The connectome and uploading

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John Clark

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Mar 14, 2023, 7:06:28 AMMar 14
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In the current March 10 2023 issue of the journal Science there is a report that for the first time the entire connectome of an insect brain (the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster) has been found, all 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses of it, they also found there were 93 different types of neurons. That connectome is an order of magnitude larger than has been possible to find before. One of the authors of the article says "It’s interesting that the computer-science field is converging onto what evolution has discovered", he said that because it turns out that 41% of the fly brain's neurons are in recurrent loops that provide feedback to other neurons that are upstream of the data processing path, and that's just what we see in modern AIs like ChatGPT. He also said that the method they used was slow and very labor intensive but he also said “Now that we have a reference brain one can now use it to train machine learning to do it much faster”. They also found that "Although the details of brain organization differ across the animal kingdom, many circuit architectures are conserved ".The implications this has for human uploading are obvious.


John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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Telmo Menezes

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Mar 14, 2023, 7:31:10 AMMar 14
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This is very nice. I did some stuff with the previously available complete connectome (C. elegans).

But:

Am Di, 14. Mär 2023, um 12:05, schrieb John Clark:
One of the authors of the article says "It’s interesting that the computer-science field is converging onto what evolution has discovered", he said that because it turns out that 41% of the fly brain's neurons are in recurrent loops that provide feedback to other neurons that are upstream of the data processing path, and that's just what we see in modern AIs like ChatGPT.

I do not think this is true. ChatGPT is a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), and LLMs use a transformer architecture, which is deep but purely feed-forward, and uses attention heads. The attention mechanism was the big breakthrough back in 2017, that finally enabled the training of such big models:


Recurrent networks have been tried for decades precisely because of their biologically plausibility, but they suffer from the "vanishing gradient" problem. In simple terms, recurrence means that an input from a long time ago can remain important, but it becomes increasingly hard for gradient descent algorithms to assign the correct importance to the weights. So in this case, the breakthrough was achieved by moving away from biological plausibility.

I think that part of the reason for this is that although neural network topology is biologically inspired, the dominant learning algorithms are centralized top-down (gradient descent). Learning algorithms in our own brain are certainly much more decentralized / emergent / distributed. I do not think we cracked them yet. I imagine recurrent NNs will be back once we do. My intuition is that if we are going to successfully imitate biology we must model the various neurotransmitters. There is a reason why we have several of them (and all sorts of drugs that imitate them and can bind selectively). This contrasts with the "single signal type" approach of contemporary artificial NNs -- which is very handy because it really fits linear algebra and thus GPU architectures.

Telmo

John Clark

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Mar 14, 2023, 8:49:13 AMMar 14
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On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 7:31 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> One of the authors of the article says "It’s interesting that the computer-science field is converging onto what evolution has discovered", he said that because it turns out that 41% of the fly brain's neurons are in recurrent loops that provide feedback to other neurons that are upstream of the data processing path, and that's just what we see in modern AIs like ChatGPT.

> I do not think this is true. ChatGPT is a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), and LLMs use a transformer architecture, which is deep but purely feed-forward, and uses attention heads. The attention mechanism was the big breakthrough back in 2017, that finally enabled the training of such big models:

I was under the impression that transformers are superior to recurrent neural networks because recurrent processing of data was not necessary with transformers so more paralyzation is possible than with recursive neural networks; it can analyze an entire sentence at once and doesn't need to do so word by word.  So Transformers learn faster and need less trading data.

> My intuition is that if we are going to successfully imitate biology we must model the various neurotransmitters.

That is not my intuition. I see nothing sacred in hormones, I don't see the slightest reason why they or any neurotransmitter would be especially difficult to simulate through computation, because chemical messengers are not a sign of sophisticated design on nature's part, rather it's an example of Evolution's bungling. If you need to inhibit a nearby neuron there are better ways of sending that signal then launching a GABA molecule like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea and waiting ages for it to diffuse to its random target.

I'm not interested in brain chemicals, only in the information they contain, if somebody wants  information to get transmitted from one place to another as fast and reliablely as possible, nobody would send smoke signals if they had a fiber optic cable. The information content in each molecular message must be tiny, just a few bits because only about 60 neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, norepinephrine and GABA are known, even if the true number is 100 times greater (or a million times for that matter) the information content of each signal must be tiny. Also, for the long range stuff, exactly which neuron receives the signal can not be specified because it relies on a random process, diffusion. The fact that it's slow as molasses in February does not add to its charm.  

