Weekly QuEST Discussion Topics, 10 Feb

QuEST 10 Feb 2023

Although definitions / positions can be quibbled over and those discussions are valuable – I suggest for this meeting you adopt this usage of the words so you can understand what such a position might provide our QuEST for flexible AI.  Keep track of the technical debt incurred by adopting these definitions because we will want to edit them in the future as we converge in on QuEST positions. 

• Intelligence is the ability of an agent to gather observations, create knowledge (can be from experience, thinking, sensing, culture), store that knowledge away to afford subsequent application of that knowledge to accomplish tasks – it is not performance at a skill – possibly skill acquisition efficiency is a useful twist to that definition– from Chollet
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a machine that possesses intelligence
• In nature Knowledge can be acquired via evolution, experience or culture (experience includes manipulation of existing knowledge to create new knowledge = reasoning or thinking)
• Why did consciousness develop?  It developed as a solution to knowledge acquisition (experience / culture) in a form that affords robust flexible behavior.  Consciousness formulates knowledge in context of sensorimotor world model and in our case emotions moods agency with spatial temporal causal coherence
•  What is consciousness good for?  Consciousness affords flexible intelligence by the representation it uses for storing the knowledge it gathers (our world model).  That knowledge is accessed / exploited by unconscious processes.

Knowledge is acquired via sensing / experience (includes reasoning) – therefore it is involved in creating a representation of sensations in the context of the sensorimotor world model with spatial temporal causal coherence to be captured in a form to be exploited flexibly – similarly as the critter interacts with the world consciousness creates a representation of those experiences in a form to be stored for efficient access and exploitation.

The discussion this week will be what are the guiding principles of the conscious representation.  Specifically we will return to all the observations, sub-tenets, that led to the ideas captured in the S3Q Theory of Consciousness.

1. Structural Coherence
   1. Interaction – enough fidelity with reality (bits of awareness info) facilitate conscious driven interaction  (situations are learned via interactions)
   2. There is a similarity measure applicable for the conscious representation – (color wheel example) – the similarity measure is between situations/qualia/chunks
   3. Spatial, Temporal and Causal consistency of the representation.
2. Situation based processing (situations as variables) – fundamental unit of conscious cognition
   1. 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)
   2. Gists as key part of representation–low bandwidth representation –what is situated/simulated
   3. Multimodal – integrates  multiple sensors representation into common framework – part of situated
   4. One quale at a time – for any aspect of the illusory cartesean theater (example invertible illusions)
   5. Qualia Theory of Relativity – only value (meaning) is in the relationships between (dictionary)
   6. Narrative based representation–situated in time/space/multiple modalities (plausible narratives compete) Stream of consciousness is a cohesive narrative
   7. TD/BU – means to do context – rapid high level first –
3. Conscious representation of situations are done via simulation (cognitively decoupled)
   1. simulation is an organized body of knowledge that produces specific simulations of a situation’s instances
   2. Imagined past, imagined present, imagined future – cognitively decoupled
   3. Exformation (pattern completion inferring mechanism)
4. Qualia Compression (infinite number of stimuli into a single quale, low bandwidth 50 bits/sec)
   1. Ability to generate meaning / situated  simulation of a new concept – the unexpected query
   2. 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)
      1. Self – special type of qualia/situation (qualia self interacts with Continuity, unity, embodiment, sense of free will, reflection)