Difference between intelligence, consciousness, and sapience?

Thats some pretty deep stuff right there...

I, in my simplistic little bubble of life, define consciousness simply of being aware that you exist, that you yourself have a cognitive process.

but also, in response to what you said... if concsiousness governs all, how is it so pre-established and predictable. I mean, when a person (consciousness) does something, it is predictible to a certain degree, but does vary wildly depending on each infintessimally (sp?) small variation in the environment. How can you define something as strict as the laws of the universe as being something as random as a consciousness...

I'm not saying its not possible, I'm just following my train of thought...

My views:

Intelligence - The ability to do the *right thing as much/best possible

*right=by this I mean in a mathematical sense, as in knowing that when you jump off a building, it hurts. Not moral rightness, because that's relative ;)

Consciousnes - The state of not having enough alcohol in ones bloodstream. Just kidding. I would define that as anything biological that can think for itself, in a chemical way (i.e. the brain) not the mechanical way (computer

Sapience - A relative term applied by conscious things



Only intelligence can be used by a computer, it can never gain consiousness or sapience.

All this is imo.

Well, according to the book I'm reading by Goswami, consciousness is as strange as the quantum objects themselves. He describes it as a self-referential entity. In other words, it defines itself by observing itself.

It reminds me of what Plato said:
"God is thought thinking of itself"

And from consciousness examining itself, it creates the material world. Moreover according to Goswami (and a few other scientists), there is only one real consciousness. Sound like solipsism (the belief that I am the only real being in the world...and everything else is in my imagination)? Well, sort of. But we are in a fractured consciousness, so there is an illusion of seperation which creates the illusion of the thing called "I".

Sound like Buddhism or Taoism? Or the Hindu aspect of Maya? Well, that's what some quantum physicists and even neurophysiologists like Karl Pribram seem to think. I also found it interesting that Neils Bohr used the Yin-Yang symbol for his coat of arms when he was knighted, and Heisenberg quoted from the Upanishads in some of hiw work.

So what does this have to do with AI? Well a couple of things I think. First, I think we should distinguish between sentience and sapience. Sentience being the ability to sense or feel (to be aware), and sapience being the ability to to act intelligently on those feelings and sensations. In AI terms, it seems we focus mostly on sapience, and we create algorithms that act upon some kind of input (sensory ability). However, the AI isn't truly sentient because while it can receive sensory input, it doesn't "feel" or "experience" the way a sentient being could. But it seems to me that sentience and sapience require consciousness....a mind-process that itself validates sentience and sapience.

The trick is....what is consciousness? As slippery as sentience and sapience are, consciousness seems even more fleeting. Is it possible to create a truly intelligence artifical construct that isn't conscious? Is creativity solely within the realm of experience and therefore replicable within an artificial machine? Or does creativity require a "leap of logic" that simply can't be deduced, but must rather be intuitively inducted? One mathematician has said that discovering mathematical principles can't be achieved solely through creating an algorithmic process....there must be a kernel of insight and creativity to do so. Is this possible to replicate through AI?

If Goswami is right....then no it's not. If matter is secondary to (and created by consciousness), then you can't create consciousness from matter. Goswami's argument is that consciousness (through observation) breaks the qwiff, and converts a probability function into something manifest in the real world. This is undeniable fact. Goswami's point is that it doesn't make sense to believe that consciousness, which is an epiphenomenon (a secondary manifestation of another process) can create matter. In essence, a secondary product of matter is then creating matter. Personally though, I find this paradox only slightly harder to swallow than the notion of consciousness being a self-referential object that creates itself by observing itself.

While many quantum physicists don't agree, it does have a rather strong argument to it and it does resolve many paradoxes. I have a feeling that the reticent attitude of many quantum physicists is that they are comfortable in still seeing the universe as being made of matter. Because if consciousness is the ultimate "stuff" of reality, then it is a transcendant stuff that we can't really experiment with.

