Interesting lady; Susan Schneider

[Alan Grayson]

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

[Philip Thrift]

On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 5:01:14 AM UTC-5, Alan Grayson wrote:

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

It's a common AI view, that the program (programming) of consciousness (like what's running in your brain right now) is substrate independent.

@philipthrift

[Alan Grayson]

What is "substrate independent"? AG 

[Philip Thrift]

As defined by Mad Max Tegmark. (I have the opposite view.)

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27126

Substrate-Independence

What do waves, computations and conscious experiences have in common, that provides crucial clues about the future of intelligence? They all share an intriguing ability to take on a life of their own that’s rather independent of their physical substrate. 

Waves have properties such as speed, wavelength and frequency, and we physicists can study the equations they obey without even needing to know what substance they are waves in. When you hear something, you're detecting sound waves caused by molecules bouncing around in the mixture of gases we call air, and we can calculate all sorts of interesting things about these waves—how their intensity fades as the square of the distance, how they bend when they pass through open doors, how they reflect off of walls and cause echoes, etc.—without knowing what air is made of.

We can ignore all details about oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, etc., because the only property of the wave's substrate that matters and enters into the famous wave equation is a single number that we can measure: the wave speed, which in this case is about 300 meters per second. Indeed, this wave equation that MIT students are now studying was first discovered and put to great use long before physicists had even established that atoms and molecules existed! 

Alan Turing famously proved that computations are substrate-independent as well: There’s a vast variety of different computer architectures that are “universal” in the sense that they can all perform the exact same computations. So if you're a conscious superintelligent character in a future computer game, you'd have no way of knowing whether you ran on a desktop, a tablet or a phone, because you would be substrate-independent.

Nor could you tell whether the logic gates of the computer were made of transistors, optical circuits or other hardware, or even what the fundamental laws of physics were. Because of this substrate-independence, shrewd engineers have been able to repeatedly replace the technologies inside our computers with dramatically better ones without changing the software, making computation twice as cheap roughly every couple of years for over a century, cutting the computer cost a whopping million million million times since my grandmothers were born. It’s precisely this substrate-independence of computation that implies that artificial intelligence is possible: Intelligence doesn't require flesh, blood or carbon atoms. 

This example illustrates three important points.

First, substrate-independence doesn't mean that a substrate is unnecessary, but that most details of it don't matter. You obviously can't have sound waves in a gas if there's no gas, but any gas whatsoever will suffice. Similarly, you obviously can't have computation without matter, but any matter will do as long as it can be arranged into logic gates, connected neurons or some other building block enabling universal computation.

Second, the substrate-independent phenomenon takes on a life of its own, independent of its substrate. A wave can travel across a lake, even though none of its water molecules do—they mostly bob up and down.

Third, it's often only the substrate-independent aspect that we're interested in: A surfer usually cares more about the position and height of a wave than about its detailed molecular composition, and if two programmers are jointly hunting a bug in their code, they're probably not discussing transistors.

Since childhood, I’ve wondered how tangible physical stuff such as flesh and blood can give rise to something that feels as intangible, abstract and ethereal as intelligence and consciousness. We’ve now arrived at the answer: these phenomena feel so non-physical because they're substrate-independent, taking on a life of their own that doesn't depend on or reflect the physical details. We still don’t understand intelligence to the point of building machines that can match all human abilities, but AI researchers are striking ever more abilities from their can’t-do list, from image classification to Go-playing, speech recognition, translation and driving.

But what about consciousness, by which I mean simply "subjective experience"? When you’re driving a car, you’re having a conscious experience of colors, sounds, emotions, etc. But why are you experiencing anything at all? Does it feel like anything to be a self-driving car? This is what David Chalmers calls the "hard problem," and it’s distinct from merely asking how intelligence works. 

I've been arguing for decades that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways. This leads to a radical idea that I really like: If consciousness is the way that information feels when it’s processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it's only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!

We know that when particles move around in spacetime in patterns obeying certain principles, they give rise to substrate-independent phenomena—e.g. waves and computations. We've now taken this idea to another level: If the information processing itself obeys certain principles, it can give rise to the higher level substrate-independent phenomenon that we call consciousness. This places your conscious experience not one but two levels up from the matter. No wonder your mind feels non-physical! We don’t yet know what principles information processing needs to obey to be conscious, but concrete proposals have been made that neuroscientists are trying to test experimentally.

However, one lesson from substrate-independence is already clear: we should reject carbon-chauvinism and the common view that our intelligent machines will always be our unconscious slaves. Computation, intelligence and consciousness are patterns in the spacetime arrangement of particles that take on a life of their own, and it's not the particles but the patterns that really matter! Matter doesn't matter.

Matter matters.

@philipthrift

 

[Stathis Papaioannou]

The computation is the same independently of the substrate of its implementation. For example, you could run the same program on a computer based on vacuum tubes or transistors, with the same output.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

[Philip Thrift]

That's the case for the conventional-Platonistic definition of computing.

Not the case for computing with a material-intrinsic semantics.

