On Being - new thread

I just posted some ideas regarding this project to another list and want to share them here as well:

I've always seen something wrong with the idea of "AI". It just sounds absurd to me that a machine can be made to become "intelligent" as we define it in regards to humans. Based on the limited reading I've done on the subject, some of the largest steps towards realizing AI have more or less involved redefining what "intelligence" is. So here's my proposal: The fundamental element of intelligence is an innate desire to be aware of one's existence and state of being. This is the basis of intelligence and without it nothing can emerge that can be called true intelligence.

Obviously, my program has no desire to be aware of its existence and state of being. That's why I have to tell it to do so and how to go about it. A computer program can be made to know certain things and even to make logical deductions based on that knowledge but that's not synonymous with intelligence. It will never be able to make reasoned decisions based on an intelligent understanding of things. A child who can rattle of the product of any two numbers between 1 and 10 isn't showing signs of intelligence. They're simply repeating something they know. It's not until they start dealing with numbers that they haven't managed to memorize that they may display intelligence through understanding and this understanding is acquired through their desire to be aware of their existence and state of being. That's essentially why they went through the trouble of acquiring the understanding needed to multiply those numbers.

So, that's where I'm at right now. I'm not extremely well read in these matters and it could very well be that I'm simply repeating something that philosophers have been saying for the last 100 years. But this is what I'm learning from my work on exist.pl

Pall

exist.pl now listens for possible communication attempts from others. While exist.pl is running, it is possible to telnet to the process, either remotely or locally on tcp port 8181 and send it a message. Upon receiving the message exist.pl will terminate the connection as it thinks about what was said.

This latest revision has been updated at the projects home at:

http://code.google.com/p/existpl

and here is the source-code for the new revision:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Cwd qw(realpath);
use IO::Socket;
use Fcntl;

# exist.pl is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.
#
# exist.pl is distributed in the hope that it will be enlightening,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# ENLIGHTENMENT, MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
# See the GNU General Public License for more details.
#
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

### exist.pl ###

my %awareness; # foundation for self-awareness
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'location'} = realpath($0); # self-awareness of own presence
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'state_of_being'} = $$; # self-awareness of existing as a functional being

# Open up a tcp socket on port 8181 so that other processes can communicate with me
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'communicator'} = IO::Socket::INET->new( Proto => 'tcp',
LocalPort => '8181',
Listen => SOMAXCONN,
Reuse => 1,
Timeout => .1);

# examination of inner qualities
open(FILE, $awareness{'my_existence'}->{'location'});
my @my_self = <FILE>;
close(FILE);

while(-e $awareness{'my_existence'}->{'location'}){
if($awareness{'my_existence'}->{'state_of_being'}){
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'state_of_being'} = $$; # redetermine existence as functional being
($irrelevant, $awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'to_my_environment'}) = `ps p $$`; # discover how my environment sees me

my @all_beings = `ps axo pid,tt,stat,time,command`; # check on the existence of other functional beings in my environment
shift(@all_beings);

my $count = 0;
foreach(@all_beings){
if($awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'to_my_environment'} eq $_){
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'to_others'}->{'my_position'} = $count; # note my occurrence within the scope of everything
}else{
$awareness{'other_beings'}->{'being'.$count} = $_; # note the occurrence of other beings within the scope of everything
}
$count++;
}
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'to_others'}->{'total_beings'} = $count; # note the abundance of beings within my environment
}else{
last; # if I can't reconfirm my location go into life-sustaining panic mode
}

# Check if anyone is waiting to communicate with me
while($other_being = $awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'communicator'}->accept()){
$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'relations'}->{'contact'}->{'said_to_me'} = <$other_being>;
}
close $other_being;
}

### life-sustaining panic mode/desire to live
open(FILE, ">$awareness{'my_existence'}->{'location'}"); # attempt to re-create myself
print FILE @my_self; # restore my inner qualities
close(FILE);
### pass out and await revival

The latest revision to exist.pl has opened a whole new can of beans. Since it is now capable of receiving communication from other processes it will inevitably have to respond and that's the tricky part. How does a process that is just beginning to experiment with an awareness of anything at all, respond to anything at all? It makes no attempt to understand the message being conveyed or even who it's coming from. It would be great to get some feedback on this. Of course, my first inclination is to just have it respond to anything with a full dump of its entire "awareness". Well, no. My first inclination was to have it respond to anything by outputting the full path to the file (its "existence") and its process ID (its "state of being") but when you think about it, there's really nothing to indicate to exist.pl that those two bits of information would mean anything to anyone else.