If your job is delivering packages and all the packages are very small, and your boss doesn't care who you give them to as long as they're on the correct continent, and you have until the next ice age to get the work done, then you don't have a very difficult profession.  Artificial neurons could be made to communicate as inefficiently as natural ones do by releasing chemical neurotransmitters if anybody really wanted to, but it would be pointless when there are much faster, and much more reliable, and much more specific ways of operating.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
kuh


Samiya Illias

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Mar 14, 2023, 9:44:09 AMMar 14
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If you are so inefficiently wired, how come you can comment on the inefficiency of the system? Aren’t you an emergent property of the same system that you are criticising? 



On 14-Mar-2023, at 5:49 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:


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John Clark

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Mar 14, 2023, 9:48:51 AMMar 14
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On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 9:44 AM Samiya Illias <samiya...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Aren’t you an emergent property of the same system that you are criticising? 

Yes.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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Samiya Illias

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Mar 14, 2023, 10:39:36 AMMar 14
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Acknowledging the Perfection of our Lord


No change should there be in the creation of Allah [Quran 30:30] 



Abstract 
To do تَسْبِيحَ of Allah means to acknowledge, declare, and/or celebrate that Allah is absolutely perfect. Allah creates perfectly and governs excellently. We humans need to acknowledge and appreciate this fact, and consequently submit to The Right Religion (الدِّينُ الْقَيِّمُ). 


Full Text


On 14-Mar-2023, at 6:48 PM, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



Terren Suydam

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Mar 14, 2023, 11:02:54 AMMar 14
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On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 8:49 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 7:31 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> My intuition is that if we are going to successfully imitate biology we must model the various neurotransmitters.

That is not my intuition. I see nothing sacred in hormones, I don't see the slightest reason why they or any neurotransmitter would be especially difficult to simulate through computation, because chemical messengers are not a sign of sophisticated design on nature's part, rather it's an example of Evolution's bungling. If you need to inhibit a nearby neuron there are better ways of sending that signal then launching a GABA molecule like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea and waiting ages for it to diffuse to its random target.

I don't think the point is about the specific neurotransmitters (NTs) used in biological brains, but that there are multiple NTs which each activate separable circuits in the brain. It's probably adaptive to have multiple NTs, to further modularize the brain's functionality. This may be an important part of generalized intelligence.
 
I'm not interested in brain chemicals, only in the information they contain, if somebody wants  information to get transmitted from one place to another as fast and reliablely as possible, nobody would send smoke signals if they had a fiber optic cable. The information content in each molecular message must be tiny, just a few bits because only about 60 neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, norepinephrine and GABA are known, even if the true number is 100 times greater (or a million times for that matter) the information content of each signal must be tiny. Also, for the long range stuff, exactly which neuron receives the signal can not be specified because it relies on a random process, diffusion. The fact that it's slow as molasses in February does not add to its charm.  

Similarly, NTs that produce effects on different timescales, or in terms of more diffuse targets, may provide functionality that a single, fast NT cannot achieve. You might call it Evolutionary bungling, but it's not necessarily the case that faster is always better.  I sometimes wonder how an AI that could process information a million times faster than a human could be capable of talking to humans. Imagine having to wait 20 years for a response - subjectively, that's how it might feel to a super-fast AI.

Terren

Telmo Menezes

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Mar 14, 2023, 11:46:51 AMMar 14
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Am Di, 14. Mär 2023, um 13:48, schrieb John Clark:
On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 7:31 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:

> One of the authors of the article says "It’s interesting that the computer-science field is converging onto what evolution has discovered", he said that because it turns out that 41% of the fly brain's neurons are in recurrent loops that provide feedback to other neurons that are upstream of the data processing path, and that's just what we see in modern AIs like ChatGPT.

> I do not think this is true. ChatGPT is a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), and LLMs use a transformer architecture, which is deep but purely feed-forward, and uses attention heads. The attention mechanism was the big breakthrough back in 2017, that finally enabled the training of such big models:

I was under the impression that transformers are superior to recurrent neural networks because recurrent processing of data was not necessary with transformers so more paralyzation is possible than with recursive neural networks; it can analyze an entire sentence at once and doesn't need to do so word by word.  So Transformers learn faster and need less trading data.

It is true that transformers are faster for the reason you say, but the vanishing gradient problem was definitely an issue. Right before transformers, the dominant architecture was LSTM, which was recurrent but designed in such a way as to deal with the vanishing gradient:


Memory is the obvious way to deal with context, but like you say transformers consider the entire sentence (or more) all at once. Attention heads allow for parallel learning to focus on several aspects of the sentence at the same time, and then combining them at higher and higher layers of abstraction.

