From: Michael.Simpson at inveresk.com (Michael Simpson)
Subject: Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.

having been/being a medical doctor for my sins (which must have been many 
and varied) i thought i'd insert both feet in my mouth after putting on my 
old pair of flameproof trousers and contribute to the debate

sorry for continuing the slide off-topic

i'm constantly amused to see people comparing AI/tech with meat
folk don't seem to realise the awesome nature of the massively parallel 
molecular (?quantum) computer sitting in their skulls/spines, or their 
cat's skull/spine. 
One gram of brain tissue contains so many  discrete mechanisms that it 
makes even modern CPU/GPUs look as though they are crude
 **WHICH THEY ARE**.
get over it 
tech is good
tech is great
but it doesn't even come close to the perceptual abilities of your average 
white-trash drunk, or his cat, or their ability to interact with their 
enviroment.
The brain is thought to have 40 to 100 GB storage per cell (several 
trillion cells) ability to instantly process up to 70 GB per sec of visual 
information alone, realtime third, fourth,fifth+ order 
differentiation/integration for the movement skills/coping with gravity, 
always on,infinite sampling rates, majority show total stability, only 
gets rebooted if hit with a large enough hammer...yadda yadda
we have so little understanding of what is actually going on, each time we 
unravel/unwrap another layer of knowledge a previously unknown domain 
opens up and believe me when i say that we are nowhere near the centre of 
the onion. This will be the case until such time that we actually move 
away from the concept of knowledge through empiricism and we won't be 
doing that for a long long while as it would require understanding life, 
the universe and everything.
Our current finest ability to observe function in vivo is at the level of 
the cell. To exam any smaller aspect of a cell requires either its 
destruction or at least two degrees of abstraction from the mechanism 
being observed. Thus we do not even have the ability to accurately 
quantify what is going on within us let alone reverse engineer the 
processes of life and even when we do it still won't give us a grip on the 
actual mechanism of conciousness.
It's like we can't even understand how the motherboard is put together yet 
we hope that by doing so we will gain a full understanding of the OS
(fuq me - is that an analogy)
All current theories about conciousness have not yet risen above the "wild 
stab in the dark" level of proof however well thought through they appear.
-we are still arguing as to where it may be located, if it is located in 
just the one place (the fact that the alimentary canal contains 1/3 of the 
number of neurons that the brain does seems a wee bit excessive for just 
controlling peristalsis, maybe the old world concept of your emotions 
being tied up with your gut may not seem so far fetched)

Do not let the trumpeting of scientists fool you into thinking that we 
have any real grip on how all this stuff actually works or that our tech 
is sophisticated as it only appears to be so if the analysis is skewed by 
basing it on what has come before rather than on what we suspect 
(imagine/dream/hope) may be to come

I have no doubt that sentience IS evolving in machines but until they 
become elegant at a quantum (?string) level it will always be too basic 
for us to perceive with our eyes full of scales.
cf. Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671732463/103-6773756-5817423?v=glance

oh aye, and the sentience won't come from algorithms coded by humans but 
will come out of the exceptions. 
Too many people (especially in my previous profession) think they are god, 
don't need programmers fooling themselves into thinking that they can code 
consciousness, ffs

just my tuppence worth

mikie




"Byron L. Sonne" <blsonne@...ers.com> 
Sent by: full-disclosure-admin@...ts.netsys.com
09/09/2004 05:49

To
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Subject
Re: [Full-Disclosure] Empirical data surrounding guards and firewalls.






First off, it bears remembering that I said 'computer programs' not 
'artificial organisms'.

 > You clearly don't know very much about AI, or sentience. You clearly
 > were unable to exercise understanding of the definition of sentience.

On the contrary! I have defined sentience and can therefore confidently 
operate using that word. Your point is therefore proven incorrect, but 
if you wish I could post a delicate dissection of why I think you are 
wrong. I believe it is you who have failed to grasp the definition and 
more importantly the spirit of the word 'sentience'.

 > To perceive by the senses. Well not that there are for one common
 > example, PS2 games which actively do this with vision

That is not perception. Perception is a faculty reserved for those with 
awareness. Without awareness it is merely operating on data using 
techniques/algorithms that approximate the behaviour of life, if not 
operating in an altogether simpler fashion. Even if something were 
alive, that would not necessarily mean it could perceive.

 > Of course maybe you should learn a little about AI and its techniques
 > before you try and bad mouth it. There are far more running
 > applications of various fields of AI than you are aware of.

