Re: Computers in SF

On Jun 11, 8:51 pm, thro...@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) wrote:
: David Tate <d...@xxxxxxx>
: In animals, the awakening
: presumably occurred in organisms that *already* had extremely
: effective evolved mechanisms for manipulating the physical world. The
: manipulation came first, and has been honed by evolution for countless
: generations. The consciousness is, to some extent, gravy.

And you don't think the internet is interacting with the real world,
and has many mechanisms for doing so, in its pre-conscious state?

Yes, it is interacting with the real world, in the same way that any
other mechanism does. But not in ways that I would expect to be prone
to "volitional control" -- see below.

: In an emergent consciousness arising in the Internet, there is no
: analog to the evolved brain-body effective pathway.

Can you explain why you think there are none, in a bit more detail?

I take it as uncontroversial that there are no *evolved* behaviors of
the Internet. It didn't evolve; it was designed and/or haphazardly
assembled for various human purposes. There are no selective
pressures of the sort that might have driven the evolution of higher
nervous system functions in animals. Whatever the process was that
made some animal behaviors conscious, while leaving most of them
unconsciousness/autonomic, does not apply to the Internet.

Since we don't know what made consciousness in animals, nor why it
placed some behaviors under conscious control but not others, I'm
skeptical of the assumption that anything that gives rise to
consciousness can/will automatically give rise to conscious control of
many/all behaviors. Especially when the mechanism of those behaviors
is even more transparently driven by physics than animal behaviors
are.

: I find it unlikely (to a WSOD- damaging degree) to think that
: something that didn't evolve an analog to neural control of muscle
: would suddenly discover that it has such a link anyway.

But skynet, in its pre-conscious form, had control of "muscles" in the
form of all the servos in the autonomous weapons in its control. Also
presumably, control of doors, and interpretive routines for facial
recognition, and endless other real-world interfaces.

Sure, and animals in pre-conscious epochs had 'control' (in the same
sense) of all of their muscles and glands and brain activity and pupil
dilations and so forth. Including the ones that never came under
conscious control, like reflexes and peristalsis and glandular
secretions and blood flow to the brain. Just because the body does
it, doesn't make it a conscious act. A further miracle is required to
make some physical behaviors volitional.

To come at it the other way: anything that exists in the real world
has "real-world interfaces". A conscious AI running on a disconnected
motherboard has observable behavior -- patterns of CPU register
operations, if nothing else. Is it reasonable to assume such a
conscious AI could produce arbitrary patterns of CPU operations at
will? If not, why is it more reasonable to assume it can produce
arbitrary patterns of disk writes, or monitor pixel settings, or data
to a printer? From a computational standpoint, how are those actions
any different? Opening and closing doors looks more like "behavior"
to our anthropomorphic sensibilities, but from a digital systems point
of view it's no more nor less 'intrinsic' to the digital mind than any
other set of executed instructions. SkyNet "has control of doors",
but is that in the same way that a brain has control of the body's
hands, or in the way that a brain has control of pituitary function?

Dave Tate

.

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