I do not think that any of this has any impact on the size of the training corpus required.


> My intuition is that if we are going to successfully imitate biology we must model the various neurotransmitters.

That is not my intuition. I see nothing sacred in hormones,

I agree that there is nothing sacred about hormones, the only important thing is that there are several of them, with different binding properties. Current artificial neural networks (ANNs) only have one type of signal between neurons, the activation signal. Our brains can signal different things, importantly using dopamine to regulate learning -- and thus serve as a building block for a decentralized, emergent learning algorithm that clearly can deal with recursive connections with no problem.

With recursive connections a NN becomes Turing complete. I would be extremely surprised if Turing completeness turns out to not be a requirement for AGI.

I don't see the slightest reason why they or any neurotransmitter would be especially difficult to simulate through computation, because chemical messengers are not a sign of sophisticated design on nature's part, rather it's an example of Evolution's bungling. If you need to inhibit a nearby neuron there are better ways of sending that signal then launching a GABA molecule like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea and waiting ages for it to diffuse to its random target.

Of course, they are easy to simulate. Another question is if they are easy to simulate at the speed that we can perform gradient descent using contemporary GPU architectures. Of course, this is just a technical problem, not a fundamental one. What is more fundamental (and apparently hard) is to know *what* to simulate, so that a powerful learning algorithm emerges from such local interactions.

Neuroscience provides us with a wealth of information about the biological reality of our brains, but what to abstract from this to create the master learning algorithm that we crave is perhaps the crux of the matter. Maybe it will take an Einstein level of intellect to achieve this breakthrough.

I'm not interested in brain chemicals, only in the information they contain, if somebody wants  information to get transmitted from one place to another as fast and reliablely as possible, nobody would send smoke signals if they had a fiber optic cable. The information content in each molecular message must be tiny, just a few bits because only about 60 neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, norepinephrine and GABA are known, even if the true number is 100 times greater (or a million times for that matter) the information content of each signal must be tiny. Also, for the long range stuff, exactly which neuron receives the signal can not be specified because it relies on a random process, diffusion. The fact that it's slow as molasses in February does not add to its charm.  

I completely agree, I am not fetishizing the wetware. Silicon is much faster.

Telmo

If your job is delivering packages and all the packages are very small, and your boss doesn't care who you give them to as long as they're on the correct continent, and you have until the next ice age to get the work done, then you don't have a very difficult profession.  Artificial neurons could be made to communicate as inefficiently as natural ones do by releasing chemical neurotransmitters if anybody really wanted to, but it would be pointless when there are much faster, and much more reliable, and much more specific ways of operating.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
kuh



spudb...@aol.com

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Mar 15, 2023, 7:47:46 AMMar 15
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The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

At this point, I claim it doesn't and that 3 and 4 are clever Language Machines.

To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order. I have seen no article by any computer scientist, neurobiologist, or physicist, indicating HOW computer consciousness arose? If there is something out there, somebody please present a link to this august mailing-list. 

Now, for life arising out of chemicals on planet earth, I stumbled upon this yesterday. The theory is called Nickleback (O Canada!)

Scientists Have Found Molecule That Is Behind The Origin Of Life On Earth? Read To Know


Somebody come up with a theory that network systems can accidentally produce a human level mind, before we celebrate chat4 overmuch. 

Let humans come up with a network that invents technology that produce inventions that humans alone would not have arrived at for decades of centuries! That, would be the big breakthrough, and not a fun chatbox.





spudb...@aol.com

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Mar 15, 2023, 7:51:58 AMMar 15
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Connectome studies hold that "The Map is The Landscape." Thus, making uploading possible. 

When people like Ray Kurzweil were pontificating 25 years ago, it seemed back then like computer science would be roaring to The Singularity. Today, much of the goodies forecast by Kurz and everyone else seems sluggish, even with LLM's and quantum computing and its photonics cousin. Uploading seems as far away to me, as ever. 


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Subject: Re: The connectome and uploading

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Stathis Papaioannou

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Mar 15, 2023, 8:48:14 AMMar 15
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On Wed, 15 Mar 2023 at 22:47, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

At this point, I claim it doesn't and that 3 and 4 are clever Language Machines.

To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order. I have seen no article by any computer scientist, neurobiologist, or physicist, indicating HOW computer consciousness arose? If there is something out there, somebody please present a link to this august mailing-list.

