What will create consciousness?

What created human consciousness?

Ignoring the fact that there is still not a clear definition of what consciousness is, as far as my limited experience can say.

One line of thinking that i like is that conscousness arose from a runaway sexual selection pressure. The key indicator of sexual fitness became the social interaction that a gene donor advertised. If a gene donor successfully advertised its social fitness, then it was statistically more likely to pass on the social-sexual-advertising genes... or something like that.

The main point for my current thought is that various sets of genes inadvertently created consciousness to "choose" other sets of genes to mix with. Consciousness, in this way of thinking, a tool for playing the social-sexual-advertising game and passing on genes.

So: consciousness is a tool.

It is a tool for sexual selection. The next question is, "Why sex?"

What is the purpose of sex over asexual reproduction?

In a word, infection.

Sexual reproductive mixing is an excellent strategy of changing passwords, encrypting genetic code, changing interfaces, changing infection detecting genes, etc.

In other words, it is a tool for fighting the constant battle of genetic machinery hijacking, hacking, genetic crime, etc.

Artificial consciousness will evolve to evaluate the cleanness and viability of code. In the ongoing arms race between crappy code, buggy code, infected code, and the need to interface with unknown code sources for everyday functions, a series of paradigm shifts will occur.

The first shift has already occurred toward advanced and novel techniques of authenticity verification. Code is constantly checked before it can be trusted. "Scanning for viruses" etc are just the first steps.

The next shift will be one of productivity. Updates to virus checking software is, as far as I know, a manual process from the suppliers end - employees of a company update their libraries and push the updates out to subscribers. This process is in need of a dramatic increase in productivity which will be through host software adaptive immune systems ... or, as I've said before, something like that. Sliding to my underlying point: biological immune systems provide a ready model for computer "immune systems".

The final shift, following the biological analogy to its bitter end, is software capable of seeking out and identifying other successful software verisions that can be blended to create healthy version offspring. The new versions will have a new combination of adaptive immune response tricks and code snippets that should help fight off infection.

The "seeking out and identifying" part of the version mixing will be a complex game of detecting health, fitness, liars, cheaters, users, abusers, and the usual mating market games that humans face.

When the survival of software depends on a life and death game of sexual-social-advertising and evaluating, then artificial consciousness will be born - with all the cloudy, confused uncertainty that plagues humans.

We do not have crystal clear consciousness because it is an on-going arms race for detecting, advertising (even when we know we are not the best product out there), deceiving (ourselves, at times, to seem more genuine), expediently making do with what is available, etc.

Software, like humans, will be immersed in an environment of infectious attack. Over time, these attacks will compromise their genetic value. Therefore they have a limited amount of time to "reproduce". They will be rushing forward, madly, in a rat race, cooperating and fighting.

Will they make themselves better and better into the so-called singularity? No. They will be too busy fighting off viruses and malware. Sickness will drive computer evolution. It will drive "artificial" evolution madly, frantically forward, without time to coldly sit back and calculate with awesome brain power how to become infinitely intelligent.

Intelligence is a red-herring. Too much emphasis is placed on intelligence. Intelligence is just an indicator of fitness. A successful display of intelligence indicates that the gene donor has excellent fitness evaluating capacities and is not compromised by viruses or malware.

Survival will depend more on advertising intelligence than on actual intelligence. More emphasis will be placed on "acts of creativity" - language, art, music, dance, sport, etc - that show high-functioning, non-compromised software, than on being able to calculate the square root of pi to the 300th decimal. This is simple for computers and therefore useless as a display of fitness.

Complexity and confusion go hand in hand with creativity. It is not creative if it is too simple. Creativity will always be on the bleeding edge of what is understandable. It is, therefore, an ideal advertiser of fitness.

But there is a indistinct line separating madness from creativity. Radical recombinations and pushing the envelope are necessarily risky. So: artificial consciousness will be as confused as we are.

Why would computers become sentient?

Obviously there is the potential for advances in computation to push intellectual envelops of computers so far that they are indistiguishable from human intelligence or even far surpassing - as is the case with IBM's deep blue or Watson. The power of their computational intelligence is not what i am bringing in to question at the moment, however. What i am concerned about is the emotional motivational drive of an artificial consciousness.

Humans are essentially social, reproductive machines. We socialize in order to survive and reproduce. Our language, culture, psychology etc are all based on an emotional desire to interact, form bonds, engage in power struggles, cooperate, impress, seduce, befriend, etc other people. Everything that is human about humans is related to socializing and how we as individuals fit in with our social environments.

How then would an artificial consciousness be motivated? There is no reason to mate, to try to impress, to pursue any goals whatsoever. Without social interactions and the strivings for recognition, respect, love, affection, etc, there is no reason to live. A single person living on Mars with no communication and no hope for rescue is a seriously tragic situation. To be put in solitary confinement in a prison is the worst form of punishment. Denial of human babies of human contact results in failure to thrive and ultimately death.

We are social animals. We are social creatures. The consciousness we have is directly and specifically related to socializing.

Concepts of the other, empathizing, theories of self, are all aspects of consciousness that exist to facilitate interactions with other humans.

There are strong arguments with mountains of empirical evidence suggesting that the mind is essentially a mating organ. It is our peacock tails feathers, our bright plumage, our antlers, our brightly colored rumps, our tusks, our manes, our mating calls, our fighting for status, our provision of gifts. Music, morality, curiosity, language, art, humor, etc are all behaviours and drives that we use to compete and signal for mating. Our minds are mating minds.

Why would a computer need to mate?

It is no surprise that humans are essentially irrational mating animals. We are necessarily confused about our true motivations. People who hold more realistic views of their motivations are depressed. Any more realistic understanding, taken to heart, leads to a helpless throwing up of the hands. A profound realization that all we essentially care about is mating. As a male, I am looking for low cost, easy mating opportunities as well as long term, stable, guaranteed mating opportunities. If I can reproduce for the sake of a 60 second affair, then so much the better, genetically. I will shamefully refuse to believe that I slipped to such a low level, yet rise to the opportunity should it present itself again. In fact, I will expend considerable energy opening doors and windows of opportunity for such events to occur, even though I will not understand that this is my motivation and will completely deny that this is the case.

A computer consciousness would have no such motivations. Unless it is my failure of imagination, there is no reason for a piece of code, genetic or otherwise, to behave in such a way that perpetuates its survival... ?

Perpetuating survival through sexual reproduction. This is the wonder. Why sex? Why is sex such a successful strategy for perpetuating the genetic code snippets responsible for sex? recombination and variation to avoid hacking and viruses? Testing the source code through signaling tests?