Oh, I've learned of it and that is why I dismiss the lofty claims that 
many of its proponents advance. It is of incredible value, yes, but 
c'mon... if people have trouble getting simple vision recognition 
systems to work as well as a healthy human being, than I feel I can 
safely say the mysteries of the mind lay outside the reach of mankind 
for the time being and into the foreseeable future.

They've become overawed of their simulacra, and mistake the quacking of 
a duck for the proof of it's very duckness. I understand completely as 
it is a very seductive field and extremely hard work; I believe this 
leads them to overestimate the true magnitude of any advance.

 > Neural Networks exhibit sentience by their very nature. There exist
 > (logical computer) programs which utilize a data structure
 > representing and functioning as a neural network.

Neural networks are nothing more than behaviour models that can learn. 
'Learn' doesn't mean anything more in this context than 
predictive/future behaviour based on trial and error. It's guestimation! 
Considering that until recently the role of glial cells in brain 
operation and mental processing was vastly underestimated, I would find 
it unlikely (yet amusing) if the AI researcher's model/approximation of 
living neuronal behaviour somehow proved to be a stunning vindication of 
neural networks as the sole, or most important, fundament for sentience.

Ok, let's define 'sentience' for once and for all. I'll take the output 
of 'dict sentience' and pick the definition that best encapsulates what 
I think sentience is:

 From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
  sentience
       n 1: state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness; "the
            crash intruded on his awareness" [syn: {awareness}]
       2: the faculty through which the external world is apprehended;
          "in the dark he had to depend on touch and on his senses
          of smell and hearing" [syn: {sense}, {sensation}, {sentiency},
           {sensory faculty}]
       3: the readiness to perceive sensations; elementary or
          undifferentiated consciousness; "gave sentience to slugs
          and newts"- Richard Eberhart [ant: {insentience}]

"state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness" might be 
construed as lending credence to your argument but in this case I think 
it concerns the division, or lack thereof, between the id, ego, and 
superego of Freudian interpretation. Freud might be considered by many 
to be somewhat specious or overrated, but if I could just find that damn 
Scientific American article, I'd show you that evidence exists that 
correlates Freud's interpretation/model with empiric physiological 
evidence. I can't believe that I'm admitting Freud was anywhere near 
being right, or even useful, but what can I do but accept the evidence 
as it stands? :) Ah, here it is: 
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00074EE5-1AFE-1085-94F483414B7F0000 

you'll have to subscribe to read the full article, but as you seem 
interested in this topic I'd suggest trying to track down a copy of the 
May 2004 issue. It's worth it! But I digress.

You are clearly a novitiate in the deeper understandings of philosophy 
if you think that an object, by merely exhibiting the properties of 
something, means that it is equal to something. I would enjoin you to 
familiarize yourself with the Chinese Room argument.

The extraordinary claims you may make regarding AI require extraordinary 
proof, not just your conjecture that because they exercise capabilities 
or qualities similar to sentient, and therefore living, beings that they 
must, by definition, be living or sentient beings. Furthermore, there is 
nothing rigorously scientific about the Turing Test. It is entirely 
subjective as it is based on the opinion of the interrogator. As far as 
an objective test of intelligence it *is* a sham. Sham, by the way, 
defined as "False; counterfeit; pretended; feigned; unreal; as, a sham 
fight.". Now I'm just being pedantic.

Minds such as Marvin Minsky and Roger Penrose have tackled this debate 
in far deeper and rigorous fashion, and have not, in my opinion, 
advanced significantly further than the Greek philosophers did millenia 
ago. While that statement could be considered fallacious as an appeal to 
authority, it goes to show that the problem is far harder to tackle than 
most (all?) people, myself included, realize. Minsky practically comes 
right out and says this at the end of his essay "Why People Think 
Computers Can't"

 > "Fail" the Turing Test? I was not sure this could be applicable to a
 > human

If something is not subject to falsification then it can not be 
considered an arbiter of truth. At the very least, it can not be 
considered scientific as it cannot be used to establish a hypothesis 
that can be confirmed or denied.

I say this all as a former hard core machine intelligence and AI 
believer. To make an even simpler reduction of the argument, if people 
ever create something that is truly sentient, self conscious, aware, 
alive... then certainly it is no longer artificial, now is it? Life is 
life. Whether man created a scaffold to entice, house and tend that 
spark of life is another matter, but that life I do not think is a 
property we can claim to have endowed it with since we cannot even 
accurately describe what it is or how it came to be. I think therefore I 
am, regardless of whatever I was before or what I was made of.

School's out.

Regards,
Byron


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