Readit NewsOther aspects of ANN that show that Gödel doesn’t apply is that they are not formal systems. Formal system is a collection of defined operations. The building blocks of ANN could perhaps be built into a formal system. Petri nets have been demonstrated to be computationally equivalent to Turing machines. But this is really an indictment on the implementation. It’s the same as using your PC, implementing a formal system like its instruction set to run a heuristic computation. Formal system can implement informal systems.
I don’t think you have to look at humans very hard to see that humans don’t implement any kind of formal system and are not equivalent to Turing machines.
Function can mean inputs-outputs. But it can also mean system behaviors.
For instance, recurrence is a functional behavior, not a functional mapping.
Similarly, self-awareness is some kind of internal loop of information, not an input-output mapping. Specifically, an information loop regarding our own internal state.
Today's LLMs are mostly not very recurrent. So might be said to be becoming more intelligent (better responses to complex demands), but not necessarily more conscious. An input-output process has no ability to monitor itself, no matter how capable of generating outputs. Not even when its outputs involve symbols and reasoning about concepts like consciousness.
So I think it is fair to say intelligence and consciousness are different things. But I expect that both can enhance the other.
Meditation reveals a lot about consciousness. We choose to eliminate most thought, focusing instead on some simple experience like breathing, or a concept of "nothing".
Yet even with this radical reduction in general awareness, and our higher level thinking, we remain aware of our awareness of experience. We are not unconscious.
To me that basic self-awareness is what consciousness is. We have it, even when we are not being analytical about it. In meditation our mind is still looping information about its current state, from the state to our sensory experience of our state, even when the state has been reduced so much.
There is not nothing. We are not actually doing nothing. Our mental resting state is still a dynamic state we continue to actively process, that our neurons continue to give us feedback on, even when that processing has been simplified to simply letting that feedback of our state go by with no need to act on it in any way.
So consciousness is inherently at least self-awareness in terms of internal access to our own internal activity. And that we retain a memory of doing this minimal active or passive self-monitoring, even after we resume more complex activity.
My own view is that is all it is, with the addition of enough memory of the minimal loop, and a rich enough model of ourselves, to be able to consider that strange self-awareness looping state afterwards. Ask questions about its nature, etc.
Consciousness is nothing but the ability to have internal and external senses, being able to enumerate them, recursively sense them, and remember the previous steps. If any of those ingredients are missing, you cannot create or maintain consciousness.
ArsTechnica’s archived article: https://archive.is/wKPi6
The book on GitHub: https://github.com/hendricius/the-sourdough-framework
The Sourdough framework: https://www.the-sourdough-framework.com/
Also has a fantastic commit where the author rants about locales: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02... worth a read for some chuckles.
“All in all, I believe this proves that software developers as a whole and as a culture produce worse results than drug addicted butt fucked monkeys randomly hacking on typewriters while inhaling the fumes of a radioactive dumpster fire fueled by chinese platsic toys for children and Elton John/Justin Bieber crossover CDs for all eternity.”
The internal hard drive uses SCSI with an unusual connector. Adapting it didn't seem straightforward, and we weren't confident the old file system (HFS) would be easy to read from a modern system.
[0] Macintosh PowerBook Duo 280c: Technical Specifications https://support.apple.com/en-us/112137