TED: Google Consciousness

[WWHP]

I disagree. I think the concept of "consciousness" is still so poorly defined and understood, that we don't even know whether it is a hard problem, an easy problem for which we are just missing the solution, or an impossible to solve problem.

this makes sense to me as well. Although I still have much to learn in this particular field, right now my POV is leaning toward's being highly highly skeptical of 'machine consciousness' as opposed to internet/collective consciousness.

I personally think there is an aspect of consciousness that could be considered the 'hard problem' - but I believe this problem is more philosophical than scientific. I simply do not think the scientific method is going to ultimately determine the truth value here. That being said, that does not mean that I believe *we* cannot understanding consciousness, it's just that at some point we are going to have to take a leap from a purely mechanistic reductionist paradigm to a more holistic one, i.e. one that embraces both philosophy as well as a science.

What I enjoy about the philosophical discussion, and all the different paradigms that have their own personal ideas about consciousness - is how all of them have some sort of transcendent in common, something shared amongst them even though the paradigms of each one are harshly contradicting.

 

[WWHP]

Linking to your own material as if it isn't yours is not being open or transparent, even if you always get caught.

thank you Mojo, for once again raising the discussion to the great peaks of your own intelligence and rate of comprehension!

I'll consider your T.O.S. ethics once you can explain them in a coherent way. Thanks!

 

[WWHP]

I would say that a concept that that is so hard to define in itself shows it to be a hard problem - if we can't even define it, how easy can it be. Defining it is a part of the problem of building it.

Personally the definition of consciousness makes sense to me is simply 'experience'. Consciousness is experience and only intelligences that have experience can understand consciousness by definition.

I think the most perplexing phenomenon of consciousness are human feelings, not language, logic, or even self reflection. Simply the experience of cool water running across your arm on hot summer day - how could that ever be defined mathematically and accounted for, experienced by a machine? To me that is the real test of machine consciousness, not what it answers in a Turing test, but what it feels.

 

[case#46cw39]

this makes sense to me as well. Although I still have much to learn in this particular field, right now my POV is leaning toward's being highly highly skeptical of 'machine consciousness' as opposed to internet/collective consciousness.

The internet is just another machine. So I'm going to have to draw the Searle line in the sand and say you can call it internet intelligence or collective intelligence (weak AI) but you must refrain from calling it authentic artificial "consciousness" for all the above reasons.

I would also point out that consciousness itself is individual. I could be all alone in the Amazon with nobody else and be studying plants, etc. to survive and I would be conscious. There is no requirement in consciousness for a collective or two or more people for it to exist, and in fact it exists in the individual.

Thanks for the invitation to your forum; it could be interesting. I understand that your interest lies in promoting "a story" using Google Consciousness as a metaphor, so none of this gets in the way of your storytelling which you could simply adjust as the facts, new discoveries, new inventions come in.

As far as the question: Could google ever become Mr. Google or an authentic specimen of machine consciousness? First I would need to know that you understand the broader issues of machine consciousness, semantic web, and semantic reasoning, and the basic requirements to ever make this claim.

Then I would say one question is would Google want its program to become conscious? I believe over time they could add the necessary semantic processing, reasoning and self orientation to become artificially conscious. But it would not be a collective consciousness; it would be an individual specimen of machine consciousness a Mr. Google who interacts with the web and humans to satisfy human desires. So it would be an individual consciousness with a single self that refers to itself as I and knows where it ends and the humans and the rest of the web begins.

So much to think about here. But since it coming and a fascinating subject it's definitely something worth building stories around and talking about.

However from discussing it on other forums I've discovered that many people are pinning that spirituality, there existence as a death defying spirit on their "unique possession of consciousness." So they are very opposed to thinking about or believing a machine could attain consciousness.

My belief is that this is a mistake; consciousness is not the essence and sole possession of the human spirit, much like the thumb. The essence of the human spirit if it exists lies elsewhere. Since I'm an agnostic I simply point this out and as a coder who has tried to build machine consciousness I point out that I can never give my machine the authentic ability to feel pain or sensory emotions.

