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:

1. Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition
2. 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)
3. Gists as key part of representation–low bandwidth representation –what is situated/simulated
4. Multimodal – integrates  multiple sensors representation into common framework – part of situated
5. One quale at a time – for any aspect of the illusory cartesean theater (example invertible illusions)
6. Qualia Theory of Relativity – only value (meaning) is in the relationships between (dictionary)
7. Narrative based representation–situated in time/space/multiple modalities (plausible narratives compete) Stream of consciousness is a cohesive narrative
8. TD/BU – means to do context – rapid high level first –
9. 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)
10. Self – special type of qualia/situation (qualia self interacts with Continuity, unity, embodiment, sense of free will, reflection)