There is no process or structure that would satisfy as the secret of consciousness. Suppose we discovered a new neurotransmitter in the brain with exotic physical properties: how would that explain consciousness? Why would silicon or gallium arsenide be so fundamentally different to this neurotransmitter that it obviously couldn’t explain lain consciousness?
--
Stathis Papaioannou

Jason Resch

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Mar 15, 2023, 9:54:16 AMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023, 7:47 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

There was this recent paper that showed self-arising similarity between language models and neural anatomical structures in in the language centers of human brains:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35173264/ “Brains and algorithms partially converge in natural language processing”




At this point, I claim it doesn't and that 3 and 4 are clever Language Machines.

To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order. I have seen no article by any computer scientist, neurobiologist, or physicist, indicating HOW computer consciousness arose? If there is something out there, somebody please present a link to this august mailing-list. 

It's not via magic, but through the thinking that our bodies are machines. Then asking: would another machine, with similar behavior and functions as us, not have an equal claim to consciousness as we have?

Indeed, if philosophical zombies are impossible, then Turing universality guarantees that an appropriately programmed computer would be consciousness, and could be conscious in the exactly same way as humans are. See Chalmers's "Dancing, Fading Qualia" paper for a good argument of this. It's freely accessible on his website.

Below I show how this thinking has developed over the past few thousand years:

“But the facts are that the power of perception is never
found apart from the power of self-nutrition, while-in plants-the
latter is found isolated from the former. Again, no sense is found
apart from that of touch, while touch is found by itself; many animals
have neither sight, hearing, nor smell. Again, among living things
that possess sense some have the power of locomotion, some not. Lastly,
certain living beings-a small minority-possess calculation and thought,
for (among mortal beings) those which possess calculation have all
the other powers above mentioned, while the converse does not hold-indeed
some live by imagination alone, while others have not even imagination.
The mind that knows with immediate intuition presents a different
problem.”
-- Aristotle "On the Soul" 350 B.C.

"I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels."
-- René Descartes, Treatise on Man, published in 1633

Man a Machine - Julien Offray de La Mettrie 1748
“Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it.”


Alan Turing in BBC Radio Interview: “Can Digital Computers Think?” May 1951.
-
“In order to arrange for our computer to imitate a given machine it is only necessary to programme the computer to calculate what the machine in question would do under given circumstances, and in particular what answers it would print out. The computer can then be made to print out the same answers.
[...]
If now, some particular machine can be described as a brain we have only to programme our digital computer to imitate it and it will also be a brain. If it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and in particular in men, are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer suitably programmed will behave like a brain.”



“The important result of Turing’s is that in this way the first [universal] machine can be caused to imitate the behavior of any other machine.”
-- John von Neumann in “The Computer and the Brain” (1958)



Minds and Machines - Hilary Putnam (1960)
"The functional organization (problem solving, thinking) of the human being or machine can be described in terms of the sequences of mental or logical states respectively (and the accompanying verbalizations), without reference to the nature of the “physical realization” of these states."


Pribram (1976),

“I tend to view animals, especially furry animals, as conscious-not plants,

not inanimate crystals, not computers. This might be termed the "cuddliness

criterion" for consciousness. My reasons are practical: it makes little difference at present whether computers are conscious or not. (p. 298)”

Freud's Project reassessed

Book by Karl H. Pribram

http://karlpribram.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/theory/T-078.pdf 



http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing.pdf  “ASCRIBING MENTAL QUALITIES TO

MACHINES” (1979)

“Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having

beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful

to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be

needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack

and where to get it.”


“Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) p. 230

 Paul and Patricia Churchland, wrote in 1983,
“Church's Thesis says that whatever is computable is Turing computable. Assuming, with some safety, that what the mind-brain does is computable, then it can in principle be simulated by a Computer.””



http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little.pdf (1983) “The Little Thoughts of Thinking Machines”
“Ever since Descartes, philosophically minded people have wrestled with
the question of whether it is possible for machines to think. As we interact
more and more with computers — both personal computers and others — the
questions of whether machines can think and what kind of thoughts they can
have become ever more pertinent. We can ask whether machines remember,
believe, know, intend, like or dislike, want, understand, promise, owe, have
rights or duties, or deserve rewards or punishment. Is this an all-or-nothing
question, or can we say that some machines do some of these things and not
others, or that they do them to some extent?”


David Deutsch in 1985 wrote, “I can now state the physical version of the Church-Turing principle: "Every finitely realizable physical system can be perfectly simulated by a universal model computing
machine operating by finite means."”