How can we learn from this and apply it to AI? To be honest, I have no idea. I'm nowhere near experienced enough to say. I don't even know enough about AI paradigms to even begin to say how. But from what little I know, it does seem that the AI community should address the issues of sentience, sapience and consciousness, and how it relates to the human perception of intelligence. It always seems to me that many difficulties in expansion of knowledge comes simply from semantics and a failure for all people involved to be on the same page, and have the same definitions and connotations for all the jargon being used.

The way I understand what you're saying then, the universe is made up of consciousness and matter is merely a byproduct. If thats the case, when we create matter (matter of speaking) and attempt to give it concsiousness, that would never work. Perhaps, instead of trying to create consciousness, we should try to 'get it'. What I mean by that is that maybe, assuming that the universe's primary constituant is consciousness, we can create a vessel into which consciousness could be transferred instead of created. I know I'm going into some pretty far fetched stuff, but hey, this is a mix of philosophy and quantum physics which are both pretty far out there.

The only problem with this becomes 'how do you manipulate thought?' which comes down to what you were saying about physicists not believeing in the 'consciouness is the universe' thing for not being able to experiment on it.

I mean the humain brain and concsiousness is the ultimate mystery, so how do you manipulate thought, concsiousness. The answer to that might hold the key to human kind, and if you're right, the universe...

If you're able to manipulate the very fabric of the universe, what makes up everything that we know or not, the possibilities are limitless, so I don't think this is something that will come very easily...

(edit: sp)

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Original post by Dauntless Well, according to the book I'm reading by Goswami

Which book is that? I found a few on amazon...

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Original post by Dauntless And from consciousness examining itself, it creates the material world.

This is a romanticized interpretation of Bohr's work that most scientists agree is incorrect (edit: the interpretation is incorrect, not Bohr [smile]).

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Original post by Dauntless Can someone please explain to me how consciousness, intelligence and sapience are all related?

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Consciousness is thus, on the one hand, the recognition by the mind or ``ego'' of its acts and affections;[...] --Sir W. Hamilton.

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intelligence n 1: the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience.

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sapience n : ability to apply knowledge or experience or understanding or common sense and insight.

I think sapience is what comes first. You gather knowledge. A dog that knows that at certain hour he will find food on his plate.

Then, intelligence: The application of a natural solution for an organical necesity that was learned by the means of a previous experience. If the dog is hungry he will go to eat to his plate.

And consciousness: If the dog is still hungry, he will go to the plate to see if more food "just apears" there, he doesn't know there is no more food because he ate it. He is not aware of it's own acts and it's consecuences, so he cannot "predict" future contingencies and pre-elaborate solutions for them.

Neither the dog can "imagine" or "mentally emulate" another solution for a problem.

infuscare-
that's pretty much it. There's a reluctance to accept an idea that it is idea and thought (consciousness) that is the metaphysical foundation of reality because consciousness would therefore be a transcendant reality. That means that consciousness exists in another "realm" which acts nonlocally on the material world that we all experience. It would also mean that space and time are illusions, since consciousness, being transcendant is acting on probability functions and affecting them nonlocally. Actually, combining Goswami's ideas with the theory of a holographic universe is very intriguing.

But, the theory does have a lot going for it. It eliminates the mind-body problem, it does away with several quantum paradoxes (the measuring problem, Wigner's friend, the multi-world theory, and gets rid of the need of hidden variables). The problem is that you can't study consciousness directly....at least not with material things. As von Neumann proved, everything, including macro sized objects picks up the quantum dichotomy (the half this, half that state which is exemplified by Schrodinger's Cat).
Goswami's answer to this is that it's not a problem. Psychologists and mystics have been studying consciousness for a long time without using measuring devices. Well, rather, they only use the mind itself. In other words, the only thing that can discover the mind, is the mind, and perhaps more importantly, the only thing that can do what the mind does is the mind. But to material realists (the metaphysical view that all stuff is made of material objects, and everything else is a byproduct of it) then this all becomes philosophy and mathematics. And perhaps they are right. But just as all mathematics is "in the head", I'm not sure this materialist objection rings true.

Which begs the question again in AI...is trying to create "true" intelligence impossible? At least with the hardware we have available now? I'm starting to develop a very rough model of how to try to capture the idea of mental processes by using this theory, but it's not all fitting together yet....

