A House Cat Knows More Than The IBM Watson

[Steve Klinko]

There you go again simply defining something as necessarily requiring consciousness.
Belief: confidence in a proposition as true. Watson is certainly confident, or it would have not provide the answer it does. It can even display how confident it is. It doesn't do it with emotion, like humans do, but with cold hard logic.

So, where is the need for consciousness in this notion of belief?
Yes they can, if belief is, say, examined under the definition I have exampled.
So you accept that computers can demonstrate confidence. That's a start. Now apply that to the definition of belief I have offered.

See, all you're doing is deliberately defining things to remove the possibility of anything unconscious being able to demonstrate it. What you need to do is define things without that a priori assumption built in, and then examine that definition so as to see who/what can demonstrate it. It may lead to obvious absurdities, or even contradictions, in which case the definition would need to be rejected or at least refined. Until then it's quite clear you're not here for discussion.

Saying Watson (the Computer) is Confident is one of the most Incoherent things you have ever said. You seem to be Confusing the name of an output of a Calculation with real Confidence as Experienced by a Conscious Mind. Yikes! and Yikes!

 

[billvon]

You must be some kind of Grammar Zombie.

Nope, just educated.

You can continue to refuse education, of course. It's your right to never learn anything if you don't want to.

I do find it funny that, on a forum where the written word is the only medium of communication, people insist on remaining ignorant in matters of writing. Of course, if you have no desire to make an intelligent case for your claims, it doesn't matter one bit what you write - or how you write it.

 

[billvon]

Saying Watson (the Computer) is Confident is one of the most Incoherent things you have ever said. You seem to be Confusing the name of an output of a Calculation with real Confidence as Experienced by a Conscious Mind. Yikes! and Yikes!

Nope. Google "confidence interval." It is a mathematical expression that is calculated statistically from a set of observed data. Confidence need not be experienced by a conscious mind to be confidence.

 

[Sarkus]

Saying Watson (the Computer) is Confident is one of the most Incoherent things you have ever said. You seem to be Confusing the name of an output of a Calculation with real Confidence as Experienced by a Conscious Mind. Yikes! and Yikes!

If what you refer to as "real confidence" is the emotional notion of confidence, then I am not confusing the two at all. Note, though, that you again have simply defined "real confidence" as that experienced by a conscious mind... so including as an a priori assumption that which you are trying to conclude upon.
Where is this definition agreed upon? What is an expression of accuracy in an answer if not confidence, whether accompanied by emotion or not?

Unless / until you stop including the a priori assumption of the necessity of consciousness, your threads aiming to show how it can't therefore apply to things without consciousness are trivially true. So where is the discussion if you insist on being trivial? Everything else you say in the OP is simply waffle compared to a simply syllogism that could prove the trivial conclusion.
The discussion to be had is in the examination of your premises, your definitions. But your simple dismissal of alternative definitions (offered for purposes of discussion, if nothing else) with nothing but insistence upon the definition you're using (that has not been agreed upon) is hardly conducive to actual discussion, is it, thus once again showing that discussion is not your intention here (if it is not already blatantly obvious).

 

[Write4U]

Here is what we know:
1) Neural Activity happens
2) A Conscious Experience Happens

The Hard Problem of Conscious Experience is: given that 1 happens, How does 2 happen

Evidence 1 : 2 happens when 1 happens .
Evidence 2: when 1 does not happen , 2 does not happen.
Therefore: 2 is directly related to 1
1 is a physical system, generating varied EM patterns in direct relationship with variation of thoughts.
2 variation of thought is evidenced by variation of EM patterns
Therefore: varied EM patterns can be mapped and compared to various thoughts.

If thoughts can be uploaded into an AI via EM patterns, we can program the AI to map the patterns down to EM quanta and the AI will solve the problem for us. AI assisted science.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Nope, just educated.

You can continue to refuse education, of course. It's your right to never learn anything if you don't want to.