Facing Up to the Hard Problem - David Chalmers (1996)
“Where there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience. A mouse has a simpler information-processing structure than a human, and has correspondingly simpler experience; perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience?”

Pattern on the Stone - Danny Hillis (1998)
"The theoretical limitations of computers provide no useful dividing line between human beings and machines. As far as we know, the brain is a kind of computer, and thought is just a complex computation. Perhaps this conclusion sounds harsh to you, but in my view it takes away nothing from the wonder of human thought. The statement that thought is a complex computation is like the statement sometimes made by biologists that life is a complex chemical reaction: both statements are true, and yet they still may be seen as incomplete. They identify the correct components but they ignore the mystery. To me, life and thought are both made all the more wonderful by the realization that they emerge from simple, understandable parts. I do not feel diminished by my kinship to Turing's machine."



“The unrelenting advance of machine intelligence, [...] will bring machines to human levels of intricate and refinement and beyond within several decades. Will these machines be conscious?”
-- Ray Kurzweil in "The Age of Spiritual Machines" (1999)


“It is interesting to speculate on just what our principles of coherence imply for the existence of consciousness outside the human race, and in particular in much simpler organisms. The matter is unclear, as our notion of awareness is only clearly defined for cases approximating human complexity. It seems reasonable to say that a dog is aware, and even that a mouse is aware (perhaps they are not self-aware, but that is a different matter). For example, it seems reasonable to say that a dog is aware of a fire hydrant in the basic sense of the term “aware.” The dog’s control systems certainly have access to information about the hydrant, and can use it to control behavior appropriately. By the coherence principle, it seems likely that the dog experiences the hydrant, in a way not unlike our visual experience of the world. This squares with common sense; all I am doing here is making the common sense reasoning a little more explicit.
The same is arguably true for mice and even for flies. Flies have some limited perceptual access to environmental information, and their perceptual contents presumably permeate their cognitive systems and are available to direct behavior. It seems reasonable to suppose that this qualifies as awareness, and that by the coherence principle there is some kind of accompanying experience.” 
-- David Chalmers in "The Conscious Mind" (1996)

“As we discussed in chapter 2, one of William Jame’s most valuable insights was to realize that consciousness is not a thing but a process. Although few people would disagree in principle with this conclusion, it is often ignored in practice, as indicated by the continuing attempts to identify some special intrinsic marker of those neurons that would generate conscious experience. The dynamic core hypothesis takes James’s insight seriously: As a process, a dynamic core is defined in terms of neural interactions. In other words, the definition of a dynamic core is a functional one, in that it is based on the strength of an ensemble of interactions, rather than just on a structure, a property of some neurons, or their location.”
-- Gerald Maurice Edelman and Giulio Tononi in "A Universe of Consciousness" (2000)


"Amoeba’s Secret" Bruno Marchal (2014)
-
“The hypothesis is that of Mechanism: the idea that we could be digital machines, in a sense that will be rendered more clearly in due course. Broadly speaking, we might be machines in the precise sense that no parts of our bodies are privileged with respect to an eventual functional substitution. This says that we can survive a heart substitution by the transplant of an artificial heart, or of a kidney substitution by an artificial kidney, etc., inasmuch as the substitution is carried out at a sufficiently fine-grained level.”

“When people talk about consciousness, something often mentioned is “self-awareness” or the ability to “think about one’s own processes of thinking”. Without the conceptual framework of computation, this might seem quite mysterious. But the idea of universal computation instead makes it seem almost inevitable. The whole point of a universal computer is that it can be made to emulate any computational system—even itself.”
Stephen Wolfram in “What is Consciousness” (2021)


“Dr Nando de Freitas said “the game is over” in the decades-long quest to realise artificial general intelligence (AGI) after DeepMind unveiled an AI system capable of completing a wide range of complex tasks, from stacking blocks to writing poetry.
Described as a “generalist agent”, DeepMind’s new Gato AI needs to just be scaled up in order to create an AI capable of rivalling human intelligence, Dr de Freitas said.“





Now, for life arising out of chemicals on planet earth, I stumbled upon this yesterday. The theory is called Nickleback (O Canada!)

Scientists Have Found Molecule That Is Behind The Origin Of Life On Earth? Read To Know


Somebody come up with a theory that network systems can accidentally produce a human level mind, before we celebrate chat4 overmuch. 

Let humans come up with a network that invents technology that produce inventions that humans alone would not have arrived at for decades of centuries! That, would be the big breakthrough, and not a fun chatbox.

