Google sets up feedback loop in its image recognition neural network - which looks for patterns in pictures - creating these extraordinary hallucinatory images

WARNING: MENTAL MASTURBATION BELOW...it just so happens your post is what turned me on. I didn't really set out to contradict anything that you said. Instead I wanted to suggest an alternative way to consider the emergence of machines and their inherent potential to achieve a sense of self. My field of study is not explicitly in computer science or neuroscience. I'm just someone who's curious. Note that the following claims are just whimsical speculation. It's a silly response, it rambles on, but ultimately the point being that computers hypothetically have a potential to emulate a complex enough neural network that could yield an emergence of a sense of self. This point is founded on the notion that aspects of our agency are sufficiently determined by an orchestration of neural activity (Note: due to the complexity of our brain's own neural network, observable properties on the constituent level are not indicative of properties on the level of an agent's action, so it becomes difficult or possibly impossible to draw causal relationships between the constituent and system levels.) IF we could provide the right "set of instructions" (i.e. sufficiently characterize the process of learning in a reasonably meaningful and general enough way), enough time, and supply enough processing power to iterate over a series of learning "generations", then a computer would be able to simulate a brain (you know like fucking monkey's writing Shakespeare....). If that simulation has a high degree of fidelity, a possible event that could emerge from this computer brain is a sense of self. Seeing as how this event emerges for our brains, and our brains are a vast network of interfacing neurons that can either be activated beyond their action-potential or inactive, there likely exists a potential for computers to have a sense of self given a particular set of initial conditions (the right adaptive algorithm and processing capacity). I'm just saying it is possible that one day computers may have the capacity to exhibit emotion or experience a sense of self as these events could be instances of emergence from vastly complex ANNs, just as those events have emerged from our own biological neural networks.

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I'd argue that machines have emerged out of a sort of survival; a technological persistence that is on par with biological survival that is. This persistence and the continual development of machine is a result of what could be considered analogous to a symbiotic relationship with man - a symbiotechnic relationship, if you will.

Consider the pace of advancing technology. It has yielded new and exciting products, but few transcend from this state to that of a truly revolutionary technology. Consider that a revolutionary technology for an individual is one that redefines a day-to-day routine in such a fashion that this change can be extrapolated from the individual to society, and results in a change in how society operates from that point forward. Some key general examples of this phenomenon are the automobile, flight, techniques for harnessing electricity, telephonic communication. However revolutionary these examples are, their functionality is narrow in scope; advancements can be made to optimize fuel consumption for planes, but a plane is for the most part limited to the function of flight. The computer, however, is the crowning jewel of these examples.

You could argue that the computer is far more revolutionary because it presents a broad range of potential functionality. I think a better way to look at this is to consider that the computer's main function is to receive input and respond according to instruction. This general function is what allows computers to be so useful in just about any context. The various modes of utilization are currently constrained by the computer's processing power and our ability to provide it with the right set of instructions.

It is this general ability to process information that is of most interest, because that is what our brain is designed to do. Every aspect of your life and your perceived reality is a result of information processed by your brain - that includes your emotions and the emotions of the artist and the "viewer" you mentioned. However, it is the sheer complexity and non-linearity of our biological neural networks that could be the reason we perceive emotions to be something more than just a calculated response or a result of a bunch of neurons firing. However, emotional responses are in fact sufficiently determined by collective neural activity, the difficulty is in accurately characterizing causal relationships between the activities on a constituent level and those on a system level.

Computers, because of their capacity to process information in a meaningful way, possess the potential to have a sense of self. But this doesn't really mean much. Considering a house fly's brain contains neuron's and processes information, it does not logically follow that the house fly could then contemplate the complexities of its existence. However, one difference is the brain of the fly is constrained by various evolutionary factors, and would take a far longer time to achieve a marginal boost in processing power (if at all possible, as more processing power for a fly is likely not a necessary adaptation). Computers on the other hand experience boosts in performance quite routinely, and with no immediate signs of approaching a limit. Even still, the amount of FLOPS required to simulate a network that could develop the capacity of human level intelligence is far greater than any supercomputer today by several orders of magnitude (that is conditional on how many FLOPS are used to model an individual neuron, and the degree of abstraction of certain processes performed by collections of neurons). But even in the most bare bones simulation, it would still be greater than the 1015 FLOPS that today's supercomputers can operate at.

TL;DR this sounded a lot better in my head. I'm gonna go eat a sandwich.

/r/technology Thread Parent Link - theguardian.com