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Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 27 Mar
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Meeting ID: 352 445 152
QuEST March 27, 2020
We then want to continue our discussion on the tenets of artificial consciousness.
Recall we seek a Theory of Consciousness:
THE ULTIMATE GOAL of a theory of consciousness is a simple and elegant set of fundamental laws, analogous to the fundamental laws of physics.
We provide the QuEST tenets – they are unlikely to be the right answer to this challenge.
1.) Structural Coherence (interaction to ensure stable, consistent and useful representation)
2.) Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition (narratives)
3.) Conscious representation of situations are done via simulation (cognitively decoupled – imagined past, present and future in the form of a cohesive narrative)
Concluding: Consciousness is Stable, consistent and useful ALL SOURCE situated simulation that is structurally coherent
Our previous discussions covered ideas in structural coherence and situated representations. We want to continue this week with the ‘simulation’ tenet:
- Conscious representation of situations are done via simulation (cognitively decoupled)
- simulation is an organized body of knowledge that produces specific simulations of a situation’s instances
- Imagined past, imagined present, imagined future – cognitively decoupled
- Exformation (pattern completion inferring mechanism)
- Compression (infinite number of stimuli into a single quale, low bandwidth 50 bits/sec)
- Ability to generate meaning / situated simulation of a new concept – the unexpected query
Some relevant aspects of the simulation tenet:
A good perceptual system has to go beyond the information given; it has to ‘invent’ things.
Your brain sees more than what your eye senses
Key is to have perceptual representation the same as what is used for cognition NOT separate distinct systems – the question is – common representational system underlies perception and cognition, not independent systems
The simulation tenet idea is – Recording systems versus conceptual systems
Solution must be a fully function concept encoding system ****
- Key aspect of solution is ‘simulators’ – simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences.
- These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and abstract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system!
Simulators that can:
- represents types (binding a concept (type) to an individual (token) in a manner that is true or false.),
- supports categorization, and
- produces categorical inferences.
These simulators further support:
productivity (from integrating simulators combinatorially and recursively to produce complex simulations),
propositions (result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations), and
abstract concepts (grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events).
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 20 Mar
QuEST March 20, 2020
Slides for this week – QuEST online trial lecture situated representation tenets (2)
We then want to return to our discussion on the tenets of artificial consciousness. We will attempt to do this with a phone in only discussion – not sure without the in-person interaction we can make this valuable but will publish some slides on the blog to facilitate the discussion.
Recall we seek a Theory of Consciousness:
THE ULTIMATE GOAL of a theory of consciousness is a simple and elegant set of fundamental laws, analogous to the fundamental laws of physics.
We provide the QuEST tenets – they are unlikely to be the right answer to this challenge.
1.) Structural Coherence (interaction to ensure stable, consistent and useful representation)
2.) Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition (narratives)
3.) Conscious representation of situations are done via simulation (cognitively decoupled – imagined past, present and future in the form of a cohesive narrative)
Concluding: Consciousness is Stable, consistent and useful ALL SOURCE situated simulation that is structurally coherent
Our discussion of ‘situated’ representations made it through the ‘One Quale at a time and also the Qualia Theory of Relativity’ tenets – we will pick up there:
- Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition
- Links (types of links, possibly capture similarity, meaning as what links are evoked – source of exformation – entities (situations) are defined based on how they are situated that is their meaning)
- Gists as key part of representation–low bandwidth representation –what is situated/simulated
- Multimodal – integrates multiple sensors representation into common framework – part of situated
- One quale at a time – for any aspect of the illusory cartesean theater (example invertible illusions)
- Qualia Theory of Relativity – only value (meaning) is in the relationships between (dictionary)
- Narrative based representation–situated in time/space/multiple modalities (plausible narratives compete) Stream of consciousness is a cohesive narrative
- TD/BU – means to do context – rapid high level first –
- Types of Qualia types of situations – time as a quale, Affect as a quale, types of speech, ToM – (Evolving not static), aha and negative aha (means to know what is known and what is NOT known by the agent)
- Self – special type of qualia/situation (qualia self interacts with Continuity, unity, embodiment, sense of free will, reflection)
Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 6 Mar
QuEST March 6, 2020
One lingering topic after our guest lecture last week was a follow-up thread that was discussing ‘emergence’. Our colleague, Prof Cybenko, will briefly share some thoughts on emergent behaviors.
We then want to return to our discussion on the tenets of artificial consciousness. Recall we seek a Theory of Consciousness:
THE ULTIMATE GOAL of a theory of consciousness is a simple and elegant set of fundamental laws, analogous to the fundamental laws of physics.
We provide the QuEST tenets – they are unlikely to be the right answer to this challenge.
1.) Structural Coherence (interaction to ensure stable, consistent and useful representation)
2.) Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition (narratives)
3.) Conscious representation of situations are done via simulation (cognitively decoupled – imagined past, present and future in the form of a cohesive narrative)
Concluding: Consciousness is Stable, consistent and useful ALL SOURCE situated simulation that is structurally coherent
Two weeks ago we initiated our discussion of ‘situated’ representations including discussing the ‘link game’ and Cap assigned some homework to answer the question – ‘why did that thought pop into my head?’ We will continue that discussion on situated representations this week hitting the subtopics starting with Gists:
- Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition
- Links (types of links, possibly capture similarity, meaning as what links are evoked – source of exformation – entities (situations) are defined based on how they are situated that is their meaning)
- Gists as key part of representation–low bandwidth representation –what is situated/simulated
- Multimodal – integrates multiple sensors representation into common framework – part of situated
- One quale at a time – for any aspect of the illusory cartesean theater (example invertible illusions)
- Qualia Theory of Relativity – only value (meaning) is in the relationships between (dictionary)
- Narrative based representation–situated in time/space/multiple modalities (plausible narratives compete) Stream of consciousness is a cohesive narrative
- TD/BU – means to do context – rapid high level first –
- Types of Qualia types of situations – time as a quale, Affect as a quale, types of speech, ToM – (Evolving not static), aha and negative aha (means to know what is known and what is NOT known by the agent)
- Self – special type of qualia/situation (qualia self interacts with Continuity, unity, embodiment, sense of free will, reflection)
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