Doesn't that assume the mind is blank slate to start? Don't you think its possible that the human brain has many important and hard won (over millions of years of evolution) hard-wired pieces that a blank slate NN can't easily learn?

Indeed, this possibility is the key underlying assumption of Chomskyan linguistics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

"Huge neural nets" as the parent suggested tend to have hardwired architectures but randomly distributed parameters. Whether or not that is analogous to the human brain is anyone's guess and probably more of a philosophical question than a compu-biological one.

That is interesting, but just thinking, there are things that humans can do "out of the box" so to speak like face recognition and language acquisition and more.

Is it possible that, rather than things becoming physically hard-wired into us, our ability to communicate and work together has gradually streamlined the learning process? Of course it stands to reason that we would physically change to adapt to our changing environments, and maybe a NN would be able to adapt at a greater rate.

> our ability to communicate

This is actually one of the most important things "hard-wired" into us that I am talking about! Language acquisition seems to be natural for humans, even if the languages are quite different.

This emergent quantum phenomena view implies there are a set of basic models transmitted or generated at conception. What we do know is the DNA genome is transmitted, so from a quantum computational perspective, there are plausibly cognition and consciousness models encoded in that.

If you have bred animals for ability, the folk wisdom is the sire throws certain traits, the dam attenuates them, and then develops others through socialization. This qualitative unscientific view obviously overlooks the dam genome, but through the lens of DNA molecules encoding models to run on a consciousness via quantum operations, the metaphor I would use is DNA encodes compressed model data.

In this view, the consciousness evolves over its runtime until it ceases to cohere information, but anything past the basic "lift head, solve for food, security, reproduction" models that run on a consciousness may originate at conception via genes.

> This emergent quantum phenomena view implies there are a set of basic models transmitted or generated at conception.

Why do you say that?

The brain and it’s cells certainly have a lot of structure that’s baked in from inherited genetic and epigenetic information. I don’t see what that has to do with whether conciseness is dependent on quantum effects.

The "basic models transmitted or generated at conception" part seems self-evident (is this even controversial?), but as evidence for quantum implementation I also don't see a connection.

Indeed, I'm suggesting the brain may do a kind of quantum computation, but the intrinsic knowledge a given brain has of models of biases toward risk/reward that resemble a father's behavior originate as genomic information modules from his genetic material, which the brain loads as models to do runtime computation about sensory stimuli on.

e.g. Consciousness is not some higher dimensional super or substrate, it's code, compressed into and transmitted by dna, running on a quantum computer in a brain, learning and processing according to initial weights in the dna model.

Sorry, but none of that in any way resembles my understanding of how DNA and the brain work.

Wouldn't that mean a pile of sand on the ground or a pile of rocks in the desert are also conscious? Because viewed the right way those can be representations of arbitrarily complex turing machines (see https://xkcd.com/505/)

Emergent from particular computation ≠ emergent from arbitrary computation. Plus, given your “viewed the right way” caveat, it's hard to argue that those “consciousnesses” (to concede that point, for the sake of argument) even exist in this universe, rather than existing purely within the concept-space of all mathematical entities.

Greg Egan's novel Permutation City is an excellent read for those who wish to read scifi based on this very premise.

See also Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Yes they could, why not? From the perspective of the consciousness being created from the rocks computing, it doesn't necessarily need to know what the material is of its hardware. ie let's say we were in a simulation and the layer above us were using rocks to compute, we wouldn't even know that that is what they are using.

I find it hard to discuss consciousness without first trying to come of a definition of it. Is self-awareness a condition for consciousness, or even the ability to contemplate consciousness? That being said I liked "the hidden spring" by Mark Solms which puts emotion at the core of consciousness. A very interesting premise that seems to be backed up by research (though I don't know nearly enough of it to evaluate). This allows for a much broader concept of consciousness and consciousness as a spectrum, which fits better with my own beliefs :)

Would it feel pain? And when? And how much?