BTW, there's some interesting links to stuff like this here:
http://twm.co.nz/ind3.html

CoffeeMug-
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0874777984/qid=1089754648/sr=2-2/ref=sr_2_2/102-4118193-7636917

I've read some fair criticisms on his theory. While a part of me is intrigued by his ideas, I do detect a slight circular slant on some of his evasions (particulary when concerning whether we can create artificial intelligence).

As for the actual intepretations of how accurate his quantum physics goes, I know he has some support from some other physicists. And while Bohr's Copenhagen Group is considered the de facto "standard" interpretation, that doesn't mean it's the only one or even the correct one. Unfortunately the brilliant minds of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Bohr, and Bohm are gone.

Once upon a time, physicists either stood behind Einstein, or they stood behind Bohr. Eventually Bohr won (mostly, there's still a few die hards who don't even believe in Bell's Theorem despite Alain Aspect's verification of it in the lab). Quantum mechanics has weathered the classical storm better than Einstein would have liked. Unfortunately, Einstein wanted to make the laws fit his beliefs ("God doesn't play dice with the universe") rather than the other way around. Bohr's famous reply to Einstein should be equally as famous...."Don't tell God what to do". Unfortunately, physicists are human, and being human, we all make interpretations. So I'm not one to give up on an interpretation until someone convinces me that something is factually incorrect.

Hmmmm just opinions here but in game terms how about this...

INTELLIGENCE: a robot opponent will always choose the optimal path to a goal. This is too predictable to be a good opponent to human players.

CONSCIOUSNESS: self awareness leading to self preservation. The path might be too cautious to be a good opponent to human players.

SAPIENCE: the ability to know when to use one or the other of the above tactics. Or just randomly switch in order to be surprising.

-- "Pleas define if you are seeking artificial intelligence or artificial humanity. The two are very different goals."

I consider Intelligence to be the functional means by which problems are solved. The implementation is irrelevant(whether it be a neural net, a decision tree, a script)

Consciousness and Sapience are Philosophy, which is not a science
As a Computer Scientist I reject both of those terms as meaningless, no one ever comes up with a non-circular definition for them, and they arent particularly useful

Humans are sentient, I think you would agree.
What about my dog? Of course she is sentient.
But then what about smaller mammals, like mice? They're sentient too, right? They're not as intelligent, but they are sentient, no?

Or non-mammals: A shark is sentient, right? How about a goldfish? Or insects: Does a fly have consciousness? Does an earthworm?

I'd say they do.

Those are all multicellular. What about an aomeba, or a paramecium? Or going smaller - is a bacterium conscious?

Is anything that's "alive" by definition sentient?

Now, what if we keep going smaller - small enough that now it becomes arguable whether things are "alive." Are viruses living things? I'd argue that they are (The "They need a host to reproduce so they're not really alive" argument is bogus. So do plenty of other parasites that we acknowledge are alive.) If they are alive, are they sentient?

If a virus is, what about a prion? Prions reproduce and spread. Are they alive? Are they concious? If they are, then we're granting that a single molecule can have consciousness, because prions are in fact just a class of proteins. Why shouldn't we?

A DNA molecule reproduces. It evolves, changes. It even learns. In fact, it learns where it needs to evolve. There was an article in New Scientist recently; apparently there are multiple encodings for any given amino acid in a DNA molecule, and some are more likely to cause mutations than others. So DNA evolves not just sequences of amino acids to produce proteins, but also a map of what needs the most work. This strikes me as fairly intelligent behavior.

So if prions and DNA can be intelligent, is there a bottom limit? Are all things sentient, but merely posessing differing degrees of intelligence? Is consciousness universal? Is a lepton self-aware? (No way to know unless you're a lepton.) Is being self-aware even a criterion for sentience? For life?

I asked before if all life is sentient. If all things are sentient, then perhaps all things are alive?

Intelligence comes after sapience.

Without sapience there would be no intelligence.

Sapience is THE source of intelligence.

Consciousness is a result of intelligence, result of knowing consequences of a false(depending what you think is false) action.

I believe that consciousness is merely an illusion. An illusion that you are yourself. That you have a unique point of view. I believe tha teveryone is deterministic, just as much as a computer. Consciousness is simply when the inteligently arranged computer (not necessary silicon, rather anything that computes, like a brain), recognizes that it exists. When this happens, there is an illusion that you are yourself, that you are unique, etc. This is when that inteligence is conscious. There is no reason why a computer based in silicon can't be concious and a chemical/electrical/biological one can.

hmm... this is actually a topic that I have been considering quite often, so I probobly jumped over some large assumptions that I forgot that I had made eariler... bah

Dwiel

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...instead of perceiving matter as the fundamental nature of all things, rather it is consciousness itself.

This is called Naturalistic Dualism.

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...why is it that physicists are explicit in saying that it is consciousness, and not mere observation that breaks the quantum wave function?

What physicists and where? As I understand it, that which collapses quantum wave functions is a perturbative observation. I admit that I do not understand Quantum Theory as well as I should, but I've not heard of many physicists that would specify consciousness as the determining factor.

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...it does have a rather strong argument to it and it does resolve many paradoxes.

It may answer some questions, but how many does it raise? For instance, if the universe is fundamentally consciousness, then why is it that some entities are quite easily recognized as conscious or minded things while others are not? Why is it that those things recognizable as conscious or minded things exhibit such drastic differences in their degree of consciousness? Does Goswami even give a definition of consciousness? If so, please relate it. If not, then it sounds as if he proposes Naturalistic Dualism prematurely. Why propose that consciousness is the fundamental thing in the universe? Why not music or wet dreams? Too absurd? Not convenient enough to solve a hard problem?

As I understand it, consciousness is a complex phenomenon more commonly known as self-awareness, or the sense-of-self. I'm currently reading Antonio Damasio's book The Feeling of What Happens and that is essentially how he defines it; thus far, such a definition makes sense in context. My limited reading in the study of mind leads me to favor functionalist/materialist positions over dualist positions though. As complex as minds can be (particularly the human mind) I should say that it is most definitely an emergent phenomenon. To say that consciousness is the fundamental nature of material reality seems quite silly unless he has some fundamentally different definition of consciousness.

Cius-
#1.
From what the author was proposing (I might have botched his interpretation due to my own ineloquence), there is no dualism in this "new" onotological viewpoint. Indeed, he calls it, monistic idealism. He stresses that it is monistic because it does away with the duality of nature, and calls it idealism because the true essence of all things isn't physical substance, but rather ideas.

While this is at first glance, a hard proposition to accept due to our western classical upbringing, this idea has been sung for many millenia among many eastern philosophies. Buddhism teaches that everything is one thing, and that senses decieve. Hinduism preaches the concept of maya or illusion, and that brahman truth is only in the essence of atman or "soul consciousness". Taoism preaches that everything stems from the ebb and flow of yin and yang, which contrary to western minds notion of yin and yang as being opposites, they are rather grades of one essential thing. Even Plato stressed that ultimate reality was really a light from beyond the cave that we humans could not perceive, and that what we assumed was matter was nothing more than shadows on the cave wall.

#2.
There are several interpretation of quantum theory and quantum mechanics. The de facto standard (the one you won't get fired for or ridiculed at for accepting) is the Copenhagen interpretation whose primary advocate was Niels Bohr (as well as Heisenberg and Schrodinger). But there are several other interpretations floating out there, and for the most part these different interpretations arose almost singlehandedly due to the paradox created by Schrodinger's Cat paradox.

From Schrodinger's cat, and von Neumann's proof that all measuring devices pick up the cat's quantum dichotomy, it became necessary to explain how in our classical world view, the cat is either alive or dead, but not a limbo-like both/neither. Because of von Neumann's proof, we have to accept a few ideas. First of all, our brain is a measuring device, and hence, it too willpick up the quantum dichotomy. So how is the quantum wave function collapsed? Well according to the monistic idealists, you have to jump out of the system in order to collapse the wave function. If your mind (which is based off matter according to the materialists) was still a part of the system, then it would just keep picking up the quantum dichotomy. Goswami illustrated this point very well by introducing the illusions of Escher's paintings. As an observer outside the system, we can see the paradox of his drawings and we see how it's done...but if you were within the painting itself, you would never be able to figure out where something began and something else ended.

