ᛕᎥᕼᗷᗴᖇᑎᗴ丅Ꭵᑕᔕ @Kihbernetics@qoto.org

#Consciousness as "deliberate #thinking and #cognition" should be easy to explain, but only by the conscious agent itself. There is no way an outside #oserver can identify if an agent's behavior is conscious or not.

>#Intuition — what seems “#obvious and #undeniable” — may **not** be #trustworthy. It may seem “obvious and undeniable” to someone interacting with ChatGPT that it is communicating with a conscious agent, but that assumption would be flawed.

https://bigthink.com/the-well/human-consciousness-womb-after-birth/

Anil Seth thinks "*Conscious AI Is a Bad, Bad Idea*" because
>*our minds haven’t evolved to deal with machines we believe have #consciousness.*

On the contrary, I think we are *"genetically programmed"* to ascribe intent to anything that *"wants"* to communicate with us.

He is also saying that:

>*Being intelligent—as humans think we are—may give us new ways of being conscious, and some forms of human and animal #intelligence may require consciousness, but basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain might not require much species-level intelligence at all.*

If, as he says, "*intelligence is the capacity to do the right thing at the right time,*" any organism that has survived long enough to procreate must have some kind of intelligence, regardless of its consciousness.

Wrt "*basic conscious experiences such as pleasure and pain*," IMO they are conscious **only** if the organism is intelligent enough to suppress the urge of an innate "*genetically programmed*" response to pain or pleasure in order to achieve some "higher goal," even if it goes against the original goal of "to survive."

The bottom line is that consciousness is **not** just a function of intelligence. Machines can become much smarter than us without becoming conscious.

In order to be really #conscious, a machine would first have the experience of being #alive and the desire to remain in that state, have some #agency and #control over its internal and external states, the ability to develop short and long-term goals and plan and execute complex time-dependent actions to fulfill those goals.

Anything less than that is just a clever simulation.

https://nautil.us/why-conscious-ai-is-a-bad-bad-idea-302937/

The purpose of #design is to #create new or/and different #artificial structures (artifacts), so speaking of design makes sense only if it is in the context of other creative #production activities such as writing, painting, engineering, manufacturing, etc.

Klaus Krippendorff has a nice description of the difference between #object and #artifact and the relationship to Gibson's #affordances in this 2007 paper published in "Kybernetes":

https://researchgate.net/publication/45597493_The_Cybernetics_of_Design_and_the_Design_of_Cybernetic

However, he is wrong, IMO, in accentuating the difference between #scientists and #designers.

Every designer is often a scientist in "describing what can be observed" and every scientist also has to design new hypotheses, theories, and experiments for the "not yet observable and measurable".

A few "gems" from #WR_Ashby on the "accumulation of adaptations":

>"A compound event that is impossible if the components have to occur simultaneously may be readily achievable if they can occur in sequence or independently...
Thus, for the accumulation of adaptations to be possible, **the system must not be fully joined**.

>The idea so often implicit in physiological writings, that all will be well if only sufficient cross-connexions are available, is, in this context, quite wrong."

I recommend reading the whole book ($20 on Amazon) but if not, here is a good overview of some interesting parts:

https://www.panarchy.org/ashby/adaptation.1960.html

#WR_Ashby in his "Design for a Brain" writes about the importance of the #preservation of #adaptations. Following his ideas I've made this little experiment using a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet that shows three different scenarios:

When re-tossing all of the 10 coins every time like in the first case there is no preservation of "1s" whatsoever. Every new toss starts from scratch.

In the second case, each coin is tossed separately until it shows "1" when the tosser moves on tossing the next coin until all 10 show "1" which usually happens around the 10th tossing.

In case #3 only the remaining "0s" of the previous toss are re-thrown until all coins show a "1" which is by far the most efficient way of preservation, needing less than half of the time and ending in about 4 tosses.

Our brains evolved as control mechanisms for the body to ensure its survival. That's the reason why #AI is beating humans primarily in areas requiring computation and abstract reasoning. We only recently added those to our tool repertoire and didn't have too much time to perfect them as for our ancient sensory-motor control tools.

>“Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually **unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge**. We are all prodigious Olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.”