Can we devise an AGI that feels intense pleasure when doing any kind of work?

There are many people who cannot believe this is possible, but all attempts so far to prove that it is not are either subtly begging the question or ultimately rest, one way or another, on intuition (as do materialist positions).

For example, David Chalmers, who originated or developed many favorite anti-materialist positions (the 'hard problem', the explanatory gap, p-zombies) holds many positions that would normally be considered materialistic - for example, that if one were to replace a person's neurons with functionally-equivalent artificial devices, the resulting entity would still be conscious in the same way as the person we started with, and therefore, presumably, capable of feeling pain and pleasure. It would seem tendentious to hold this position and still assert that artificial conscious entities (complete with subjective experiences) are impossible.

Are pain and pleasure prerequisites for consciousness?

The term 'consciousness' is used in many different ways, but I do not think you can simply define away the question of the origin of pain, pleasure and other subjective (or at least personal) experiences.

Probably not but a value system I imagine is. The interesting question is at what point do we have AI ethics for how to treat AI?

Probably not, but we should think if they "emerge" as a consequence of our doings.

The problem is the assumption that 'AGI' has anything to do with a bipedal physical body that resembles ours.

We evolved the way we did due to evolutionary constraints.

The constraints of the evolution of our silicon computing devices are completely different.

Why would you hook all that gear up to a single automaton, with a head, two eyes, two arms and two arms. Those are completely arbitrary.

Why not hook it up to 100's or millions of cameras? Thousands of 'limbs'? i.e. ever camera and operable apparatus connected to the internet?

Our 'silicon' will have a recall advantage that our pure-NN brains do not, which is consistent lookup of data and 'perfect recall' of every bit of human data every recorded, which means that it's evolution will be quite different as well.

We'll have distributed systems that go way past the 'Turing Test' decades before anything remotely approaching AGI.

'Siri' is almost there, in 10 years I'll bet it becomes difficult to tell if Siri is a person or not. And Siri isn't even 'one entity' - it's a generic interface to other, distributed systems. 'Siri' in 10 years will start to resemble AGI but with other, more fantastic abilities (information access and synthesis).

Imagine in 50 years your Tesla is deeply integrated with satellite GPS location data, weather data, it's 'talking' to the 'local road controller' for control data with ms latency, and also 'talking' to every other car within 500m to get relevant positioning and other sensor data. Maybe some of the relevant AI processing requires far too much power, and it's done in real-time at the closest data centre via networking. At that point you have to say the Tesla isn't really the vehicle in front of you, it's an entire system of technology.

Sun Microsystem's motto was 'The Network Is The Computer' implying to the extent that all computers are comprehensively connected ... they form at least some kind of coherent entity.

The concept of AGI is so abstract that it almost doesn't make any sense.

By the time we are able to assemble a discrete group of computing components, to a discrete bipedal robot (i.e. a Metropolis-like automaton, i.e. Data from Star Trek) we will already be many decades ahead of that in terms of understanding how all of that maps to consciousness. We'll already have intelligent systems doing things way beyond what any human could do and probably what we could imagine right now.

But AGI might not imply consciousness.

The internet is already a network with 'all that hardware'.

Why isn't the internet conscious?

Because the internet is not trying to be an agent in this world, it is a simple tool.

There is nothing magical about this: consciousness is obviously a complex computational process that has evolved over millions or billions of years. It is a good solution to the problem of navigating the world as a living thing.

Saying 'you need an extremely complex computational system to have consciousness' does not entail that any extremely complex computational system is conscious (incidentally, this is also the mistake that the integrated information people make).

"Because the internet is not trying "

And so about your physical body, a collection of atoms can 'try' to do something?

'Trying' is a function of conscious intent. So you can't 'try' to be conscious, that would be a prerequisite.

"consciousness is obviously ..."

Glib statement of the century.

"It is a good solution to the problem of navigating the world as a living thing."

Only conscious, living things can have 'problems', ergo, your statement is again circuitously referential.

