Looking forward to the meetup.

How long is this meetup?

Hi Koushik, lecture and discussion will end at 2 PM. Bob

Hi Randall... Yes. That will be abundantly clear; not the least is that understanding CONSC may be vital to AI's future. Bob

Congratulations, Bob.

You sold out the event at 70 (The fire marshal's limit).
I believe you are the third person to do so after Ben Goertzel and Peter Norvig and the first internal member of the group to do so.

- Monica

I'd like someone with a decent digital camera to take a few pictures of the MeetUp tomorrow (the speaker AND the audience) so we can get more pictures on our web site. Post pictures to our photo album here.

PLEASE don't use flash since we're videotaping. If your camera can't take pictures of people sitting perfectly still, hanging on to Bob's every word in a well-lit room without a flash, leave the camera at home :-)

Great presentation today by Bob Blum. Just wish we had more time to explore more depth and dimension to this holy grail of subjects..

Thanks for a very interesting and informative presentation, Bob. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

AI may have a "Glass Ceiling" or "Silicon Ceiling" without consciousness - makes sense.

I thought that the talk mixed lots of different categories together, probably causing confusion for the uninitiated. The intelligence of crows and chimps can exist without them being conscious of it. Isn't it possible for beings, say zombies, to formulate unconscious strategies for achieving certain goals in the real world? Then what role does consciousness play? It seems plausible, that we can build robots with intelligence of a raven to function in real world - but would it be conscious?

Great start, hopefully we can narrow down the specific issues in the next 2 or 3 talks!

Calls for a better defintion of CONSC.
I followed Crick and Koch's lead.
See their must read 2003 paper
"A Framework for Consciousness" online.
No definition or argument , however clever, will make
the problem of CONSC go away - it's a fundamental science/ engineering problem that will not be solved by fancy talk.
Remember the yellow spots disappearing when you stared at
the rotating blue grid. No amount of talk will change or explain that - only progress in neuroscience.

CONSC talks draw a diverse audience with diverse expectations. I made a deliberate decision to only deal with philosophy of mind issues this time. I felt compelled to acknowledge the breadth of the subject (in my slides), a tack that I don't take when just addressing the AI perspective, which will come later.

Am I caught btwn worlds of Science and Humanities? YES
(and I love it). (See C P Snow's famous essay on Two Worlds).
Truth, values, emotion are essential in both worlds.

Relation of CONSC and AI. You can build narrow AI systems
without CONSC: witness Darpa Robotic Cars or Deep Blue -
ver impressive but no CONSC. You MAY not be able to do
human-level AI without CONSC, since it provides a broad
integration of perception and cognition. See David Gelernter's
essay "AI is Lost in the Woods" and my response (both in
Technology Review) and on my website.

What if consciousness is simply an understanding that "the self is part of the environment". Kind of like realizing that there is a camera man for every show, and not just an invisible observer? If Consciousness is simply an understanding that "I exist" in this world, and that "I have control over MY limbs" then why is it so great?

Does a spider have any less control over it's 8 legs if its not "consious" of them? Would a butterfly fly any better if it were conscious?

Consciousness does not have to be the goal. It a symptom of good AGI. Consciousness emerges partly from abstract symbolic manipulation, which emerges from non conscious things....

We know about the sensory portion of this, but deriving meaning from those perceptions, now I?m afraid it?s going to take a much deeper understanding of quantum mechanics for that. Especially if our IQs are going to remain intact. Randall you?re a brave man saying thing like this: ?What if consciousness is, at essence, very simple? What if it is simply and only adding as input the recent history of a system's own actions and reactions to all other perceptual streams??

The two-fold elements of the process appear to be the ability to sense an environment and the ability to derive meaning from those perceptions.

Consciousness, I see it as a two-fold symptom. It is a symptom because it is not a thing and it seems to be derived from a process.

Meaning is derived from connections of perceptions. No consciousness or quantum physics needed.

I'm scared when I'm looking down a cliff. Why? because there's a strong connection between "looking down a cliff" & "dying". subjective Meaning/Feeling created! Where is the quantum physics and/or consciousness?

Quantum mechanics seems to be a buzzword brought up at the meet-ups these few times I?ve attended. My use of the term was done to contrast the simplicity that I believe the subject deserves.

I think it's just that quantum mechanics sounds sexy and nobody claims to understand it. The experts say if you think you do, then you don't. It's just weird. Einstein had problems with spooky action at a distance. Me too.

I was actually impressed by the inherent simplicity in Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence" where he said the key fact is that we're always predicting the near future and can thus discover unexpected things quickly. That helps to notice what might be important details like there is now a bear in the cave. His Numenta co simulates cortical columns rather than neurons and synapses. Great demos a couple of years ago and now a partner sells a recognizer for people in security videos. No CONSC. yet.

Yep, QM comes up when folks see consc as non-computational. Not so. Shadlen found that decision making in monkeys is computed by neurons sending messages through different brain structures and feedback from these structures. He could predict their decisions. A human brain is much more complex (layers, connectivity, feedback loops), genes turning things on and off and its a self organizing system like a flock of birds. Consc is part of this bio mess. Devil is in the details, synchronization?

Regarding QM as key to consciousness: What is the reply to this obvious thought experiment? Make h bar (plank's constant) arbitrarily irrelevant by replacing a brain with an equivalent giant version that replicates the inputs and outputs to each neuron at a very large scale. The resulting "mind" will certainly act identically to the original, including making claims to feel conscious. But it will be as close to Newtonian as you wish to make it. (Certainly this is a well-worn line of argument?)