There is Koza's "Invention Machine":

And computers have been used to design computers since at least the 80s with Danny Hillis's "Thinking Machines". He notes that the human brain can't keep track of a device with billions of parts, only machines can do that. So humans alone would not in centuries be able to design the CPU chips we have and use today.

Jason 

John Clark

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Mar 15, 2023, 10:19:59 AMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 7:51 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Connectome studies hold that "The Map is The Landscape."

And if the map is so detailed that you can't tell the difference then it's 100% true that "The Map IS The Landscape".


> When people like Ray Kurzweil were pontificating 25 years ago, it seemed back then like computer science would be roaring to The Singularity. Today, much of the goodies forecast by Kurz and everyone else seems sluggish,

 
Since 1990 Ray Kurzweil has made147 precise predictions about the date by which certain advances in information technology will be achieved, at the time most technology gurus said his predictions were ridiculous, but 86% of them turned out to be correct and only 14% were wrong. I can't think of any other prognosticator on any subject that has a better track record than that. But in one prediction he was too conservative, decades ago Kurzweil said a computer would pass the Turing Test by 2029, but it passed it in 2023; he also predicted that the Singularity will happen by 2045, but the events of the last few months have led me to believe that he may be too conservative on that prediction also.

> Uploading seems as far away to me, as ever. 

As far away as ever?!  I think the time when the sun turns into a red giant and incinerates the Earth is closer this year than it was last year but if after the passing of years you think the time when uploading is possible has not become closer that can only mean it will never happen because you think uploading is physically impossible.  Why is that? Do you think chemistry is sacred but electronics is not? 
John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

u7v

John Clark

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Mar 15, 2023, 11:02:14 AMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 7:47 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
 > 3 and 4 are clever Language Machines.

You can input nothing but a photograph into a modern "Language Machine" (by "modern" I mean something that has been developed in the last couple of months) and ask it what is in the photograph and it will be able to tell you, or ask it what will likely happen next to the object in the photo and it will give you a good answer. It can read and understand graphs and charts and if you show it a drawing from a high school geometry textbook full of intersecting lines circles squares and triangles and ask it to find the area of the second largest triangle in the upper left quadrant it will be able to do so. And if you ask what's humorous about the photograph it will be able to explain the joke to you. And it works the other way too, if you ask it to paint a picture of something, even something that doesn't exist, it will be able to provide an original painting of it that's far better than anything I could dream of painting.  How on earth can something that is just a "Language Machine" do amy of that?


> To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order.

It's no more magical than the claim that consciousness arises from 3 pounds of gray goo made of carbon hydrogen and oxygen. Are you claiming that carbon hydrogen and oxygen are sacred but silicon gallium and arsenic are not? And besides, to hell with consciousness! If computers are not conscious then that's their problem not mine; it won't affect me one way or the other if computers are conscious or not, and I could say the same thing about your alleged consciousness.  I'm far FAR more interested in if computers are intelligent or not because that most certainly does affect me.


> The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

Because both animal brains and server farms process information intelligently.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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Jason Resch

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Mar 15, 2023, 11:47:10 AMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023, 11:02 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 7:47 AM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

 > 3 and 4 are clever Language Machines.

You can input nothing but a photograph into a modern "Language Machine" (by "modern" I mean something that has been developed in the last couple of months) and ask it what is in the photograph and it will be able to tell you, or ask it what will likely happen next to the object in the photo and it will give you a good answer. It can read and understand graphs and charts and if you show it a drawing from a high school geometry textbook full of intersecting lines circles squares and triangles and ask it to find the area of the second largest triangle in the upper left quadrant it will be able to do so. And if you ask what's humorous about the photograph it will be able to explain the joke to you. And it works the other way too, if you ask it to paint a picture of something, even something that doesn't exist, it will be able to provide an original painting of it that's far better than anything I could dream of painting.  How on earth can something that is just a "Language Machine" do amy of that?

> To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order.

It's no more magical than the claim that consciousness arises from 3 pounds of gray goo made of carbon hydrogen and oxygen. Are you claiming that carbon hydrogen and oxygen are sacred but silicon gallium and arsenic are not? And besides, to hell with consciousness! If computers are not conscious then that's their problem not mine; it won't affect me one way or the other if computers are conscious or not, and I could say the same thing about your alleged consciousness.  I'm far FAR more interested in if computers are intelligent or not because that most certainly does affect me.


It might affect you. Do you plan to freeze your brain? Do you have a clause to only resuscitate to biological substrates?