If as you say 'there is nothing magical' then there can never be 'intent' or 'problems' to solve - it's a pretty big giant contradiction.

There would just be 'bags of particles bouncing around, randomly' that's it. In the context of materialism, then there isn't even anything such as 'evolution' - just the appearance of it. Atoms bounce around from one thing to the next, randomly, we just call it a 'process' - but it's not, so long sticking to materialism (i.e. no magic).

" 'you need an extremely complex computational system to have consciousness' does not entail that any extremely complex computational system is conscious"

Sure. But the totality of technology on the planet is already very well connected and 'sufficient' (according to the OP's indicated scale) so as to form the basis of some kind of 'network', which, while may not be 'conscious', should nevertheless exhibit some of the emergent properties of such a thing, if emergence does come out of those kinds of configurations.

You are making an error of taking my imprecise language to assume that I am anthropomorphizing physical processes. Furthermore, you seem to think that there can be no structure in the world if there isn't a consciousness to perceive it, which is not compatible with the very idea of materialism.

Things in the world behave the way they behave regardless of our interpretations of them. Electrons were bound to nuclei long before consciousness observed and named these phenomena. Bacteria and archaea looked for sustenance and reproduced and suffered changes and adapted the same way billions of years before any consciousness existed in the world. They were 'trying' to survive just as much as we are - you can express this in principle in terms of a physical law just as much as the motion of the Electron wave, but we don't know that law and use a human word, "trying", instead.

As evolution happened according to the laws of chemistry and statistics, biological beings became more and more complex, and found more and more complex ways of interacting with the world. At some point(s), simple agents capable of planning were born from a previous generation, and these created more offspring than previous organisms, so this trait became more and more pronounced. After eons of this process, these planning abilities started including information not just about the environment, but about other living things, agents (the behavior of such things is not well explained by basic mechanical laws). Over more time, this same logic circuit probably started being applied to model the behavior of the entity doing the planning, which is probably what we recognize as self-reflection, experiences, consciousness.

Of course, there are many things in my account that may turn out to be inaccurate. I'm not claiming to understand the exact evolution of consciousness - I'm only giving a somewhat vaguely plausible explanation of consciousness as a physical, evolved phenomenon. We don't know how to model evolution, we have no idea how life began from anorganic compounds, we don't know to what extent evolution could have produced different results than we see today.

Also, while concepts like 'life' and 'agents' and 'objects' are human categories imposed on a fuzzy world, that does not mean that these concepts are arbitrary or that they are purely fabrications of the human mind. It is an objective fact of the world that the laws that describe the motion of a rock tumbling down a slope are different from the laws that describe the motion of a gazelle running down a slope. Any being or computer that wanted to predict the speed or position of the gazelle and the rock would fail to do so if it didn't account for this difference.

Another important note that many reductionists seem to not accept is that a computer computes regardless of a conscious mind interpreting this computation. If we find a physical process that moves a block of wood in response to certain patterns of light hitting a seminconducting crystal, that system is a computer using a camera to open a door, regardless of whether it happened naturally or was designed by a designer. This was the great insight that Turing and Church came up with: that computation is a mathematical object that is isomorphic to any system with certain simple properties.

This observation is so fundamental that we can actually deduce limits of physical processes by modeling them as computations: for example, we know that certain crystals need some minimum time to grow a certain way because the physical laws that cause the crystals to grow are isomorphic to a known optimization problem. Since we know the minimum complexity of a computer solving that problem (the minimum number of steps that need to happen) we also know that the physical processes must take at least [time(step) * number of steps] time to grow the crystals.

For the internet, the explanation is simple again: there is no equivalence between the evolutionary laws that led to consciousness evolving and any process used in the design of the internet, so we have no reason to expect the internet to be conscious. Again, some level of complexity is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to emerge, in the materialist theories of consciousness. There are very few people (notably, the IIT people) that equate complexity with consciousness.

According to Buddhist and Hindu thought, because it doesn’t have a body.

maybe it is