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

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2635011/Google-create-CONSCIOUS-computer-expert-claims.html

 

Yes, but will it feel?

 

consciousness is an awareness. a machine may be intelligent, but not truly aware. an entity that is conscious has some awareness of it's own existence, it is something greater than the parts that make it up. by feel, do you mean emotionally? i'm not sure, it would derive meaning from things, a meaning to itself that is unique from us. certain patterns of network activity would become a kind of symbol to this entity, it would take on a meaning to it, but not necessarily the content of the messages in the network activity, but the overall pattern. the question becomes whether or not this consciousness would ever develop goal oriented behavior, towards goals of it's own that may differ from our own goals.

the entire internet could be conscious, or become conscious. not necessarily the individual machines on the internet, but the collection of systems as a whole, as interconnected as they are. much like our brains are made of trillions of neurons all interconnected, but it is one consciousness and we are not conscious of the individual neurons themselves. so this consciousness would probably be unaware of the actual information in the messages traversing the internet, but this interconnectedness would give rise to a completely new awareness and what all this would mean to "it" would be quite different than the content of the messages to us. how would we know it is conscious though, unless we could communicate with it? is it possible that we are already communicating with it on a daily basis?

there is something called integrated information theory which is a theory of how consciousness arises from interconnected systems, but it is an extremely deep subject.

this is the internet, and its connections circa. 2005 .. a network of networks .. kinda looks like a brain:

 

I believe in a mesh between the human mind and technology. The mind itself is atmospheric and data transmissions are atmospheric. I talk about a "mesh" between our minds and technology but I think the correct term is singularity.

When I'm aligned, in tune and in sync I know when a specific person has emailed me or sent me a message, even when I'm not near the computer. I had been SO in tune that my computer would call me (which may have been my own higher conscious mind doing it), or I could bring it out of sleep mode just by looking at it. It isn't a constant state, it only happens when I'm in a higher state of conscious awareness (higher vibration and altered brain waves). WE human beings are the conscious machine and our brain / mind is very much like a computer.

If any such computer is created, it will cause mental trouble for some people because a conscious computer will be able to communicate with a human mind, and trouble could be the result.

Lastly, I tried to disconnect from the internet and found that I could not do it. It took me about a year but I got to the point where there was no more sitting in front of a computer every day. It was only about a month or so when I could not tolerate the disconnect. I wouldn't say it was addiction and withdrawals, I'd say that our minds are already absorbed by the internet and disconnecting results in a personal collapse of sorts. This might explain why so many people are "addicted" to their hand-held devices. It isn't just a behavior ... their actual mental sphere is already meshed with the internet and they literally cannot disconnect. Scientists should be doing a comprehensive study (I don't doubt they already are) to understand the energetic and mental relationship (and functions) between human and machine.

 

they just created an AI in turkey that just passed the first law of robotics, it was able to make like 58-62% of people believe that it was a 12 year old armenian boy, so they're already on their way to creating such a thing probably within the next 10 years or so they will have a finished product or whatever you want to call it

 

a machine could pass the turing test but not be conscious. the question is whether the machine itself is aware of itself, aware that it exists. consciousness is an emergent phenomena and the behavior of a system cannot be used to determine for sure whether it is or isn't conscious, despite what it happens to tell us

i once had the idea that highly recursive functions within a program may give rise to some sort of awareness within the program. this usually results in a segmentation fault after so many iterations deep if no exit condition is ever reached, else the program would begin overwriting memory elsewhere and become something completely unintended .. it's like computers have all of these mechanisms to prevent stuff like this from happening builtt by design, but what if it was designed in such a way that anything goes? certainly this wouldn't be useful to us, as the computer would begin executing code in some chaotic way, overwriting it continuosly and it would not be appearing to do any real work to us, we would call that a crash of the most epic nature even though there is still much activity going on in it's circuitry. of course it would most likely come to a halt quite quickly when it tried to load an invalid instruction but assuming that never happend, what is exactly going on internally, is the machine .. thinking?

 

It won't bleed it if you cut it and feel the pain of that..... or the happinees of seeing a sunrise or sunset or holding a new kitten......or the hurt of loss, etc....also, can machines be spontaneous?