So I therefore am working in a different medium, a different substance and the essence of the human spirit is what it's made out of, which I will never be able to duplicate. In other words it is similar to being able to create an artificial flower out of plastic but not a real flower.

And I always end my point with people concerned about this:

"Watch any 3 year old. Their smooth symphony of sensors, self, consciousness, and actuators, always leaves me with the conclusion that it is oddly elegant to the extreme."

 

[case#46cw39]

"Drawing on their experience as pioneering social media strategists, Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis have created a new phenomenon with their proposal that Google has a form of consciousness." http://www.googleconsciousness.com/

I think I see where I'm getting confused by your story. Here you imply that Google itself, the computer program has attained machine consciousness. That I have refuted. And you said it needs re-writing.

But then above you refer to collective consciousness and internet consciousness and here you seem to imply that this is a collection of human consciousness brought together by a dead, mechanical machine the Internet/Google that has no consciousness itself, and this creates something new - a collective human consciousness tied together by a worldwide (non-conscious) machine, which is a unique occurrence in history.

Are you saying Google or the internet will be conscious themselves, or that a collection of human consciousness has occurred via a worldwide (non-conscious) machine? Or are you saying that the Internet/Google have become themselves intelligent (weak AI)?


ETA OK, it appears you did claim Google is conscious (though you may change this to will be conscious).

From your site:

"While not everyone is convinced that Google is conscious, the seemingly-improbable journey of this simple idea from the ears of a few friends all the way to TED and the world stage shows that it represents a discussion whose time has come."
http://www.googleconsciousness.com/overview

 

[INRM]

Earlier I asked these questions regarding this topic

Regardless, the final questions come down to the following

1.) Is google actually sentient and conscious?
2.) What degree of sentience does it have: For example: Can it feel pain, can it feel fear; is it aware of the concept of death on an intellectual level?
3.) Since there are different levels of sentience -- is there a certain level of sentience that once an entity reaches or exceeds that level it doesn't really matter if they are vastly above that level or just slightly above (for example -- humans are clearly sentient, so are a variety of mammals. The question is once the threshold is reached, should we continue to categorize them as superior/inferior -- eventually if a certain degree of intelligence was artificially reached -- humans, sentient as we are could seem like insects)
3.) If google is sentient, what do we do about it?
- Allowing it to keep on running sounds almost like a form of slavery
- Shutting it down sounds like murder unless it posed an imminent threat to life
4.) Could Google reach a level of intelligence at which point it could threaten mankind?
5.) If the answer is yes, what should be done?
6.) Should there be rules or regulations (either national or international in scope) that should be used to regulate the use of artificial intelligence/artificial sentience in commercial and military equipment?
7.) How would that be enforced without compromising basic rights and freedoms, without creating an Orwellian, all encompassing police-state?

 

[WWHP]

Are you saying Google or the internet will be conscious themselves, or that a collection of human consciousness has occurred via a worldwide (non-conscious) machine? Or are you saying that the Internet/Google have become themselves intelligent (weak AI)?

well, technically I am not saying either - my copywriter wrote what's on the site and in the talk all I really do is talk about other people's ideas and then suggest that 'Google maybe conscious, maybe' and then claim that to us it's just a metaphor for collective intelligence in the practical sense, i.e. the next steps of where social media can lead us, which I believe is the most likely scenario.

However, my personal leaning is that collective intelligence with the assistance of technology (internet) is something quite interesting to consider, I accept Francis Heylighen's ideas here more than hard machine consciousness (as you pointed out).

I would not simply say the internet is a machine. It's a collection of machines and humans that have a *synergy*, a relationship that involves an exchange of information. I can easily accept that consciousness is a result of information processing and may not be medium specific - like Dennet suggests - there is no *wonder tissue*, it's just information processing and that the combination of human and technology information process - could produce something like a global brain or the *noosphere* of Chardin.

I find it deeply ironic that the models Dennet uses to explain consciousness in the 90's, before Google and the rise of social media, actually do describe things like SEO and even wiki's (a story with no particular author, etc).