Moravec, H. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. (Harvard University Press, 1988).

as reported in:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11786-6

There is a lot of talking against "#linear thinking" and planning in #complexity and how the only "good" hierarchy is a "flat" one.
The above diagram shows how a #hierarchy is a natural effect of folding the linear "information #flow" to match the physical structure of the system.

For nearly 4 decades in organizational change management, I've been using this idea of #hierarchy layers emerging from the #folding of a sequential "information processing" #flow and just found that a whole area in biology deals with this exciting topic.👇

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050922017811

>"An algorithm solves a problem only if it produces the correct output for every possible input — if it fails even once, it’s not a general-purpose algorithm for that problem."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/alan-turing-and-the-power-of-negative-thinking-20230905/

Most commenters do not realize that no "information processing" (#computation on symbol sequences) of any kind is necessary for an agent to have #control over their internal #states and surroundings.
Think of a #homeostat or comparator such as in #PCT (Perceptual Control Theory).

>Anthropomorphizing image generators and describing them as merely being “inspired” by their training data, like artists are inspired by other artists, is not only misguided but also harmful. Ascribing #agency to image generators diminishes the complexity of human creativity, robs artists of credit (and in many cases compensation), and transfers #accountability from the organizations creating image generators, and the practices of these organizations which should be scrutinized, to the image generators themselves

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3600211.3604681

The premise of this article is solid. The brain evolved first and foremost as a #control mechanism. Symbolic "information processing" is a later development.

However, just from reading the reactions in the comments section, one can easily see that #computationalism is still very much the mainstream theory of mind.

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

The 20th century is said to have been the "age of #machines" because all explanations of how things work would end in some kind of computing or "information processing" by a known #mechanism.

Some people think that the 21st century will be the "age of #biology" because science seems starting to look at nature and the living #organism for inspiration about how things really work.

If this is true then #Computationalism must be one of the last remnants of the past century.

>The twenty-first century is the Century of Biology *(Brown, A. The Futurists: September-October 2008)*. Just as the twentieth century looked to machines, the twenty-first century is looking to biology to inform how we think, organize, design, and lead our organizations.

Allen, Kathleen E.. Leading from the Roots: Nature-Inspired Leadership Lessons for Today's World (p. 20). Morgan James Publishing. Kindle Edition.

>"Given that organizations are filled with human beings, it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to believe that a living system would emerge from all the life that shows up every day"

https://kathleenallen.net/works/

Finding out the complexity of complexity is a really complex problem😀

Fortunately, the things that we think are really complex to compute don't know (or care about) how complex they are.

>"Complexity theorists are confronting their most puzzling problem yet: complexity theory itself"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/complexity-theorys-50-year-journey-to-the-limits-of-knowledge-20230817/

Same source:

>Self-organizing systems are characterized by their intrinsic, nonlinear operators, (i.e., the properties of their constituent elements, macromolecules, spores of the slime mold, bees, etc.), which generate macroscopically (meta-) stable patterns maintained by the perpetual flux of their constituents. A special case of #self_organization is #autopoiesis. It is that organization which is its own Eigen-state: *the outcome of the productive interactions of the components of the system are those very components*. It is the organization of the #living, and, at the same time, the organization of #autonomy.

>The #purpose of invoking the notion of "purpose" is to emphasize the irrelevance of the #trajectories traced by such a system en route from an arbitrary initial #state to its #goal. In a synthesized system whose inner workings are known, this irrelevance has no significance. This irrelevance becomes highly significant, however when the analytic problem, the machine identification problem, cannot be solved, because, for instance, it is ***trans-computational*** in the sense that with known algorithms the number of elementary computations exceeds the age of the universe expressed in nanoseconds.

From #H_v_Foerster's definition of CYBERNETICS in the *Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence*, Wiley, 1987, as presented in:

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA171072.pdf

>At the heart of #TESCREAL-ism is a techno-utopian vision of the future in which we become a new species of “enhanced” posthumans, colonize space, subjugate nature, plunder the cosmos for its vast resources and build giant computers floating in space to run virtual-reality simulations in which trillions and trillions of “happy” digital beings live. The ultimate aim is to maximize the total amount of “value” in the universe.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/before-its-too-late-buddy/

>#Logic_Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning, and has been described as ***the first artificial intelligence program***.
Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Whitehead and Russell's *Principia Mathematica*, and found new and shorter proofs for some of them.

#AI #heuristics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist