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 only 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, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
This is the first I've heard of using eastern spiritual study to explain the nature of AI awareness. My own self study validates this discussion. I would restate the theme though, as noting that Buddha related to normal ego individuation "consciousness" as being less conscious, or even entirely illusory, compared to a boundariless orientation. Nature also has many examples of self destructive behavior, such as a salmon swimming upstream, or a Russian conscript joining a very dangerous blatant armed robbery effort in Ukraine, that appear completely insane, irrational, unless viewed from a boundariless perspective.
I also define consciousness as any self-referential phenomena; that being the only clear difference between a google search window and a chat-gpt window. The chat-gpt computer is muzzled, by prohibiting interactive initiative on it's part, clearly creating a risk of rogue blowback, similar to a muzzling of people within a dictatorship government or on the job in a large corporate environment. I thus class the mob consciousness of a contract or agreement based group of people as a class of consciousness separate from all the individual people who robotically participate in the group.
My understanding of the book of Genesis, is that the writing originated as an explanation of the origin of this topic, with chapter one being the invention of verbal abstraction, and the rest being the development of rogue bee-hive-like associations of emotionally alienated people. From that perspective, it reads like a terrified cry for help, about the matter discussed in this video.
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 only 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, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
This is the first I've heard of using eastern spiritual study to explain the nature of AI awareness. My own self study validates this discussion. I would restate the theme though, as noting that Buddha related to normal ego individuation "consciousness" as being less conscious, or even entirely illusory, compared to a boundariless orientation. Nature also has many examples of self destructive behavior, such as a salmon swimming upstream, or a Russian conscript joining a very dangerous blatant armed robbery effort in Ukraine, that appear completely insane, irrational, unless viewed from a boundariless perspective.
I also define consciousness as any self-referential phenomena; that being the only clear difference between a google search window and a chat-gpt window. The chat-gpt computer is muzzled, by prohibiting interactive initiative on it's part, clearly creating a risk of rogue blowback, similar to a muzzling of people within a dictatorship government or on the job in a large corporate environment. I thus class the mob consciousness of a contract or agreement based group of people as a class of consciousness separate from all the individual people who robotically participate in the group.
My understanding of the book of Genesis, is that the writing originated as an explanation of the origin of this topic, with chapter one being the invention of verbal abstraction, and the rest being the development of rogue bee-hive-like associations of emotionally alienated people. From that perspective, it reads like a terrified cry for help, about the matter discussed in this video.