@philipthrift

[spudb...@aol.com]

Lets cut to the chase. Do you, or do you feel Schneider (without knowing) believes that a subject's mind, is transferable, duplicatable, transferable to a diff substrate?  Hey, its Halloween! 

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Oct 30, 2019 6:01 am
Subject: Interesting lady; Susan Schneider

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

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[Alan Grayson]

On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 6:42:09 PM UTC-6, spudb...@aol.com wrote:

Lets cut to the chase. Do you, or do you feel Schneider (without knowing) believes that a subject's mind, is transferable, duplicatable, transferable to a diff substrate?  Hey, its Halloween! 

I have no idea. AG 

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Grayson <agrays...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wed, Oct 30, 2019 6:01 am
Subject: Interesting lady; Susan Schneider

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

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Ok thanks!

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[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 6:54 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> The computation is the same independently of the substrate of its implementation. For example, you could run the same program on a computer based on vacuum tubes or transistors, with the same output.

Stathis Papaioannou

> That's the case for the conventional-Platonistic definition of computing. Not the case for computing with a material-intrinsic semantics.

So according to "material-intrinsic semantics" the 4 that a vacuum tube computer produces when it adds 2+2 is not the same 4 that a transistor computer produces when it adds 2+2; and the 4 a white man gets when he adds 2+2 does not mean the same thing as the 4 a black man gets when he adds 2+2, and there is a male 4 when a man makes the addition and a female 4 when a woman does. So how can a serious person consider anything as monumentally silly as a computational theory involving "material-intrinsic semantics"?

John K Clark

[Philip Thrift]

If there is a program in C vs. a program in Python (vs. Java, etc.) that produce the same I/O, which uses the least energy? 

Or a man vs. a woman that adds. :)

Material-intrinsic semantics are a UCNC conferences topic. Check them out.

 

@philipthrift

[Bruno Marchal]

Indeed, a point made clear by Putnam, and called functionalism. But that was obvious from the definition of a Turing machine, by Turing.

Obviously, that is the least you need to understand that a digital machine (aka Turing machine, or combinator, or number, …) cannot feel any difference if it is run by a Babbage (coo-coo-clock like) machine, a quantum computer, or arithmetical true relation in arithmetic. 

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

Which does not admit a mathematical definition, and relies on a metaphysical commitment, without any evidences for it. Why not, but given that mechanism is testable let us see. Up to now, nature does exactly what it needs to do to confirm Mechanism, including its many histories interpretation of the arithmetical reality.

Bruno

@philipthrift

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[Bruno Marchal]

It all depends on the algorithm, and not of the language (but still on the way that language is implemented).

The only thing which requires energy is in the erasure of the information (Landauer). Yet, it has been shown (by Hao Wang) that we can get Turing universality with elementary operations which never erase anything. This is of course reflected in quantum computations, which have to reversible, and never dissipate energy.

Computations does not require energy, except for read and write, and interaction with the users.

For example, instead of using the combinators K (which erase information, as Kxy = x, implies that the information in y has vanished), we can use the base I, B, C, W:

Ix = x (identity)

Bxyz = x(yz) (composer, applicator)

Cxyz = xzy (permuter)

Wxy = xyy, (duplicator)

In that case we can avoid using energy.

So, your question is that it depends on the number of erasing done in your algorithm, and in the universal machine implementing your algorithm.

The presence of the quantum axioms ([]p->p, + p-> [<>p, for p sigma_1) in the self-referential “observable” modes suggests that this remains true in the physics extracted from arithmetic (or from any universal machinery).

Bruno

Or a man vs. a woman that adds. :)

Material-intrinsic semantics are a UCNC conferences topic. Check them out.

 

@philipthrift

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[Philip Thrift]

I am including with the program (C, Python, etc. the whole system (compiler, interpreter) that takes the program (implementing a common "algorithm") and ultimately produces machine code for different machines.

If there was a universal compiler that could take a program in any (of the top 10 languages, say) and produce the lowest energy and fastest version transformation of the program for the target machine, that would be quite a compiler.

@philipthrift 

[Bruno Marchal]

That cannot exist, but some approximation of this could make sense. By the Blum speed-up theorem (or a more general version due ti Blum & Al.) there is no fastest universal machine. We can diabolise to bring a more faster one, in theory. There are nice theories which explains why they cannot be used in practice, but still play a role if we are concerned with the truth about the machine, and the relation between machine and truth.

Bruno

@philipthrift 

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[Brent Meeker]

On 11/3/2019 5:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> We can diabolise to bring a more faster one, in theory.

You're letting more theological concepts corrupt your thinking.  :-)

Brent

[Bruno Marchal]

Lol. You are right. I meant “diagonalise” of course. What a lapsus!

Maybe the devil is in the diagonal, not just Cantor one. The diagonal of a square already troubled the Pythagorean (according to some legend), for its incommensurability with the square’s sides.
Then diagonalisation plays also a key role in defining mathematically the 3p-self, which is at the heart of the development of the “little ego”, so close to the devil, so far from the higher self without a name!

The diagonal might be diabolical. Sometimes truth emerges from Lapsus! :)

Bruno



>
> Brent

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[Cosmin Visan]

Garbage. Cultural mumbo-jumbo.