Consciousness and the unimaginable progress of computing technology

[Alan McDougall]

Consciousness and the unimaginable progress of computing technology

Sourced and consolidated by me, from more than one internet article

My comment are in italic font

 

The debate really is about our brains, does that strange entity we call the mind exist separate from the physical brain? If that is the case a computer will never have a mind it would remain a colossal calculator given us the illusion of intelligence

Present computers are in reality as intelligent as a door knob, they add in binary at the speed of light and very smart software programmers have manipulated this to give the impression of intelligent consciousness.

Cary Kasporov the grand master chess world champion has been consistently out played by a supercomputer. I have played chess against an easy computer program and it nearly always defeated me. That is until found a weakness in its game, after that it fell into my trap time and time again, it could not learn from its mistakes. Of course I did not play against a supercomputer like Big Blue, but can Big Blue learn from its mistakes?

 

Consciousness defines our existence and reality, but the mechanism by which
the brain generates thoughts and feelings remain unknown.

At the moment, computers show no sign of intelligence. This is not surprising, because our present computers are less complex than the brain of an earthworm. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. -- Stephen W. Hawking, physicist, 1998.

Intelligent computers are now considered as inevitable, there is supposed idea that there is/will be an geometric growth of semiconductor power. Will computer intelligence evolve to the point where it'll get hard to tell computers from human beings.

If we think of the Industrial Revolution, up until now, it was the use of simple tools making more complex tools and so on until we finally create the ultimate product, a lifeless machine smarter, faster and more powerful than us, with a common consciousness of unimaginable brain power that will transcend all living things , sadly including humans

.
And the advantages of this virtual silicon , will be its immortality and unimaginable brainpower

Some researchers fear super-brainy machines will be a science-fiction nightmare come true, some are even convinced that machines will overpower humanity by 2050.

Because such chips of the future won't need wires, which now occupy most of the space on silicon, it won't take long to duplicate a human brain fully, not only its 100 billion neurons but also its trillions of synapses, or interconnections.

A billion human brains could soon be crammed into a cubic inch of quantum circuitry, Kurzweil says. And the size of artificial brains won't be constrained by the human skull. They could grow as big as trucks. De Garis of ATR even sees brains the size of satellites orbiting the earth.

Critics contend that no matter how big or powerful computers get, they can't become intelligent until we know how to emulate the brain's functions in software. Not so, retorts Inman Harvey, a mathematician turned robotics at Britain's University of Sussex.

By mimicking evolution, ''it's possible to create artificial brains without really understanding how they work,'' he says. In other words, they could evolve their own internal programming, just as human brains have.

Even the nature of human life itself will be changing by mid-century. Neural implants will expand human knowledge and thinking powers--and begin a transition to composite man-machine relationships that will gradually phase out the need for biological bodies. Swarms of microscopic robots will take up positions in the brain's sensory areas and create virtual-reality simulations that are impossible to distinguish from real reality.

Will humans transfer their minds into electronic circuits, and by this attained immortality as a result ?.

However computation alone cannot explain why we have feelings and awareness, an inner life unique to ourselves and no one else

 

Well we will just have to wait and I will be long gone before the above most un/likely events take place, however, I would like to know the outcome, maybe I can look down from another dimension beyond this moral plane of existence?

 

Alan McDougall

[Sensei]

Computers don't compute at speed of light.

Single thread is doing at maximum 3 billion simple math operations or so per second. Multiple it by number of threads, in quad-core it's 8 HT threads, so it's like 24 billion operations per second. This number is often limited because of slow access to memory and hardware.

 

Regular algorithm of chess game is checking the all possible positions of figures, either side, rate how good or bad is move, and repeating it over and over again. After some time chess engine is returning the best for it move and figure moves to new position on screen. The faster computer, or cluster of computers, the more possible to check positions in human the same time.

 

Human doesn't play chess this way. You don't need f.e. to (virtually) move pawn from a2 to a3 to know it's bad senseless move (most the time). We know from past experiences which moves are "good", which are "bad". So amount of moves to rate is quite small for human. We think and judge "why somebody did that move?" "what was purpose of it?", and seeing that figure will be used in future to some kind of attack, we do something to prevent it.

Edited January 15, 2014 by Sensei

[Thorham]

However computation alone cannot explain why we have feelings and awareness, an inner life unique to ourselves and no one else.

Maybe they can. Depends on the nature of our existence.

[Alan McDougall]

Maybe they can. Depends on the nature of our existence.

