Saturday, July 16, 2016

The surprising role of cloud computing in the understanding of consciousness

I am filing this one under "extremely speculative".









Dan S said...

What are it's goals? How would it determine what should change and how/how much? Would it need to inspect the behavior of other "conscious clouds" and adjust accordingly? How would it balance self interest vs the interest of cloud society? Or would it? Would it consider it's relationship to humans? Would these imperatives be intial inputs from humans? So much more on which to speculate.

Unknown said...

I suggest that "arranging a computing system that can observe every aspect of itself in operation" is, strictly speaking, more than is possible for known exemplars of consciousness, at least directly - and therefore can't be a true requirement. For example, there are lots of aspects of human thought that are not observable, especially when you get down to the "hardware" level.

All that said, I would agree that there needs to be a lot more reflexive capability than most systems have at this time before there's likely to be much progress on the consciousness front.

Avdi Grimm said...

I think about this a a lot: the emergent possibilities of greater self reflection in software. I wonder if a necessary precondition for making it work well would be to also somehow add the *resiliency* of our plasticity: we are prevented (usually) from bricking ourselves by the simple fact that our plasticity is far from 100% effective.

Sean McGrath said...
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