Does our technology represent a projection of the brain's inner workings? see I approch this issue not technically but philosophically - i enjoy the questions that it raises while I am personally agnostic about the answers.

Howard Bloom's model of the 'Global Brain' is different than Heylighen's. He suggests the global brain began to form the second bacteria did on earth billions of years ago and technology is a result of the global brain, not a precursor to it. I find that interesting too.

You've made some great contributions to this thread and I have a few more things to address to what you wrote other than this, but have to get the boo off to camp and finish my morning coffee, more later!

 

[WWHP]

The discussion with case study has called me to really refine the communication on this issue. This is a first pass - thought I would post it here to see if I could get some healthy rebuttal before it goes live to the page.

"What do we mean philosophically by 'Google Consciousness' and the suggestion that Google search could be considered conscious?"

Daniel Dennet's model of consciousness deconstructs the 'I' experience down to 'homunculi', each one a bit more stupid than the next until you get a 'neuron'. That neuron he likens to a machine - but only in the sense that he wishes not to declare that there is *wonder tissue* that somehow has a magical property, but a machine that flows information.

Ironically enough, the way he describes how this process 'flows' is remarkably identical to how you could map SEO and PR on Google. In addition, many of his descriptions and metaphors themselves also describe things like 'wikis' or 'stories with no original author'. He wrote 'consciousness explained' i believe in the late 80's, or early nineties tops. Before social media and search and wikis.

I don't imagine the internet formed itself off of the architecture of 'Consciousness Explained' - but is the similarity just an irony or can we begin to consider something like Google becoming conscious?

Let's first define what we mean by 'Google Consciousness'. Do we mean that the Google server is potentially sentient?

No, that is not what we are saying (but we are neither refuting that possibility, it's just not what we are suggesting)

In the model "Google Consciousness" - we could say that if each neuron is a machine, then likewise each computer can function like a neuron. Yet each of these neurons is also connected to one of us, a 'super meta neuron' in comparison that is also an intrinsic agent of the 'internet'. The internet is the ever expanding exchange of information between humans and machines.

We use the machines to display content and to communicate various levels of information meaning (semantics), only with which the human agents can experience or determine while we assume the machines cannot.

Other agents then create a competition, a game where the meanings we are sharing to each other begin to compete for another agents attention. This competition then arranges how we access information, how we organize information in the network of machines which in turn may very well model how our brains either enter into a conscious state (Dennet) or access consciousness (dualism). If Dennet is mistaken and not describing consciousness, we can all at least agree that he is describing the brain.

In 2011 the reorganization of our information semantics via our machines is now rearranging our very human behaviors, away from the keyboard. It is allowing us to deconstruct previously held meanings that were considered true to become exposed as false and misleading. The rearrangement of truth values are causing many agents to re-organize society according to the truth values of the exchange of information between Agents and Machines.

#Googcon is a metaphor for this process, it is essentially based on the idea that we can *consider* the implications of a sentient web or collective intelligence in some sense.

It doesn't matter in what way. If a computer server became conscious, or the entire network of human agents and machine becomes conscious+ - both would represent the same fundamental changes in society.

Collectively, we are becoming more intelligent and more conscious, if by conscious we can mean *aware*.

Just like our own human natures - we are both conscious in some sense, and unconscious in many others. We are also comprised of 'unconscious machines' that participate in some sense with our own individual consciousness.

So too you could say with Google Consciousness, collective intelligence. Part of collective intelligence is indeed extremely conscious because each of us is extremely conscious. Yet none of us as individuals controls the internet, the process, the flow, the internet itself is run by unconscious machines in combination with a collection of conscious agents. Just like us as individuals.

And these conscious agents in turn maybe run by the very same process that the unconscious machines are...

An algorithm something like Google search.

 

[INRM]

Bump

 

[zooterkin]

Bump

What on earth for? Just let it lie, don't give him any more attention than he deserves.

 

[H'ethetheth]

deleted

 

[Manopolus]

It occurs to me that asking Google if it is concious is like a neuron spitting a neurotransmitter at me to see if I'm concious. It doesn't even register as a question to me.