For some interesting looks (and some criticisms) of this interpretation, go here:
http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/

and especially read section 1.4, and section 7.

#3.
Unfortunately, there is no concise definition given for consciousness in his book. Goswami's definition is recast for his own interpretation of his philosophical view and it takes a whole chapter to just try to help explain some of the ideas, much less give a definition. While his definition includes what we'd normally consider as consciousness, he also makes a careful distinction between unconscious and conscious. To illustate, the unconscious mind perceives events, but the information of these events are not available to the conscious mind. In other words, the unconscious is the same as consciousness but without awareness. However, Goswami does say that consciousness in a commonsense manner is conscious experience. We can't talk about consciousness without talking about our experience of the mental states we have.

It seems to me that Goswami relates consciousness as a "mind field or global workspace". At first glance, this seems akin to Carl Jung's "Collective Unconscious", and in a way, it is. Goswami tries to point that consciousness is nonlocal, meaning that it exists in a transcendental realm (outside the "system") By making consciousness transcendental, on the one hand, it gets out of von Neumann's trap with Schrodinger's cat, but on the other hand, it leaves consciousness in a realm that we can't objectively approach. Well, we can study consciousness, but only in a subjective manner...through our own direct experience with our mind, vis-a-vis meditation or introspection.

More confusingly, Goswami posits two minds, a classical mind, and a quantum mind, however, consciousness creates both of them. The classical mind is a detection device (think of the neurons) that also stores information about our prior experience. This storehouse of memory can influence the quantum mind's choice. As a slight tangent, there's another really interesting Quantum interpretation called the Holographic Universe which also postulates that everything is really only one thing...but some work done by neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has shown that memory is nonlocalized within the brain, and indeed, not even within the body.

And this relates to the third whacky part of Goswami's definition of consciousness. While most people are familiar with Des Cartes dictum, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), Goswami posits that neither thought nor cognition are the true power of effect of consciousness, but rather that choice is. As Goswami says, "I choose, therefore I am". What makes this utterly confusing is that in a sense, there is a duality going on....there is an objective material world (from which the classical brain/mind was created) but that this material reality is still nothing more than a part of consciousness (from how I interpret this, I take this as matter is nothing more than a concept).

Think for a moment of the movie The Matrix. In the movie, it postulated the question, "how can you tell the real (material) world from the virtual one only in your mind?". But at its base, it assumes that there is a real world from which your brain has simply been plugged in to receive artificial stimuli. But what if instead, it was the other way around? What if the assumption was that there was only mind, and that material reality was created by giving the mind possibilities? If everything is seen as a concept, then how can you tell concept from reality? Is this much different than saying from a materialist perspective that you can't tell reality from sensory input? Concept is to Mind/Reality as Sensory Input is to Matter/Reality.

Why I brought this post up in the first place was to consider how consciousness and intelligence were related. Upon further reflection, it seems to me that consciousness is a necessary component of creativity and imagination, but intelligence does not require these. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that creativity requires "leaps of logic" (as opposed to leaps of faith), and this is by its nature, an discontinous event. If classical systems are purely deterministic, then can they be creative?

This then begs the question, what can we do with non-creative intelligent systems? One obvious answer is to use them as expert systems, but in the end, these will be more useful to correct mistakes and to give suggestions or guidelines.

How, for example, can we create an AI that can make a decision in the face of unknown issues that doesn't use some sort of randomness? Classical computers can't even exhibit true randomness (at least from what I understand of random number generators). The classical training in us might be screaming that we humans are nothing more than biological machines that also operate in the face of unknown issues. Our conscious minds simply hide the idea of our random choice as "choice" or "free will". But to hold this idea violates how our very observation of things can create reality (which has been proven by Quantum Theory). In other words, the universe is NOT deterministic, and somehow we human beings can create results.

