perfectly and without referring me to phony 'system scan' malware...

Google, I'm talking about you,
Google.

 

I will say no to this question in the thread title....


"Will Google Create The First Conscious Computer?"

Now, one must accept my answer.....

I do not think consciousness in machine computer will ever exist.