One good quote why I enjoy reading "The New Curiosity Shop" (see Quentin's phrase in the parentheses):
"In 2007, a French civil servant, a successful person with a wife and two children, went to the hospital to have his leg pain checked out. When he was examined, it was determined that 90% of his brain consisted of spinal fluid, with no brain there at all. And yet he seemed to be much like you or me (except he was better at speaking French)."
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
Thank you for the long memo. Very interesting stuff. There is no doubt that we now know far more about how the brain and consciousness work than we did even 30 years ago; moreover that language and ritualistic behaviors like burial of the dead with decoration originate at roughly the same time (though other animals exhibit aspects of these things too.) As such, this is a more tempting theory than those held in the past.
Whether the theory is falsifiably tested and built upon, and whether it can then be modeled and transposed to a completely different set of material circumstances, with all the unsiloed connections that are the actuality of nature; and whether this can be made to run on something like the 20 watts of a human brain (probably less for French civil servants) and not the gigawatts a data center needs simply to statistically match human language - well, much awaits.
Dr. Krichmar seems like a very nice man. I do wish he wasn't falling for the usual "it's just like the brain!" linguistic fallacies I've written about many times. Naming a robot "Darwin" is nice, but what it's doing is nothing like Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about a species adapting over generations because certain traits are more suited to a changing environment. Additionally, the machine is not conditioned "just like Pavlov's dog," which he says twice. "Akin to Pavlov's dog" would be more accurate.
In any case, as I said before, we have learned about the brain. Nothing in this indicates anyone will be creating consciousness anytime soon. If ever.
Dr. Edelman won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for determining that the immune system was a selective recognition system, the same as natural selection, and the biological embodied brain, but operating by different mechanisms: amplified replication of antibodies in a highly varied repertoire that bind to antigens more or less well for the immune system; sexual reproduction of biological animals out of a varied repoiroire that are better fitted to their environment over evolutionary time; and developmental and experiential selection of a huge repoirtoire of neuronal groups by external and internal signals over the lifetime of an individual.
One good quote why I enjoy reading "The New Curiosity Shop" (see Quentin's phrase in the parentheses):
"In 2007, a French civil servant, a successful person with a wife and two children, went to the hospital to have his leg pain checked out. When he was examined, it was determined that 90% of his brain consisted of spinal fluid, with no brain there at all. And yet he seemed to be much like you or me (except he was better at speaking French)."
The world is an ever-blooming miracle.
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
Thank you for the long memo. Very interesting stuff. There is no doubt that we now know far more about how the brain and consciousness work than we did even 30 years ago; moreover that language and ritualistic behaviors like burial of the dead with decoration originate at roughly the same time (though other animals exhibit aspects of these things too.) As such, this is a more tempting theory than those held in the past.
Whether the theory is falsifiably tested and built upon, and whether it can then be modeled and transposed to a completely different set of material circumstances, with all the unsiloed connections that are the actuality of nature; and whether this can be made to run on something like the 20 watts of a human brain (probably less for French civil servants) and not the gigawatts a data center needs simply to statistically match human language - well, much awaits.
Did you get a chance to view the links I provided?
Dr. Krichmar seems like a very nice man. I do wish he wasn't falling for the usual "it's just like the brain!" linguistic fallacies I've written about many times. Naming a robot "Darwin" is nice, but what it's doing is nothing like Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about a species adapting over generations because certain traits are more suited to a changing environment. Additionally, the machine is not conditioned "just like Pavlov's dog," which he says twice. "Akin to Pavlov's dog" would be more accurate.
In any case, as I said before, we have learned about the brain. Nothing in this indicates anyone will be creating consciousness anytime soon. If ever.
Dr. Edelman won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for determining that the immune system was a selective recognition system, the same as natural selection, and the biological embodied brain, but operating by different mechanisms: amplified replication of antibodies in a highly varied repertoire that bind to antigens more or less well for the immune system; sexual reproduction of biological animals out of a varied repoiroire that are better fitted to their environment over evolutionary time; and developmental and experiential selection of a huge repoirtoire of neuronal groups by external and internal signals over the lifetime of an individual.
Nicely put: “the quest continues, with the idea that the right mix of metal, plastic, and electricity can achieve consciousness.”
Thanks.
I probably should have given silicon a little credit too.
Perhaps, but would silicon count as matter with emerging consciousness 🫣