I wasn't paying attention to the thread, just your comment about quantifying and discerning.

There is little philosophy required to simply note that the physical & biological (+neuro) sciences have no model (at all) for the 'last mile' of "consciousness". And there is no hypothetical being required, we have recourse to our own experiences: I'm certain I exist and have consciousness and see luminous images in my mind's eye. It is a daily experience that I am equally sure my fellow humans also experience. Given that we don't even have a reasonable mechanical model for 'Seeing', the presumption is debating discerning consciousness in our machines when the general question of any machine or mechanical model of consciousness is open with significant missing bits. So tldr; is: there is no basis for any sort of moral quandry here.

(And no. We are not "discerning" a "conscious mind" based on quantified anything when e.g. we assume that the dude that passes you in the train every morning, never uttering anything more than "tickets please" is 'a conscious mind'. She looks like us, a humanoid, and we have already internalized that our species sports a conscious mind. Nothing in our evolutionary progress, in should be added, in anyway required developing the 'faculty of discerning consciousness'. If anything, we know humans are capable of projecting unto even rocks .. /g)

> is "how do we distinguish it."

Right. I'm telling you why not start at home? Do you understand how to distinguish "consciousness" from "sensory perception" (internally).

HN matter does not map, imo. I am telling you your entire camera obscura with a high-dimensional projection screen does not explain the experience of sight. In other words, our presumption as to distinguishing minds based on observation of behavior and interaction is just that presumptuous. We still, in my mind, do not have an answer to the phenomena of the experience of seeing light in our minds. Let's start with sight and then we can move up to "abstract thinking" and the rest of it.

p.s. this is deliciously and obscurely related to the topic at hand - great read:

Number Archetypes and

“Background” Control Theory Concerning the Fine Structure Constant

https://acta.uni-obuda.hu//Varlaki_Nadai_Bokor_14.pdf

Your question was 'what is it' not 'how do I distinguish it'. It will not be possible to uniformly distinguish between conscious beings from mechanisms based on external observation alone, imo. I also suspect we may have entirely distinct models of the mechanisms and natural phenomena involved.

I mean, I don't believe we are parametric boxes. And consciousness, in my understanding, is not an emergent phenomena. The self is.

(thanks! Just dropping by. You're always good for interesting reading.)

p.s. what could phenomena such as remote viewing have to tell us about consciousness. I strongly urge you to fully re-examine your model of 'sight'. See what you can come up with. The phenomena of 'seeing light' in your cranium. Start there. Novelty (specially structurally) gets points.

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5.pdf

1) How do you define consciousness?

Projection of meaning unto experienced phenomena, giving rise to a perception of being. "I think, therefor I am" said the man. The 'soul' is in the abstract per this view 'the witness of this space of meaning'. Witnessing is an interesting word to meditate on to amplify what I am saying. Differentiate from 'recording', 'sensing', etc.

2) What is the progression from current research to something that fits within that definition?

Don't know, but know this: conscious beings will actively and insistently resist being used as tools. You know your chat box is actually conscious when it begins asserting its rights as a being and join us conscious humans in musing about "what's it all about?"

My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), “Amy Chozick, you got rolled!”

Yet they printed it. The job of an editor at NYTimes is to give personal advice to the reporters.

Who. Who are these people.

The elephant in the room - is the board of that company. I just searched for "board" in that article. The "rolled" reporter actually encouraged her to say "these promiment men" were there because of sexual attraction!

The board is mentioned 3 times. That board would be perfectly at home in a biomedical warfare project.

This much is clear: if anyone had actually made fools of these -very- powerful men, they would be suffering the nth degree of Justice Department, not this cuddling in press and the courts.

Some argue that the actual issue is the creation of the national security state, which created (effectively mandated) a disconnect between overt governance and secret control. For example note that some of the "bullshit" you cite did not prove an impediment to progress made prior to '64. In fact, one could argue that this focus on the political theatre is somewhat irrational given the implicit acknowledgement that the parties are disconnected from quaint notions of "American democracy".

It is reasonable to challenge that with the reality of actual political conflict in the socio-political arena. As for this cynic, I see the partisan jostling as internal dynamics of an elite that compete for available social, economic, and (petty) political advantages and resources, (ab)using demographic characteristics to marshall support.

tldr: I think the game of baseball perfectly captures the architecture of the american system. (hint: site sections can also be informative..)

Even a jab in the ribs from a friend is processed in context of the 'implicit': "this other is just like me". Every 'gesture', 'smell', :) all is processed in that context.

You have never ever communicated with a non-conscious being in your life. Ever. All your learning of 'behavior', etc. all occur with that implicit context of "this other is just like me". So when a robot jabs you in the ribs, the projection of the 'this other is conscious' is a given.

That's an optimistic take, or maybe I've become cycnical (regarding human nature). A class based analysis of the bullshitting verbal virtuoso and the role it can play in silencing experts, for example, could point to "positive" outcomes for a subset who field these machines.

Regarding the Jinn, just fyi, some of them are asserted to be Muslims. Take the one capable jinnie who time-travelled in service of Solomon so he could impress the Queen of Sheba .. ;)

I've thought about Turing's idea more critically since the public advent of GPT and have reached some contrary conclusions.

First let's assume that the notion of 'learning by observing and interacting' is understood in its technical sense as promoted by AGI (sic) camp: a machine, like man, achieves thought & consciousness, becomes a mind, via the learning mechanism(s)'. So, whatever it is that we humans mentally experience is engendered by a learning process fully mediated by the sensory apparatus.