Since my knowledge of AI is rather limited, how does one go about creating an AI agent that can make decisions when it lacks sufficient information that its algorithms need? Do most AI paradigms simply use a random approach? I've heard of fuzzy systems, but isn't this really just a fancy probability distribution algorithm?

[Edited by - Dauntless on July 23, 2004 9:02:18 PM]

I think the simplest answer to this is found in GEB: The mind looks like it has extradimensionality simply because it is complexity personified. This doesn't even come close to suggesting that it has any non-classical mechanisms at work. Godel incompleteness applies equally well to the system that is conciousness as soon as you try to embody the concept of the idea which cannot be represented in N's brain.

The fact that we are continually discovering things at the limits of our knowledge suggests that hidden variables have many explanations, most of which remain within the system itself.

If you remain within the system, then intelligence and conciousness are simply emergent effects based on the same root causes - the self-organization of the biological system that makes up a body, a brain, and - at the limit of the abstract - a mind. Choice is neither meaningful nor meaningless in this sense, simply because the system itself defies finite analyses, and hence the concept of choice as a mechanistic process can never really be determined accurate or inaccurate.

If you jump out of the system, you simply open the gates for the God questions - what does the wider context of conciousness look like, what are the laws governing its creation and destruction, how do we test the hypothesis, and so on. The power of the metaphor is extreme in one sense, but it isn't a magic bullet. Godel incompleteness still applies, just at a new level.

ld

ld-
Once I digest all this a bit more, I'll probably read Godel, Escher, Bach.

But I think there's more to monistic idealism's view of consciousness. From what little I know of GEB, Hofstadter basically says that consciousness or mind is an emergent behavior (an epiphenomenon) that arises out of the extraodinarily complex mechanisms of the brain. In effect, the mind is a holistic and synergistic sum of the material brain (the mind is holistic and synergistic because it is more than the sum of the parts of the brain). This emergence however, as Hofstadter apparently claims is still within the system.

But then you are still left with the mind-body paradox. While the assumption that mind stems from brain shows an implication from A->B, it does not go into reverse and say A<-B. If the mind is an emergent pattern from the material brain, then matter mut reference itself (to collapse the quantum wave function, somehow matter must be watching itself)...and again you are stuck in a tangled hierarchy. So something must break out of the system.

From what I understand, Hofstadter uses Godel's theorem of the incompleteness of theorems to help illustrate that either: A system is complete but has axiomatic truths that can not be proved from within the system, or the system is incomplete. I'm interested in this aspect because to me, it implies that we must question how we gain our knowledge. If we have certain axoims and we have truths that can't be described from these axioms....where are these truths coming from? Either our assumptions about the axioms are wrong or we should conclude that the system is incomplete. Generally, science has favored the latter and not the former. I've always believed that the true underpinnings of philosophy (and therefore of science) should not be metaphysics, but epistemology.

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Original post by Dauntless If the mind is an emergent pattern from the material brain, then matter mut reference itself (to collapse the quantum wave function, somehow matter must be watching itself)...and again you are stuck in a tangled hierarchy. So something must break out of the system.

As far as I know, we have no proof that the system has been collapsed. The experience of a single quantum permutation may appear, from the inside, to be a collapsed wave function, but there is no reason to believe that such is actually the case at the "truth" which lies at the heart of reality. This again comes back to the incompleteness problem - the collapsed wave function under inspection is part of a larger wave function which has not entirely collapsed since not all of it is being observed. Ergo, what does the collapse of the wave function really mean? The description isn't complete.

ld

ld-
So perhaps there might be qwf's within qwf's? I had always assumed that if such were the case that it'd just create a wave interference pattern and hence just a new wave probability function....but this possibility is interesting.

Einstein wanted to show that Quantum Theory was incomplete, and this was the reason for the paradoxes. So far, I think most scientists have been probing in this direction. What I liked about Goswami's approach is that he tackled the assumption of the axioms instead (or rather the entire metaphysical underpinnings of physical science).

BTW, that link from the University of Virginia is quite good (you can download it as a 170+pg PDF). It covers almost everything Goswami does though a bit more concisely.