[Melchior]

Originally Posted by Michael Chui

I would say it's more like the sensory input--patterns of light splashing across the retina, vibrations in the colchea, nerve firings in the nose, tongue, and skin--is the sheet music being generated spontaneously. That is, it's not random: it's entirely informed by sensory information.

Ah, so it's back to a network of associations, just specialized parts for different stimuli patterns and such.

I only touched on the sensory regions because consciousness is about sense. It's reception and processing what got received. I imagine introspection and reflection is something like parts of the brain dumping out remixes and other parts receiving and "sensing" it: that's the simplest and most plausible explanation I've heard.

Well, I'm thinking that because a lot of what is taken in through the senses is essentially disregarded in the process, not really making it to what is generally considered 'conscious thought', or did you mean that the disregarded data is something like white noise, aware of it, but just not important enough to the overall 'melody'? Hmm... reflection and introspection: record, remix, rework, replay, repeat, it's a never ending loop with a constant input feed.

Yeah. I don't know whether or not research is being done on this topic (probably), but I'm not really aware of any of it.

Assuming it's correct, though, it provides an explanation for several things. Most trauma-based insanities, for instance, are a cancer-like echoing of past incidences. And a creator who locks himself up and doesn't allow external things to influence his originality tends to fail to create anything, arguably because the feedback loops don't have any novelty to work with and die out.

I remember some of my friends talking about how some of their AI programs work better with some constants than others, even if the overall algorithm is the same. But yeah, there's most probably research being done somewhere, I should really browse more journals, in everything, sigh.

Oh, we already have conscious computers. What we don't have are self-conscious computers. I was saying it'd take at least a century to figure out how to do actual mind control. Or memory forensics.

Ah, I see. I think mind control would likely require a (self-aware) consciousness at least a magnitude of hierarchy level (based on that memory-prediction framework) greater than ours for it to work. If not in the case of this framework, then still at some greater value, marking a milestone or sorts, such as the jump to self-awareness from simple awareness. (I wonder if there'll be an analogous mirror stage to go with it )

The book is made for laymen, as my math professor complained when I showed him. You might be able to learn more if you poke around with Numenta products; I know my knowledge isn't up to snuff for understanding what they're doing. I barely understand neural networks.

For motivation, there is a section at the end where he talks about consciousness, qualia, and robots taking over the world. It's nice.

That's good, I don't necessarily enjoy reading math all that much, even though I seem to have been doing a lot more of that recently, luckily it's just calculus... >.< lol, we're all zombies.

tbqh, challenging questions that can't be answered pithily tend to be too slow-moving to stick around the first page. I would know, having been in like... half of them. Which is fine, technically, since any worthwhile question is going to demand thoughtful reflection in between posts. But they tend to lose popularity contests; Christianity-bashing is much more fun and exciting.

Hrm. I can't remember the last time I saw a thoughtful thread on religion.

that is quite saddening, old threads getting lost and neglected because they're more worthwhile. As one of my friends commented when he visited these forums, a lot of the stuff he saw was rather mindless, granted, a bit less mindless than other forums, but mindless nonetheless. Ah well, let's hope I don't get too caught up in the Christianity-bashing to lose focus of what I feel is more important.