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?

Is a Physical Dollar Worth More than a Digital Dollar?

In one year a dollar may be spent multiple times. A physical dollar spent 20 times generates more economic activity than a dollar spent once and is therefore worth more. A digital dollar can be spent millions of times per year. Since digital money can be spent more frequently than physical money, digital money is worth more. But too much economic activity leads to inflation. A physical dollar can be spent less frequently but is less inflationary. Which effect dominates?

Does it Matter What Income Tax Revenue is Spent On?

There are two parts to income taxes: removing income and spending revenue. Both parts have social and economic effects, but which part is more significant? Progressive income taxes take "excessive" income from wealthier people and prevent them from getting too far out from the norm. This helps create a more financially equal and healthy society than would otherwise develop. This much is good. But this effect is destroyed if tax revenue is spent entirely on projects making it easier for "go-getters" to make more money. Spending should be regressive.

How Peer Pressure Could Fix the Education System

What people around us consider important, we tend to consider important. If we are surrounded by people who care about education, we are also likely to care about education. If they value studying hard and learning, then we are likely to as well.
By divvying students into groups of motivated and unmotivated students such that motivated students dominate the peer culture, a culture of hard work and learning should prevail. But what ratio of motivated students to underperforming students is necessary to tilt the scales in the direction of high performance?

The Ethics of Forced Normalcy

In the past society has condemned so-called socially deviant behaviors and orientations such as homosexuality. Psychologists, religious leaders, teachers, and other supposedly well-meaning people tried to reform these so-called deviant homosexuals to be straight, or to at least, not act on their orientations.

Most of us in the west have come to at least accept and sometimes even welcome homosexuality. It has entered mainstream culture in big ways and, at least in the larger metropolitian areas, is generally considered acceptable . Same sex couples can live together, hold hands, kiss, and basically do everything straight couples do. The point is, we no longer think they need to be "fixed".

This is not the case for other individual differences such as different learning styles, interpersonal styles, and moral orientations. What I mean by this is that there isa growong movement among people with Asperger's to not be forced to normal social interactions. there are certain mannerisms which non-Aperger's people may not feel is normal, but help Asperger's people interact. Forcing them to cease this behavior and adopt more normal behavior is dangerously close to forcing homosexuals to become straight.

The same may be said about learning styles. In our standardized schooling system, there are many children who can not sit still first thing in the morning, or in the afternoon, or learn through rote memorization, or a whole host of differences in individual attention and learning styles. While some of this cross-training is necessary to prepare students to interact with employers and other people, blanket conformity is oppressive. it prevents people from reaching their even mid-range potential and is essentially a human rights violation. Or at least can be argued to be a human rights violation since the pursuit of happiness is a constitutionally desired right.

My intent here is simply to point out how we may be falling into the same old traps of trying to "help" people live "normal" lives. We should keep the idea fresh in our minds that our good intentions may actually be just as oppressive and wrong-headed as "fixing" homosexuals.

The Myth of the Value

In a multicultural, diverse society, we do not have values "like we used to". (I put "like we used to" in quotes, because this is pure speculation on my part, I wasn't there and I have not studied history deeply enough, so I don't know.) Values are socially learned; we learn them and absorb them from the people we socialize with - our siblings, our parents, our neighbors, our schoolmates, etc. What they find important and care about, we tend to, at the very least, notice and become aware of.

"In the past", when our social circles were much more limited and monocultural, our values were probably also much more clear and concrete - we knew what was important because it did not change much and everyone else felt pretty much the same way. Now, however, especially in larger cities, there is an ever changing crowd of anonymous and semi-anonymous people from various parts of the world. Where they came from, people had at least some different values. When we connect with these people in any way - either through seeing the way they dress, decorate their homes, or speak - what we feel to be important is altered slightly. "If they care about this, then maybe it is important," we seem to feel. Our attention is drawn and our sense of importance is scattered. Since our values are connected to what we feel to be important, our values are scattered too.

Which is why, in a multicultural, diverse society, we do not have values "like we used to."