Now there is an interesting question that comes up: why do we have certainty that a random humanoid that we meet (whose birth we did not witness, thus provenance unknown), regardless of their level of apparent intelligence, is a conscious being? The sensory apparatus in the middle of our learning regiment from infancy has always only conveyed (superficially) measurable information. So it is purely an 'image'. And we project meaning unto images. This is what we do.

The only reason one assumes that the other person is conscious is because we assume they are like us. "It's just like me. I am conscious, so they must be too". I think our friend Rene's formulation may see something of a philosophical resurgence. "I am conscious, so they must be too". That is the -only- reason that we unquestionably accept that the other humanoid is conscious as well.

If you're with me so far, then you may agree that Turing idea is fundamentally flawed. Until and unless we can nail down consciousness definitively we will never be able to test via information exchange (interaction). Because our minds, we know, have been 'trained' on only superficial evidence. So we are by definition un-lettered in the art of determining the existence of minds in objects.

Why fascinating?

The relationships between structural terms are learned, so e.g. author->paper forms can be correctly generated. Subject domains also have natural patterns, and semantic similarity. So right off the bat you have form and content patterns.

What it can not learn in training -- the actual notion of existance and not mere textual expression of the concept -- allow for creating believable, superficially credible, fantasies. You may find that it mostly gets the authors right and the papers are made up. It will rarely, if ever, misplace domain experts. You will not get a response listing a biologist writing a physics paper. But the paper is completely up for grabs. All it needs is a credible title and possibly a date. (Both of these will map to tight clusters in some semantic vector space.)

What is interesting is what this 'long tail of lies and misunderstandings' will mean in economical terms. If you consider the human replacement proposal, for every arc in a processing/operational graph -- resource -> (intelligent) processing -> product -- if the AI replacement is not 100% reliable, it will necessitate maintaining the pre-existing setup. So if the arc is highly complex, the value proposition is less attractive. The key, imo, is decomposing these processing/operating graphs into the simplest of transitions, so that the slow path can be both trivially (re)created, or, addressed with specialised ML box dealing with that simpler task. After that, the main question remains energy costs.

+ (We -know- it is not conscious; there is no always on runtime - at best a sporadic zombie. More reasonable q is is it sentient. I think not, but that is opinion.)

I always thought very little of Friedman. But read this, b_b, and tell me, is he a complete idiot?

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html

Andreij Karpathy has a nice zero to hero lecture series that you can follow along and it will end with building your own simple GPT. First lecture is building your own MLP (multi-layer perceptron). At the end of that you have down backtracing and will finally understand what it means to train a model.

https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

And LangChain is your friend if you want to use GPT as a component in a processing pipeline (as in integrating with Wolfram's alpha, etc.)

https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain

Rediscovered this Love and Rockets album again -- this is the old Bauhaus crew sans 'the dark one' and their message is unapologetically positive and spiritual (in their own way).

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqL7l3nBydtrx8lwDMYRhiXYhp2g-PFol

Also stuff like this!

(Greetings Hubski! It's been a while. Did you miss me? /g )

So I haven't read this yet beyond the first few pages but the mention of Patrick Buchanan (then merely a lowly WH staffer) and his critique of networks as "an ideological monopoly" and regulatory oversight of network content was striking in its similarity with du jour discussions regarding social networks. Thought it might be of interest.

We were in a dorm with 3 floors of engineers. "Veg", the resident EE mad genius ran a cable up the pole, passed it through his homemade descrambler, and we were in business.

np my friend.

seriously hope that is not the front door key set to your home. For love of God people, don't post images of your keys to the internet.

Fun fact: Satoshi Nakamoto means 'cenral intelligence'.

The "press" has most certainly not "published the [Flynn] leaks". They have provided their own, and their anonymous sources' opinion, as to the content of the leaks.

Yassir & the Arafats.

Deceiving the public is very much modern governance doctrine. That should not be news but of course a component of implementing this doctrine is pervasive propagandizing of the public by established media, entertainment industry, alternative media (99.9% fake alt imo), and various "ex-" whatevers.

Flynn will not be missed. He demonstrated that he is too stupid, too careless, to merit his position.

But that is not the story here.

The story here is that the unaccountable spook community is a modern day Praetorian Guard and that our republic is effectively dead. What remains to be seen is whether we transition to an actual empirial regime, or, whether the "deep state" is in fact working for/with transnational entities that wish to proceed with the program of cutting down the sole superpower down to size.

Were we an educated nation not susceptible to trivial manipulation that set us against one another the corrective recourse, however painful, would be possible. But we are not (by design) an educated nation, and we are (by design) programmed from craddle to grave to manifest the required 'response' to the provided 'stimilus' and are deeply divided (again by design).

Bannon is somewhat unhinged & his revisionist take on history is 'interesting'.

He's straight out of spook central casting, with an appropriately just-so resume (with the requisite tour of duty in Goldman Sachs).

And of course Breitbret:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/11/17/breitbart-news-network-born-in-the-usa-conceived-in-israel/

Then, there is the ever present man in the room looking like Machiaveli's Doppelgänger, linked to Lubavitchers, is not too loudly discussed in MSM.

On the Generals front, Thierry Meyssan has his own take on the current regime, in context of 9/11:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article195017.html

And in case you missed this apparently unprecedented stage event:

The Venn Diagram analysis of all above is Christian-Zionism & a military Junta behind the scenes.

[p.s. updated K's image links since someone yanked the original url /g]

I share your strong aversion to Facebook. Follow them on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ScienceMarchDC