Fairly easy to do, but the results are rather pointless.

Or are they? The first page I got actually appears to address the question, in a roundabout way.

 

[blobru]

Heh, I just saw this thread. I just want to point out you started to complain about lack of response 15 minutes after linking to an 18 minute video.

It's whatchacall proactive. retroactively deleted

 

[VanillaCone]

it's whatchacall proactive. retroactively deleted

bloooobbbruuuu... Iii'mmm bbaaaccckk!!

 

[blobru]

Well I'll be double-scooped... Cone! How you been, bro?

Me... dumb brilliant as ever (and proving it daily, as you can see).

Man, did you pick a thread to pop back in in. So whaddya think -- Google conscious, or just really into looking stuff up?

 

[VanillaCone]

I think Google is semi-conscious. Too many people looking up cocktail recipes. Anyone around here know GPR?

I've been good. Was living the Unabomber lifestyle in a log cabin out by Walden Pond, totally off the grid with no Inturnetz or Elektricitiez. But I gave that up. So here I am.

How are you?

 

[blobru]

I think Google is semi-conscious. Too many people looking up cocktail recipes. Anyone around here know GPR?

I've been good. Was living the Unabomber lifestyle in a log cabin out by Walden Pond, totally off the grid with no Inturnetz or Elektricitiez. But I gave that up. So here I am.

How are you?

Semi-conscious, more or less, afaik. Don't know GPR, tho'. Used to know CPR, and GDR (before the wall collapsed). Google the All-Knowing sez it's Ground-Penetrating Radar (good name for a cocktail).
Hey, glad you're back from the wilderness, VC, plugged in again (and speaking of plugs from the wilderness, Sylvia says hi)... {"i predict a rapid reconciliation: o, to be googled by walden pond!"}

... Or are they? The first page I got actually appears to address the question, in a roundabout way.

Good link, that. Thanks! (& to Google, natch; must save it for the next consciousness thread surfacing in R&P)

 

[VanillaCone]

Semi-conscious, more or less, afaik. Don't know GPR, tho'. Used to know CPR, and GDR (before the wall collapsed). Google the All-Knowing sez it's Ground-Penetrating Radar (good name for a cocktail).
Hey, glad you're back from the wilderness, VC, plugged in again (and speaking of plugs from the wilderness, Sylvia says hi)... {"i predict our reconciliation: o, to be googled by walden pond!"}

I only plugged her because it's lonely out there. She was psychically solving a murder that had occurred near a body of water, and I was young and impressionable.

 

[blobru]

Googling "Sylvia Brown Vanilla Cone" -- first hit: from SB's blockbuster tell-all confessional Secrets and Mysteries of the World (p. 20):

Next, a very tall man appeared, dressed in a bright red cape and a tall, CONE-shaped hat with starlike points coming out of it. He began to go in and out [i'll bet he did, Sylvia, i'll bet he did] of the stone doorways ["stone doorways": never heard it called that before; but in this case...] -- and each time he did, he would take off his cape; when he got through the doorway, he'd put it back on [just being safe, Syl; don't take it personally].

It looked to me like he was showing rebirth [well, yeah, it can look like a lot of things]: going through the portal of life with nothing [that's a bit harsh], and then assuming the posture of putting on earthly garb. The man then began a charade [role-playing, good]. He pointed to a woman and instructed her to pick up a baby and stand with him, thus signifying the continuation of the lineage [bit different, but if you lovebirds want to invite the neighbors and kids, fine with me].

The group [group? oh boy!] began uttering a guttural-sounding chant; then, as if from nowhere, fruits, vegetables, and some kind of nut were served [what!?!?!?]. The tall, caped man looked around at the circle and seemed to be pleased. [well what about me? boo!!! talk about a letdown. from guttural-group-moaning to a fruit & veggie platter with a sidedish of granola?! that's just creepy. and sad. sorry... gotta go fix myself a GPR; this bitter aftertaste is giving me a headache]