Jason 



> The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

Because both animal brains and server farms process information intelligently.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
pii


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John Clark

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Mar 15, 2023, 1:47:32 PMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 11:01 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It might affect you. 

I don't think so, but because it involves consciousness I'll never be able to prove it, i'll never be able to prove anything about consciousness. But I'm confident that if something acts just like me then it will be me.  

> Do you plan to freeze your brain?

Yes, I've already paid the $80,000 bill to do so. 

 > Do you have a clause to only resuscitate to biological substrates?

No, and it would not make any difference even if I did because it would not be followed. I'm not at all sure cryonics will work at all because I'm not sure my brain really will remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures until the singularity, and even if it is I'm not at all sure anybody will think I'm worth reviving, but I think my chances are infinitely better than if my brain is burned up in a furnace or eaten by worms. If I am lucky enough to be brought back I'm certain it will be as an upload, nobody will want somebody as stupid as me (relative to the average citizen living at that time) wasting resources in the physical world.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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Jason Resch

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Mar 15, 2023, 3:06:00 PMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023, 1:47 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 11:01 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It might affect you. 

I don't think so, but because it involves consciousness I'll never be able to prove it, i'll never be able to prove anything about consciousness. But I'm confident that if something acts just like me then it will be me.  

> Do you plan to freeze your brain?

Yes, I've already paid the $80,000 bill to do so. 

 > Do you have a clause to only resuscitate to biological substrates?

No, and it would not make any difference even if I did because it would not be followed. I'm not at all sure cryonics will work at all because I'm not sure my brain really will remain at liquid nitrogen temperatures until the singularity, and even if it is I'm not at all sure anybody will think I'm worth reviving, but I think my chances are infinitely better than if my brain is burned up in a furnace or eaten by worms. If I am lucky enough to be brought back I'm certain it will be as an upload, nobody will want somebody as stupid as me (relative to the average citizen living at that time) wasting resources in the physical world.  

In that case the question of machine consciousness is not entirely irrelevant to you.

Jason 




John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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yft

pii
 




 





You can input nothing but a photograph into a modern "Language Machine" (by "modern" I mean something that has been developed in the last couple of months) and ask it what is in the photograph and it will be able to tell you, or ask it what will likely happen next to the object in the photo and it will give you a good answer. It can read and understand graphs and charts and if you show it a drawing from a high school geometry textbook full of intersecting lines circles squares and triangles and ask it to find the area of the second largest triangle in the upper left quadrant it will be able to do so. And if you ask what's humorous about the photograph it will be able to explain the joke to you. And it works the other way too, if you ask it to paint a picture of something, even something that doesn't exist, it will be able to provide an original painting of it that's far better than anything I could dream of painting.  How on earth can something that is just a "Language Machine" do amy of that?

> To the claim that via magic, a consciousness arises in silicon or gallium arsenide seems a tall order.

It's no more magical than the claim that consciousness arises from 3 pounds of gray goo made of carbon hydrogen and oxygen. Are you claiming that carbon hydrogen and oxygen are sacred but silicon gallium and arsenic are not? And besides, to hell with consciousness! If computers are not conscious then that's their problem not mine; it won't affect me one way or the other if computers are conscious or not, and I could say the same thing about your alleged consciousness.  I'm far FAR more interested in if computers are intelligent or not because that most certainly does affect me.


> The question offered up 6 weeks ago was how does the similarity to animal brains arise from a Server Farm? 

Because both animal brains and server farms process information intelligently.




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spudb...@aol.com

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Mar 15, 2023, 3:27:06 PMMar 15
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All I am saying is what are the dynamics of creating a human level mind in a server farm???

You do know that we have switched identities with this argument with you being the cybernetic believer and me being the religious atheist? I am good if somebody arrives at an explanation? The Mechanics Plese.

I bet I can get a neuroscientist to explain how meat and bone become self aware. We need the same for Le Machine!

Stumbled upon this Tweet that applies perhaps to yourself?

A woman in the Philippines spent four years praying to a green "Buddha" figure she purchased from a store, until one day a friend pointed out the Buddha figure she'd been praying to was actually Shrek. The damned thing is, it actually works!

Image
George Carlin: I believe in God, but I pray to the Sun. "“I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely day.


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From: John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Cc: te...@telmomenezes.net <te...@telmomenezes.net>
Sent: Wed, Mar 15, 2023 11:01 am
Subject: Re: The connectome and uploading

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spudb...@aol.com

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Mar 15, 2023, 3:31:03 PMMar 15
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Lets not accuse me of setting the bar, too high, Stathis. Just as Neuro-guys explan human consciousness, there is no reason why thet cannot come up with a cause and effect sketch of how Cha4 began to be conscious. 