I do find it funny that, on a forum where the written word is the only medium of communication, people insist on remaining ignorant in matters of writing. Of course, if you have no desire to make an intelligent case for your claims, it doesn't matter one bit what you write - or how you write it.

It really doesn't matter. Come on, join the Modern World of Twitter and Texting where it's the Thoughts and Ideas that count, and not some stale grammatical structures. If you're not getting the Thoughts and Ideas, then I'm Sorry about your handicap.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Nope. Google "confidence interval." It is a mathematical expression that is calculated statistically from a set of observed data. Confidence need not be experienced by a conscious mind to be confidence.

That's not the point. People are saying the Computer itself is Confident. Wrong. Computers cannot be Confident, Scared, Happy, Sad, or have any other Human Conscious Experience.

 

[billvon]

It really doesn't matter. Come on, join the Modern World of Twitter and Texting where it's the Thoughts and Ideas that count, and not some stale grammatical structures. If you're not getting the Thoughts and Ideas, then I'm Sorry about your handicap.

You are like a mathematician who can't do math, but expects everyone to take him seriously because of his Thoughts and Ideas.

People are saying the Computer itself is Confident. Wrong.

Yes, they can be. They can express that as a degree of confidence. Scientists, doctors and engineers regularly rely on machine determinations of confidence.

 

[Steve Klinko]

You are like a mathematician who can't do math, but expects everyone to take him seriously because of his Thoughts and Ideas.

Yes, they can be. They can express that as a degree of confidence. Scientists, doctors and engineers regularly rely on machine determinations of confidence.

You are like a mathematician who can't do math, but expects everyone to take him seriously because of his Thoughts and Ideas.

Yes, they can be. They can express that as a degree of confidence. Scientists, doctors and engineers regularly rely on machine determinations of confidence.

Of course Computers calculate all kinds of things, but it is not Coherent to say a Computer is Confident in the sense they said it. Here is the part of the reply I am complaining about:

Belief: confidence in a proposition as true. Watson is certainly confident, or it would have not provide the answer it does. It can even display how confident it is. It doesn't do it with emotion, like humans do, but with cold hard logic.

It is Incoherent to say that Watson (the Computer itself) is certainly confident. I'm just trying keep people aware of the concept of what Human Consciousness is. People are too liberal with their Anthropomorphizations of Computer actions. It is a convenient shorthand to talk like that but it does give non Computer savey people the wrong impression.

 

[Steve Klinko]

Evidence 1 : 2 happens when 1 happens .
Evidence 2: when 1 does not happen , 2 does not happen.
Therefore: 2 is directly related to 1
1 is a physical system, generating varied EM patterns in direct relationship with variation of thoughts.
2 variation of thought is evidenced by variation of EM patterns
Therefore: varied EM patterns can be mapped and compared to various thoughts.

If thoughts can be uploaded into an AI via EM patterns, we can program the AI to map the patterns down to EM quanta and the AI will solve the problem for us. AI assisted science.

You are just mapping Neural Activity to Conscious Experience and you are not Explaining anything. How are varied EM patterns mapped and compared to various thoughts? What is the Mechanism of this?

 

[billvon]

It is Incoherent to say that Watson (the Computer itself) is certainly confident.

Nope, it's completely coherent. Watson needs a certain amount of confidence before it will announce a result.

You are using the classic fallacy - argument from incredulity. "I don't understand the definition of that word, therefore the statement that uses it is incoherent because I don't understand it." Doesn't work that way. Your inability to understand something does not make something incoherent.

 

[Sarkus]

I'm just trying keep people aware of the concept of what Human Consciousness is.

You're going about it ass-about-face. People are aware of what human consciousness is. What you're in fact doing is simply stating (in your view) not what consciousness is but what you think is not possible without it, simply by defining the things not possible without it as necessarily requiring consciousness.
There's nothing clever in what you're saying, despite the waffle. There's simply a trivial argument that goes from your definition to the conclusion you want to reach. And why is it trivial? Because you have explicitly included the conclusion within the definitions you use.

