It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
This plays well with my description of consciousness as a composition of lower level brain activity, in which we learned over the course of evolution to build higher order patterns from the various rythms in neural substructures and we do this with guided attention: We use our ability to compose the patterns of higher level brain activity to attend to whatever we bring into our conscious focus.
I agree that *if* any form of consciousness can arise from complex algorithms, it has to develop lower level functions first.
And: Gary Marcus is known for critisizing current Deep Learning because its unreliable and the good outputs are mostly cherrypicked. I think he's right in doing so, and if only because we already use these machines in real world products where they are able to da real world harm.
But also: What if these unreliable machine outputs are similar to our own chaotic and absolutely unreliable brain activity? When I look at what my brain does, I see a lot of noise, chaos and weird stuff popping up, constantly. This is normal, this is how the brain works, it throws out all kinds of stuff and we cherrypick and choose, what we attend to and what we speak out loud. Machine output at the moment is like watching an unfiltered human brain, including glitches and artifacts that are, well, normal for normal neural activity.
Saying that current neural networks are similar to biological neural processes is nonsense, but the unreliable output for me is no indicator for a defunct principle.
Great philosophical analysis, Man - Our human problem of missing definitions kills many insights - what is reality e.g.? We still haven't defined clearly and can't tell if there is one 'objective' beyond our perception. How could we even tell real intelligence if it's not well-defined? Same for soul, god, etc.etc...
Ron Thal fasste das schon zu meinen Blogtagen ganz gut zusammen, noch weit vor der Realitätshinterfragung und -verwirbelung durch Hirnschaden und künstliches Koma(in dem Zustand ist es keie gute Idee "The walking dead" zu gucken, sag ich Dir Realität ist echt dünn definiert) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWGKzgUCNzs
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Thanks for the link and summary.
This plays well with my description of consciousness as a composition of lower level brain activity, in which we learned over the course of evolution to build higher order patterns from the various rythms in neural substructures and we do this with guided attention: We use our ability to compose the patterns of higher level brain activity to attend to whatever we bring into our conscious focus.
I agree that *if* any form of consciousness can arise from complex algorithms, it has to develop lower level functions first.
And: Gary Marcus is known for critisizing current Deep Learning because its unreliable and the good outputs are mostly cherrypicked. I think he's right in doing so, and if only because we already use these machines in real world products where they are able to da real world harm.
But also: What if these unreliable machine outputs are similar to our own chaotic and absolutely unreliable brain activity? When I look at what my brain does, I see a lot of noise, chaos and weird stuff popping up, constantly. This is normal, this is how the brain works, it throws out all kinds of stuff and we cherrypick and choose, what we attend to and what we speak out loud. Machine output at the moment is like watching an unfiltered human brain, including glitches and artifacts that are, well, normal for normal neural activity.
Saying that current neural networks are similar to biological neural processes is nonsense, but the unreliable output for me is no indicator for a defunct principle.
Great philosophical analysis, Man - Our human problem of missing definitions kills many insights - what is reality e.g.? We still haven't defined clearly and can't tell if there is one 'objective' beyond our perception. How could we even tell real intelligence if it's not well-defined? Same for soul, god, etc.etc...
I mean, at least we know that we can't really perceive level0-reality and that knowledge of nothing is not nothing, so to speak ;)
Ron Thal fasste das schon zu meinen Blogtagen ganz gut zusammen, noch weit vor der Realitätshinterfragung und -verwirbelung durch Hirnschaden und künstliches Koma(in dem Zustand ist es keie gute Idee "The walking dead" zu gucken, sag ich Dir Realität ist echt dünn definiert) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWGKzgUCNzs