On free will

I just read the first few chapter in Sam Harris excellent Free Will. He is of course correct. Free will is (almost certainly) an illusion.

However. He is sort of pointing to something in the book which I have been thinking about before and which is more or less captured by the Turing test. A device has free will if its actions cannot be foreseen and they are known to be at least partially causal.

This connects to a formulation I made a long time ago about free will. A system has free will if it is by it self sufficient to determine some action outcome given some stimulus. This is an attempt to differentiate it from stochastic and deterministic systems. In this sense, a system possessing memory or hysteresis has free will.

On consciousness (again)

I just listened to Sams pod with David Chalmers on consciousness. They get it almost right about 50 minutes into the show when they talk about panpsychism and the ideas that everything is conscious at some level. What they miss is that they should really (as I have done in a previous blog p lost) define consciousness as interaction. They talk about information processing which is a complicated non-physical (but rather mathematical) concept. The correct concept to use is interaction which is very physical. And with that, everything is conscious. But at different levels.

These ideas also explain in a natural why we as humans cannot grasp how a chair or even a worm can be conscious. The problem is that the kind of interaction these entities takes part of is so vastly different from ours.

In this sense, consciousness is an illusion. It is a local phenomenon in an hierarchical structure of more and more complex interactions. And a consciousness operating as a certain level and with certain complex interactions cannot grasp, or even experience, a consciousness at a vastly different consciousness level.

It is the self-experience of the interactions occurring in a particular physical structure. We as humans can experience cars and chairs. Complex objects and we interact with these. (This is also probably why small children and illiterates attribute consciousness to objects that are not conscious at our level - it is the only thing we understand)

Later in the show Sam and David got into the thoughts on simulated worlds and that perhaps we live in one. This is also in some sense obvious true as I have also discussed before. We have some experience. That is mediated through our senses. But the world in it self (in Kantian terms) is something we can have no real idea about. Thus we do live in a simulation. It is impossible to say something outside of our experience of the world about the world.

We will not create true AI without understanding it

Everyone Is talking about AI. How fantastic it will be or how dystopic it will be. How we will create a super intelligence without understanding it. How it might pose a threat or how we will transfer our consciousness to some non-biological hardware.

At the same time a picture is drawn that this might happened with us humans in the back seat. Without us understanding it happen, or the consequences.

This is all ridiculous. Is there a single technical achievement in history that has just happened? The closest is perhaps the discovery of penicillin.

But in general every progress is preceded by careful analysis and hard work. Often by a large group of humans. We will not wake up one day and AI is just here, ruling the world. We will have to understand self-awareness, free will and consciousness long before we will be able to create it. There is no doubt about it. Anyone saying anything else is a believer of magic and fantasy.

And as for consciousness, self-awareness and free will, we haven't got the slightest idea what these things are. There are some fuzzy sociological ideas, mirror-experiments on chimps and the notion that we have to have free will because we have no other choice (not to mention the out-right ridiculous arguments put forward by religious proponents about God giving us free will and other nonsense crap). But these are all non-constructive. Useless. We will not be able to create true AI before we understand it. What people perceive as AI today is simply complex algorithms running on very fast computation hardware. Hence it is just Moore's law still in operation. Nothing else.

I am not saying that Moore's law won't be the thing that actually gives us AI, that it is just emergence. That might well be; but we will understand it before we create it.