People are too liberal with their Anthropomorphizations of Computer actions. It is a convenient shorthand to talk like that but it does give non Computer savey people the wrong impression.

I'm sorry you are non-savvy with computers, as clearly you seem to be getting the wrong impression of what people are talking about.

As well as the argument from incredulity that billvon has mentioned, you are also dismissing any possible notion of the concepts in question that aren't equivalent in demonstration to when humans/conscious entities display them, or work exactly how they work with such conscious entities, rather than looking at what the concept actually is in a broader sense. Yes, there is a certain complexity to such concepts that comes with them being performed by conscious entities, but that doesn't preclude much simpler notions of the same concepts being demonstrable by non-conscious entities.

Furthermore, you're ignoring in this thread the fact that a cat, lacking self-awareness, is no more self-aware of what it does than IBM Watson is. Cats are biological, and obviously "conscious" in as much as any animal is (they are able to respond to stimuli and their surroundings etc), but they are not "conscious" if by that you mean self-aware - they do not pass any test of self-awareness, for example. They have memory, they have the ability to learn, but unless you can show how they are aware of what they know (this "conscious knowing" that you require for knowledge) then you can't claim that cats have more knowledge than IBM's Watson, as, according to your definitions, both would have ZERO knowledge.

So in answer to your thread: using your own definitions you are wrong - a cat "knows" precisely as much as IBM's Watson: ZERO.

 

[Write4U]

What is the Mechanism of this?

What is the mechanism of Morse code?
I suggest you watch this very simple lecture by Roger Antonsen about learning to see things from different perspectives, which leads to "understanding"

 

[Write4U]

They have memory, they have the ability to learn, but unless you can show how they are aware of what they know (this "conscious knowing" that you require for knowledge) then you can't claim that cats have more knowledge than IBM's Watson, as, according to your definitions, both would have ZERO knowledge.

A great test for self-awareness is the mirror test. Only hominids have a natural sense of self awareness. Some other animals can develop a sense of self-awareness.

Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall: Can You Reveal An Animal's Inner World At All?

A macaques monkey looking into the mirror of a motorbike in the grounds of a temple in Jaipur in the Indian state of Rajasthan.

In Gallup's view, only three species have consistently and convincingly demonstrated mirror self-recognition: chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/17/9475...can-you-reveal-an-animals-inner-world-at-all#:

Most animals and human babies will look behind the mirror to see who is that interloper.

But all biological organisms are self-referential to some degree.

 

[Write4U]

Belief: confidence in a proposition as true. Watson is certainly confident, or it would have not provide the answer it does. It can even display how confident it is. It doesn't do it with emotion, like humans do, but with cold hard logic.

Does it matter?

It is Incoherent to say that Watson (the Computer itself) is certainly confident. I'm just trying keep people aware of the concept of what Human Consciousness is. People are too liberal with their Anthropomorphizations of Computer actions. It is a convenient shorthand to talk like that but it does give non Computer savey people the wrong impression.

How about a cat's consciousness? Is that comparable to human consciousness?

You just keep trying to find what separates the human mind from the AI mind. For once try to find some "common denominators" . Then you will begin to see things from a different perspective and you will become more savvy in both human and computer language (another one of those human terms applicable to computer communication)..

 

[Write4U]

How about comparing a bacteria to a computer:

Bacteria as computers making computers
Antoine Danchin
Section Editor: Michael Galperin

Abstract

Various efforts to integrate biological knowledge into networks of interactions have produced a lively microbial systems biology. Putting molecular biology and computer sciences in perspective, we review another trend in systems biology, in which recursivity and information replace the usual concepts of differential equations, feedback and feedforward loops and the like.

Noting that the processes of gene expression separate the genome from the cell machinery, we analyse the role of the separation between machine and program in computers. However, computers do not make computers.

For cells to make cells requires a specific organization of the genetic program, which we investigate using available knowledge. Microbial genomes are organized into a paleome (the name emphasizes the role of the corresponding functions from the time of the origin of life), comprising a constructor and a replicator, and a cenome (emphasizing community-relevant genes), made up of genes that permit life in a particular context. The cell duplication process supposes rejuvenation of the machine and replication of the program. The paleome also possesses genes that enable information to accumulate in a ratchet-like process down the generations. The systems biology must include the dynamics of information creation in its future developments.

...

Many paths can be followed in the pursuit of the aim of integration, and I choose to review here a slightly unusual one, that of considering the cell as a computer making computers. Having revisited the history and the concepts of molecular biology with this aim in focus, I follow the path opened up by the pioneering investigators who took seriously what was (and usually still is) just perceived as a metaphor, the concept of the genetic program.

Using a variety of sources, I show that a cell can be seen as a computer (a machine expressing a program), and review the evidence in support of the cell having the properties required to reproduce the computing machine while replicating its program. This view takes into account the important paradox raised by the obvious observation that computers do not make computers (yet). It provides an entry point for the category of information as a fundamental category of nature that all future developments of systems biology need to include (Danchin, 2008a).

...

The study of systems biology has been aided by the ease with which the internet allows researchers to store and distribute massive amounts of information, plus advances in powerful new research technologies, and the infusion of scientists from other disciplines, e.g. computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and engineers.’

...

Systems biology, then, begins with inventories, and develops as an interdisciplinary science. This latter adjective is another fashionable word that underscores the importance of an intimate association between the concepts and technologies underlying widely separated areas of science – biochemistry, genetics and computer science. The statement also points out the importance of information, and this justifies investigating in some depth the present status of information theories.

...

Historically, systems biology follows on from molecular biology, a science based on many concepts more closely linked to arithmetic and computation than to classical physics or chemistry. Molecular biology relies heavily on concepts such as ‘control’, ‘coding’ or ‘information’, which are at the heart of arithmetic and computation. To accept the cell as a computer conjecture first requires an exploration of the concept of information, in relation to the concept of genetic program.

...

Systems biology being highly multidisciplinary, this article has the difficult task of helping microbiologists become familiar with some unexpected developments in genomics, which are rooted in very abstract regions of knowledge, namely Number Theory. However, at some point, we need to leave the world of abstraction to come back to more mundane biology, via the exploration of the structure of genomes (essentially bacterial genomes, here), to link abstraction with the concrete world of metabolites, proteins, genes and cells. We devote a significant part of our review of the literature to the task of pinning down the relationship between the abstract domain of information and the concrete domain of its creation and management in the cell.

Why is this emphasis on information so important? In addition to his seminal role in computer sciences, Alan Turing, a central figure in the conceptualization of information, was also responsible for many of the ideas used today in biology, both through his theory of growth and biological forms (Turing, 1952), and through his theory of computation [Turing, 1936–1937, 1946 (1986)]. Even at a fairly popular level, the involvement of information and Number Theory in biology is not new. It has been developed extensively by Douglas Hofstadter in a famous book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979.

But how many people really understand that strings of symbols – such as those found in the sequence of DNA – can produce unexpected (emergent) outcomes when they are associated with a coding process (Hofstadter, 1979)? The Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel showed that arithmetic (the science of whole numbers) can make statements about itself. To substantiate this remarkable claim, which implies that just manipulating whole numbers with the rules of arithmetic can generate novel information, Gödel used a simple trick.

He coded the words used in Number Theory as integers (e.g. four, which is quatre in French, vier in German and τɛσσɛρα in Greek, can be coded by 4) and used the corresponding code to translate propositions of arithmetic. This generated a large whole number, which could be manipulated by the rules of arithmetic, and after a sequence of operations, this manipulation generated another whole number. The latter could be decoded using the initial code. Gödel's trick was to drive the sequence of operations modifying the initial statement, to lead to a very particular conclusion. When decoded, the manipulated sequence translated into a particular proposition, which, briefly, stated: ‘I am impossible to prove’.

In other words, arithmetic is incomplete, i.e. some propositions of arithmetic can be understood as valid; yet they cannot be proven within the frame of arithmetic. But this ‘incompleteness’ can also be seen as a positive feature; it is what allows the creation of new information – in Gödel's case, the statement of a fact of which the world was previously unaware.

In his book, Hofstadter showed that the genetic code, which enables the world of nucleic acids to be translated into the world of proteins, which in turn manipulate nucleic acids, behaves exactly as Gödel's code does. This implies that manipulating strings of symbols, via a process that uses a code, can generate novel information. Of course, in the case of nucleic acids and proteins, there is no Gödel to drive the process, and no need for one: while Gödel knew what he was aiming at, living systems will accumulate information through recursivity, without any design being required.

We only perceive a design because the end result is familiar to us, and thus seems more ‘right’ than any other possible result. But what we commonly term the ‘genetic program’ because it unfolds through time in a consistent manner is not a programme with an aim – it is merely there, and functions because it cannot do otherwise.

continued.......

 

[Write4U]

continued.......

This observation, that the manipulation of strings of symbols can produce new information, may have considerable consequences in the development of new avenues for systems biology, and will be at the heart of the present review.

Despite the conceptual importance of this view, at present, few investigators would easily accept that there is more than a crude metaphor behind the analogy between cells and computers (see, however, Liberman, 1979; Yockey, 1992; Danchin, 1996; Liberman & Minina, 1996; Maynard-Smith, 2000).

Yet the literature exploring the conjecture that the genetic program is more than a metaphor, and that cells, bacteria in particular, are Turing machines [i.e. behave as if they were computing devices (we shall not discuss here the nature of computing, save to say that it would be purely declarative, that is, not intentional, in a way similar to that proposed in lambda-calculus by Barendregt (1984))], provides an answer to many of the enigmas raised by the continuous production of information by living organisms. New forms, emerging structures and processes can be accounted for without having to rely on any novel or external principle (Danchin, 2003), and this can be the starting point for new families of experiments.

....more.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704931/

 

[RainbowSingularity]

CONFIDENCE

real confidence

Saying Watson (the Computer) is Confident

scientific confidence would need to be the strict rule of terminology
and algorithm & mathematical confidence is the value of margin of error or variance
or interference/resistance

a computational confidence is a quality of its ability to not make errors and produce the intended goal to a low if not 0 sum margin of error



statistics and the word confidence
deliberately confused in science to play with terminology and trick people

statistical confidence is a margin
and not a function

confidence in gambling is a margin

confidence in computing is a low error margin and a quality of mechanical engineering & programming

psychological emotional or mental theory confidence is Ego
and purely human sciences
not computer sciences

 

[Write4U]

a computational confidence is a quality of its ability to not make errors and produce the intended goal to a low if not 0 sum margin of error

confidence in computing is a low error margin and a quality of mechanical engineering & programming

Does it require an emotional conviction for a computer to have confidence in it own abilities or can it gain confidence from statistical libraries?

GPT3 imitates a cat very nicely in this interview. Cats think killing mice is fun!

 

[RainbowSingularity]

Does it require an emotional conviction for a computer to have confidence in it own abilities or can it gain confidence from statistical libraries?

that is statistical confidence in outcome variable probability of known unknowns

however
the statistics do not start getting produced until an answer has been created

a computer can have a 100% confidence of delivering a value
even though that value is 0 as a perceptual result for the human
the confidence in obtaining that 0 remains

predetermined outcomes
statistical probability function & chaos theory ...(predictive modelling of chaos theory)
scientific method & ...