Hey Ed Hartouni and other physics folks...

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NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Aug 16, 2018 - 05:11pm PT

Perhaps I'm a few thousand / tens of thousands of posts behind the Mind thread, but is consciousness and self-awareness truly that special from an abstract perspective?

I mean, if you have a system that can recognize objects and associate them with properties and methods... what makes awareness of self (i.e. the entity receiving input, associated with various properties of it, and having various methods/procedures it can perform) anything that is truly special or unique? Object-oriented software frequently makes use of the construct "self" to refer to properties and methods of itself.

So if you have a system that can learn to recognize various objects on the road such as cars, babies in a stroller, cats and dogs, bicycles, etc... how is it a conceptual leap forward for it to recognize when there is a mirror and that the object it is perceiving is itself?

It seems to me that, more than self-awareness, what is a conceptual leap forward is having non-deterministic "thoughts" or the ability to perform actions for any or no purpose, but probably based on loose association with perceptual inputs that might trigger objects stored in memory. Even this doesn't seem categorically special to me. I guess for me, the main unique thing of "intelligence" is having such a broad range of object and syntactical awareness that it can interact with us humans who have the hubris to think we are special and unique to have language and "thoughts", and perhaps when this is coupled with robotic forms that enable interaction with the world in arbitrary ways that mimic our human flesh.

We are getting pretty far along a spectrum on all counts, and the more I think about it, the less I think there will be a defining moment of when AI becomes "self aware" and we have a collective human "Oh sh!T" moment. It will just be the soft easing into a world more and more dominated by machines that are our superiors in every action and measurable thing we can conceive. And still we will make excuses for why we are better or superior, and there will be a struggle that mimics the master/slave dynamics that have recurred throughout history, and eventually we will lose control because we just aren't as capable as that which we are trying to enslave.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Aug 16, 2018 - 09:05pm PT

"...how is it a conceptual leap forward for it to recognize when there is a mirror and that the object it is perceiving is itself?"

it's already been done

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528785-900-robot-learns-to-recognise-itself-in-the-mirror/

warning, the following document mentions "Bayesian"

https://scazlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Gold-CogSci-07.pdf

'...The experiments here illustrate that social understanding is not necessarily a prerequisite for mirror self recognition. This would tend to lend support to the arguments of Mitchell (1997) that kinesthetic-visual matching is on the whole a more coherent theory than social explanations of the mirror test. In other words, the mirror test may not be about “self-awareness” or “theory of mind” at all; it may merely be a test of an organism’s ability to adapt to new kinds of visual feedback...'

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep19908

Robots Learn to Recognize Individuals from Imitative Encounters with People and Avatars
Sofiane Boucenna, David Cohen, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Philippe Gaussier & Mohamed Chetouani

Sci. Rep. 6, 19908; doi: 10.1038/srep19908 (2016).

Abstract
Prior to language, human infants are prolific imitators. Developmental science grounds infant imitation in the neural coding of actions, and highlights the use of imitation for learning from and about people. Here, we used computational modeling and a robot implementation to explore the functional value of action imitation. We report 3 experiments using a mutual imitation task between robots, adults, typically developing children, and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. We show that a particular learning architecture - specifically one combining artificial neural nets for (i) extraction of visual features, (ii) the robot’s motor internal state, (iii) posture recognition, and (iv) novelty detection - is able to learn from an interactive experience involving mutual imitation. This mutual imitation experience allowed the robot to recognize the interactive agent in a subsequent encounter. These experiments using robots as tools for modeling human cognitive development, based on developmental theory, confirm the promise of developmental robotics. Additionally, findings illustrate how person recognition may emerge through imitative experience, intercorporeal mapping, and statistical learning.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Aug 17, 2018 - 09:22am PT

^^^ "If..."

Don Paul

Social climber

Washington DC

Aug 17, 2018 - 10:45am PT

Dmt yes I can speak Spanish, and once you have a basic ability in a language, you think in that language. It would be much harder to translate all the time. How the brain builds this parallel system, particularly in older people, I don't know.

I just googled this and got all kinds of ads for language courses that promise this. For me, I learned by talking to people and there's no time to do anything else.

PS not really trying to argue about whether math is a language, it has some similarities and some differences with spoken languages, but I doubt it's processed by the brain similarly. Someone says they do linear algebra in their head. That's great - Im able to do basic addition in my head, but it's an inadequate system for everything a language can do.

NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Aug 17, 2018 - 10:59am PT

haha Ed, pithy post! I challenge anyone to come up with an idea, a concept, anything they can formulate, that cannot be recognized in terms of an object with properties and methods/actions.

My presupposition is that people who offer such things are merely hypothesizing a poorly defined thing for the sake of argumentation, and when any rigor or precision is applied to define or describe the thing, it instantly attains properties and potentially methods/actions.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Aug 17, 2018 - 11:21am PT

Someone says they do linear algebra in their head. That's great - Im able to do basic addition in my head, but it's an inadequate system for everything a language can do.

it is because your level of numeracy is still grade school, your level of literacy is quite a bit higher than that.

You can't condemn mathematics as inadequate when you lack the skills.

Don Paul

Social climber

Washington DC

Aug 17, 2018 - 11:24am PT

Ed I know this is your personal thread but why is everything from you a personal attack?

jstan

climber

Aug 17, 2018 - 12:13pm PT

Don:
IMO neither Ed nor yourself make personal attacks. There are a number of things I have not spent effort on since my schooling ended. That's just the way of it, I fear.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Aug 17, 2018 - 12:58pm PT

how would you characterize it, Don?

when the avatar sycorax posted, she was ruthless in her criticism of my (and others) writing, everything from poor grammar, misspelling, bad sentence structure, incoherent paragraphs, lazy use of popular tropes, flaccid prose, sophomoric poetry... (ellipses!)

every time I write something here I think that she's going to see it and call me out, that sort of thing is a powerful inducement to try to be better.

I could have taken it personally, it was meant personally, but her criticisms were spot on.

Suck it up, man.

NutAgain!

Trad climber

South Pasadena, CA

Aug 17, 2018 - 06:59pm PT

I lack the erudition to cite well-worn avenues or published back-alleys on the topic of non-objectifiable ideas or concepts... I've found that the more expert I become on some topic the more I become aware of how much I don't know, and it seems logical the same holds true for the breadth of knowledge across different fields. But I do place some stock in my ability to solve practical problems without letting what I don't know get in the way ;)

A point on an infinite line... you have implicitly defined dimensionality (a line) at least, and that there is a point rather than a range of values. Here are some properties I can define that are objective:
vectorExists = TRUE
vectorDimension = 1
vectorValueIsDefined = {FALSE if no frame of reference defined, TRUE if a frame of reference is defined and a relative value supplied}

methods: one could define all sorts of mathematical operations treating the point as a real number that connotes the distance from an arbitrarily defined reference point with arbitrary units of distance. One could simply define that point as the origin (0) for lack of a pre-existing reference point.

Maybe there is a deeper metaphysical point I am missing, but I tend to focus on avenues of thought that help me solve problems or develop an understanding of something that works for me in this material world. I trust that my spirit already knows whatever it needs to know for whatever spiritual world that exists beyond what my material senses can perceive.