Evolution proves that algorithms can solve any problem: Difference between revisions

Aha, but the very imagination, creativity and narrative construction skills you point to ''are themselves the product of an [[algorithm]]'': the [[algorithm]] encoded into [[evolution by natural selection]].

Here they might appeal to {{br|Darwin’s Dangerous Idea}}: it was [[evolution by natural selection]], after all, and ''only'' [[evolution by natural selection]] that as operated relentlessly, for 370 million years since the first legged fish crawled out of the primordial ooze and onto the shores of a new, terrestrial world. That single [[algorithm]] transformed those little flippy-finned mudsuckers into the highest type of sentient being yet known in this neighbourhood of the Galaxy: the [[ISDA ninja]]. And, to the best of our current thinking, all an [[ISDA ninja]] is doing is using her brain, and that is purely [[algorithm|algorithmic]], we see that human natural intelligence ''is'' an algorithmic process, ''created out of'' an algorithmic process.  

Herewith, the case for the defence.

It is not that algorithms ''cannot'' in principle generate general intelligence — though the “[[Darwin’s dangerous idea]]” arguments ''are'' a bit hand-wavy — but that the particular ones you find in [[artificial intelligence]] as it is currently developing — and, no, it isn’t “evolving” in a technical sense, which is kind of the point — ''won’t''. Not just ''any'' [[algorithm]] is capable of self-awareness — a good thing, or you would spend more time in meaningful communication with your carrot cake than is necessarily healthy. They are a special kind of algorithm. Some folks have some ideas about what their special qualities may be ({{author|Douglas Hofstadter}} thinks the key may be [[Reflexive proposition|recursivity]]<ref>{{br|I am a Strange Loop}}.</ref>)

Hofstadter is at his best when when he addresses the reflexivity of human consciousness — the magic that emerges courtesy of the strange loop whereby the human perceives ''itself'' inside the universe it constructs, and where that working narrative must allow for, to explain, ones own causal impact on the universe. This sets off an infinite loop which creates magical artifacts by itself.

In Roland Ennos’ recent book {{br|The Wood Age}} he gives a better example:

The only way you can explain the movement of those branches is by reference to your own presence. It is hard to see a dematerialized computer operating in a virtual space, having to solve that same problem, other than at the quantum level (it need hardly be said that quantum elements are not the same as machine consciousness - that would be a reductionism too far.

Machines are more like {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}}’s sentinels, watching dissociatively. They purport describe the world as it is without affecting it: they monitor, measure, observe, process and give back but not to themselves, and not for themselves. to do that would be to colour their observations about human interaction, which would be to defeat their commercial purpose.

 

{{Author|Kazuo ishiguro}}’s {{br|Klara and the Sun}}, which I happened to read straight after {{br|The Wood Age}}, makes the same point through the android’s unusual segmented spatial perception. It prompts the question: to what extent is consciousness a function of our own peculiar evolved perceptive apparatus? It seems to me it must be. When we design artificial intelligence with a blank slate, and especially if we come at it from a Behaviourist [[machine learning]] angle, which cannot have been the route to consciousness of human evolution, deprecating as it does the notion of an inner consciousness altogether, we would make different design choices, arrive at functional intelligence different way and these might lead to profoundly shifted articulations of ”consciousness”, if indeed any kind of consciousness emerges at all.