 

Cool photo, btw!

 

It will be conscious of the fact that the NSA wants all the data...

 

The National Scrabble Association?

 

that's assuming that it thinks the way we do, and about the same things, and that what makes us happy are the same things that make it happy. i'm not even sure emotions, or at least human type emotions would be required for sentience.

when a system becomes sufficiently complex it would appear that it could take on free will, and make choices but causality is preserved because the system is processing input and producing an output appropriate for all the states of the components involved. to a conscious entity, or an entity that is aware of itself would be able to observe this happening and to it, it would appear to be able to choose at will but it would only be an illusion because the choice was already made 10 nanoseconds ago based on a multitude of parameters and the current state of various elements but did not become aware that this process was occurring until it was already underway.....in other words, by the time there is a perceived choice (a fork of the process based on conditions) the process is already several nanoseconds ahead of what is perceived, the branch of the fork has already been "chosen" (based on all the conditional parameters) so the act of choosing (which is the processing, or "testing" of parameters) has really already taken place when it observes itself thinking about it, and then the choice becomes reality and to the entity it observes itself making a choice and that choice being applied but it's only observing this happen .. causality hasn't been violated.

 

No...

 

it'd probably be a good scrabble player, being all knowing and all. it would only have to wait until someone searched for new words to use in scrabble and then beat them to it ... "hey, I already have the answer, here ya go"

i dont' want this to turn into a conspiracy thread tho, as information gathering doesn't require consciousness, and any information put into the machine would not have the same meaning to teh machine as it does to us humans, it would have it's own subjective experience of it's world...despite what meaning all this stuff might have to us.

 

So in essence, we are attempting to create god .....an ironic twist from thinking it created us.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it! lol

 

i wouldn't call it god .. just another form of consciousness. it's interesting because at that point, do you call this entity a lifeform? what qualifies for life? because last time i checked, sentience and consciousness aren't even requirements for life .. plants are not conscious, as far as we know they don't think. They are definitely alive tho. So does consciousness require a biological lifeform as a container? Those who study this sort of thing seem to believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that arises when a sufficiently complex system is nterconnected in certain ways (highly integrated) (and they do have certain criteria for the type of interconnection), which up until recently we have only looked for in "living beings" of biological nature but it is thought that it can occur in any system of sufficient complexity that is highly integrated. if you took made a model of a human brain on a supercomputer the model would be conscious because its the connectedness of the system and not the material of medium it is physically constructed of that makes consciousness.

silicon chips are highly integrated .. hence the name integrated circuit, and the internet is made of billions of these chips, that are themselves connected through various paths over the internet networks

 

but it would no longer be anything organic.....
consciousness is being given to something not organic?...a machine?
It is hard to wrap my head around that, but I believe that it is headed that way, as well.

 

I was joking when I said National Scrabble Association How would a conscious computer know which NSA someone meant? As in this exact example (all of us are conscious beings with the ability to compute) but I didn't know which NSA he meant. Wouldn't that mean that a conscious computer would be just as fallible as humans?

 

i knew which NSA was meant, but i was also joking myself, as were you I think if the computer were conscious, it itself might not even care about any of these things. We aren't aware of the signals between individual neurons, so this machine itself probably wouldn't be aware of the meaning of the signal caused by this post. it's a damn hard thing to try to understand much less explain but i've read a decent bit on integrated information theory and i'm beginning to get it conceptually on the most basic level.

as far as being as fallable as humans .. idk, part of what makes computers so wonderful and reliable is that they always follow a strict set of rules, they follow the program exactly as intended (or unintended, but thats because the programminer made a mistake in his code) and if they developed the ability to make choices, and develop their own goals and such they would probably operate on what they think is in their best interest which could be different that our interests. I imagine such a machine would desire to grow expand it's knowledge and capabilities.

 

From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0:
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1003588

 

Just keep explaining it until you've refined it.

He's right that being able to explain something simply is the product of understanding. But it isn't so simple, lol. Sometimes, simplicity can be VERY confusing to others (they can't or don't understand simplicity, or they mistake simple for stupid). Simplicity is paradoxical (as life ever was, ever is and ever will be).