 

Maybe! is a huge generalization?

[Dylan Cannisi]

It's a very interesting concept non the less, but, I doubt the normal silicon transistor can ever be as intelligent as a human. Human's make gray area decisions; we don't always answer yes or no, we sometimes answer maybe. When you have a physical object like a silicon transistor all it has is ones and zeros, it is incapable of being unsure. It also doesn't have the ability to rebuild and expand itself like the brain does over a period of time. The change in the human brain is very obvious, if you ask the same person a question during different periods in their life they will most likely answer that same question differently each time.

 

The defining moment in computer engineering is to come, when we have a reliable transistor with more then true or false that is when computers will gain A.I. When the computer is able to build itself a new due to previous experiences and make different choices when in the same situation then the computer can learn.

 

Another interesting concept that must be tackled is 'What is the Human Brain's Bootstrap program like?'. Assuming a human knows how to breath and beat it's heart from day one,(which is a pretty safe assumption) 'What are the pre-installed drivers and other programs like?'. The more and more you think into the process of thinking the more questions arise and you realize A.I. is a lot farther down the road than you may think.

[AtomicMaster]

Just some notes from the original post:

Its Garry Kasparov, if someone cares to bring up a person as reference, I believe they should take care to use their actual name, also, and this is not as relevant here, but also express that person's actual opinion.

Between fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, a computer program can be programmed to improve on its own strategy.

Big Blue like Raspberry Pi are just computers, they don't think, they don't do anything to interact with you, everything they are claimed to do are work of the cleverness and ingenuity of the programmers behind the programs that those machines run

As to how complex computers are, you would have to define what you are accounting for in the definition of complexity. And that quote is from 1998, and computers have only been getting exponentially more complex since then, worm brains, last i heard, have not changed recently.

There is a lot of philosophical questions to answer too, for example, if you transfer your mind to another body exactly teh same as yours, then are you the same person, and so if you live in a computer simulation, are you, you?

[Unity+]

It's a very interesting concept non the less, but, I doubt the normal silicon transistor can ever be as intelligent as a human. Human's make gray area decisions; we don't always answer yes or no, we sometimes answer maybe. When you have a physical object like a silicon transistor all it has is ones and zeros, it is incapable of being unsure. It also doesn't have the ability to rebuild and expand itself like the brain does over a period of time. The change in the human brain is very obvious, if you ask the same person a question during different periods in their life they will most likely answer that same question differently each time.

 

The defining moment in computer engineering is to come, when we have a reliable transistor with more then true or false that is when computers will gain A.I. When the computer is able to build itself a new due to previous experiences and make different choices when in the same situation then the computer can learn.

 

Another interesting concept that must be tackled is 'What is the Human Brain's Bootstrap program like?'. Assuming a human knows how to breath and beat it's heart from day one,(which is a pretty safe assumption) 'What are the pre-installed drivers and other programs like?'. The more and more you think into the process of thinking the more questions arise and you realize A.I. is a lot farther down the road than you may think.

Actually, it is not a matter of silicon rather it is a matter of language. Binary is the system of language that computers use and, therefore, are limited to decisions related to 1 and 0, or on and off. On the other hand, quantum mechanics allows us to develop a computer that can go way farther than yes and no, though silicon is still useful as a resources if somehow there was a language that could imitate the properties of languages developed using quantum mechanics.

[Blix]

I agree with Dylan -- silicon electronics will NEVER match the human brain, but…

The true path to AI will NOT be pure silicon. The first real AI will emerge from what’s called a “MONKEY ROOM” - a collection of human brains (i.e. users) mediated by a computer interface to produce an entirely new entity - a collaborative consciousness that goes far beyond individual human potential.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Blix

[AtomicMaster]

Just because computers operate in binary, doesn't mean that we can't express more complex states. And it's not a matter of not being able to express complex states, because more often than not, things boil down to much simpler states than we think about. For example on one hand, every language on earth is different, some more complex than others, but if you were building a system to represent language, you would start by breaking languages into the sounds, which would significantly cut down the states needed to represent a language, then you cut the sounds down into their patterns, and at the end of all of that you find that representing the language as a set of rules and words, which are themselves a set of sounds, which are themselves a pattern of wave frequencies and amplitudes, which themselves can be stored in whatever base you want (like base 2), and we see that even though a computer can only operate in 2 states, it is indeed enough to be able to represent them speaking any language on the planet. I would have to consult my linguist friends, there is a name for this concept though...