If we don't know what, we will soon. UNLESS you hold that consciousness is a Mystery? 

You may be correct, but until research gets done, lets hold our cards.


-----Original Message-----
From: Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com>
To: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wed, Mar 15, 2023 8:47 am
Subject: Re: The connectome and uploading

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spudb...@aol.com

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Mar 15, 2023, 3:44:47 PMMar 15
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JC is theologically correct.

Why? Because any resurrection will be quantum.

The information about all things remains in the universe. How do I surmise this?

Physicist, Guilio Prisco & Science Writer, George Musser saw this. Musser's 2019 article is called Gravit's Residue.
Musser-
Back in the 1960s, Hermann Bondi, A. W. Kenneth Metzner, M. G. J. van der Burg and Rainer Sachs made the truly remarkable discovery that space–time far away from any matter has an infinite collection of symmetries known as supertranslations…”

A supertranslation, Strominger says (as reported by Musser), adds soft particles to spacetime.

“This realisation, in turn, provides a clearer picture of how a seemingly empty spacetime that is far from any gravitating bodies can retain a residue of gravity’s effects. Plop a soft particle into a vacuum and, though it adds no energy, it does contribute its angular momentum and other properties, thereby bumping the vacuum to a new version of itself. Strominger realised that if the vacuum can assume multiple forms, it will retain an almost homeopathic imprint of what passes through it.”

A project like no other, I agree! But our Machine/Human descendants will have lots of time to gather up the data. 



Me: So if you're a Christian and you have met favor in The Lords' Eyes, you come back electronical.
If Samy pleases Allah, bang! Up to Janah he goes!

Is this the only way this could happen? It's the most currently, scientific, but this cannot be the last word in astronomy, physics, and computer science.




Sent: Wed, Mar 15, 2023 1:46 pm
Subject: Re: The connectome and uploading

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John Clark

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Mar 15, 2023, 4:16:22 PMMar 15
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On Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 3:31 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Just as Neuro-guys explan human consciousness

Nonsense, the Neuro-guys are able to do no such thing and I am quite certain the electronics guys won't be able to explain consciousness either, other than by proposing the axiom that it's a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being processed intelligently. And it is now much more obvious than it was even 2 months ago that the electronics guys CAN explain intelligence.


> If we don't know what, we will soon.

Nope

> UNLESS you hold that consciousness is a Mystery? 

The trouble is even if you find out that X causes consciousness the next obvious question is what causes X. There are only 2 possibilities, an iterative chain of "what" or "how" or "why" questions either goes on forever, like a Matryoshka doll or an onion with an infinite number of layers, or it ends with a brute fact, an event without a cause.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
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Samiya Illias

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Mar 16, 2023, 3:14:52 AMMar 16
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Faṭara (فَطَرَ) 

وَقَالُوا أَإِذَا كُنَّا عِظَامًا وَرُفَاتًا أَإِنَّا لَمَبْعُوثُونَ خَلْقًا جَدِيدًا
قُلْ كُونُوا حِجَارَةً أَوْ حَدِيدًا
أَوْ خَلْقًا مِّمَّا يَكْبُرُ فِي صُدُورِكُمْ فَسَيَقُولُونَ مَن يُعِيدُنَا قُلِ الَّذِي فَطَرَكُمْ أَوَّلَ مَرَّةٍ فَسَيُنْغِضُونَ إِلَيْكَ رُءُوسَهُمْ وَيَقُولُونَ مَتَىٰ هُوَ قُلْ عَسَىٰ أَن يَكُونَ قَرِيبًا
يَوْمَ يَدْعُوكُمْ فَتَسْتَجِيبُونَ بِحَمْدِهِ وَتَظُنُّونَ إِن لَّبِثْتُمْ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا

And they say, "Is it when we are bones and crumbled particles, will we surely (be) resurrected (as) a creation new."
Say, "Be stones or iron.
Or a creation of what (is) great in your breasts." Then they will say, "Who will restore us?" Say, "He Who فَطَرَ you (the) first time." Then they will shake at you their heads and they say, "When (will) it (be)?" Say, "Perhaps that (it) will be soon."
(On) the Day He will call you and you will respond with His Praise, and you will think, not you had remained except a little (while).
[Al-Quran 17:49-52]



On 16-Mar-2023, at 12:44 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote: