Keith Duggar: disagreement

Transcript context

…Yes, that's good question. And the answer I think in principle, Can I just come back and qualify that answer by reference to that wonderful example about what I would read as vagueness in a technical sense? So vagueness, how many grains of sand constitute a pile? So it's not well defined. It is in philosophy, but not in mathematics. I think that's absolutely the right way to think about these, the bright lines. And if I had to commit to the dimension, the number of grains of sand that you get before you have consciousness or there is a pile. Would say it's something you actually referred to earlier on. Think it's the depth of your future or your future in your head. So if you're talking now about an algorithm or some artificial intelligence that is equipped with a generative or a world model of the consequences of its action, there will be a time horizon associated with that component of its generative model. And I think it's the depth of that time, Anil Sethin would refer to, not as counterfactual breadth, which is the number of divergent paths 1 could take into the future, the options that you select among, but the counterfactual depth, The temporal depth. And so that means that you can you can say you can be panpsychic. You you you can you can say that, you know, a thermostat has a notion of the future in the sense that it operates of, you know, sort of pathological control and differential equations. As soon as soon as put a differential equation in play, you've got an, you know, an instantaneous future because you've got some gradient with respect to time. That's not though the kind of depth that you and I enjoy. So I would imagine it is really just the depth. You are either very, very reflexive and I think people like Maxwell Randstad talk about this as merely reflexive active inference with, you know, very myopic, very short term self models right through to fully well, to be conscious in the way that we've been talking about, I think you need to have, you know, a long depth. So what does that mean for building a GI or a conscious artifacts or machine consciousness? It means, first of all, they have to be agentic because we've just said that having a world model of the consequences of your action would be necessary to be an agent. But more than that, you'd have to look quite a long way into the future. Your generative model, your world model, have to go quite a long way into the future. And I repeat, have that both counterfactual breadth and counterfactual depth at hand. Would that be sufficient? And I'm now remembering that I forgot to mention Aneel Seth in the list of people not to upset when reviewing theories of consciousness. So this is an opportunity just to say that there are people out there who would say, well, you know, okay, you can write down the maths of all this, and you can write down in the screen hypotheses or indeed simulate global neural and workspace theorism and try to produce ho would say, well, you know, okay, you can write down the maths of all this, and you can write down in the screen hypotheses or indeed simulate global neural and workspace theorism and try to produce things that look as if they have consciousness. That's not going to work unless you actually embody it, unless you are in Aneel's words a beast machine. I think that that sort of coheres with the argument for mortal computation. So when you may ask the question, can't we build it on our computer architectures? I would have to ask you, do you mean a Von Neumann architecture or do you mean a memory processing in memory or in memory processing architecture, which I would take as synonymous with the neuromorphic architecture, not spiking neural networks, you don't need those. But you do need the processing in memory to be mortal. You need that substrate dependence, read in terms of Geoffrey Hinton's definition of mortal computation and, you know, Alex's subsequent elaborations of that. So if you've got, I think, I would subscribe to that. I think largely to keep O'Neill happy, but I would subscribe. I don't think you can do this on a on a Von Neumann architecture because the the Markov blankets of a Von Neumann architecture where you're reading and writing from memory make it very difficult for the memory to self organize. I see. And…

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