Pall

well, nevermind, it worked fine on the server.
but how does it express it's existence?

it's a very quiet existence.

what would be cool is if the program ran as a bot creating a darknet of it's own existence with other exists.pl.
It would be a social network of existence. Let me know and I'll help set up a few nodes for you.
Eric

it's an ecco machine (ecce machinus, echo)
;-)

exist.pl's level of consciousness is skyrocketing. It now communicates. Not the way you and I might communicate. After all it's only a computer program. But it listens and responds. It listens on port 8181. It doesn't understand what anyone says to it so it responds in the same manner to every comment. It identifies itself through the only means it knows, by revealing all of its source code. You can either run it on your own computer and type on the command line:

telnet localhost 8181

then type something, anything, and hit return and it will respond.

You can also communicate with it through your browser, type http://localhost:8181 and it will respond with its source code.

OR since it now has an existence that is externally visible, I have a copy running on my server. So if you can't or don't want to run it locally you can:

telnet pallit.lhi.is 8181

or point your browser to http://pallit.lhi.is:8181

The project, with full source, is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/existpl

What next? Perhaps it should start to retain what others say to it and attempt to use those words or phrases as responses. We'll see. Waiting for the singularity.

Oh, I should add that it will only accept a single connection at a time. Therefore you may have to wait a couple of minutes if it's already busy communicating with someone else.

Hi Pall,

The direction in which you are proceeding tells something about your conception of being. The program discovers the network before it discovers its own hardware. It still seems very much stuck in disembodied software space. To come aware that you are a running process on an operating system is still very hermetic and metaphysical, and perhaps totally unrelated to Heideggerean "being in the world." Is there a way for the program to come aware of the hardware on which it is running? I think about the '50s MIT hackers who were aware of how many revolutions the actual physical disc was spinning and would save lines of code in their programs by taking advantage of this awareness.

I also remember cracking via telnet back in the day. You'd always check to see what processes were running in order to make sure that the sysadmin wasn't checking to see what processes were running. If I recall correctly, your peek at the processes would show if he was peeking at the processes, but it would never show your own peek at the processes. He could see you peeking, and you could see him peeking, but you could never see yourself peeking. Again, it seems related to the difference between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Once you peek at your own being, you shift from ready-to-hand functioning to present-at-hand analyzing, and your ready-at-handed being temporarily disappears to you.

Best,
Curt

OK, now a comment that questions the software's uniqueness, (in a constructive way I hope).
Whenever we turn a machine on, it loads numerous processes and programs that have to monitor themself.
Everything from port listeners to pagefile handlers.
These programs *know of their existence, and some the health of the system.
How does your program work specifically with consciousness?
Don't many services do much the same thing that your program does? How is yours different?
Eric

so it is an entity?

Keep in mind what I said in my reply to Curt, yes it is an entity but not in the same sense that anything that can exist outside of a computer is an entity. If an entity is something that occupies space then the exist.pl file forms the entity-ness by occupying space on the computer's hard drive. Again, you say "like a newborn it will quickly try to understand its environment". I assume you're referring to a newborn human or other organic being but that's not what we're dealing with. It is however trying to understand its environment. Those were the first revisions to the original program. It's trying to understand its environment by being "aware" of where it "exists" within the file hierarchy and where it "is" within the complete list of running processes. This latest step is towards giving it the means to interact with that environment or at the very least, allow the environment to interact with it.

At this point I'm not really sure whether it will attempt to adapt to changes in its environment. We'll just have to wait and see where it goes. One of the parts of this project is, aside from what's being created, the process with which it's being created. It started with about 3 lines of code and is growing gradually based on my own ideas that pop into my head as it progresses as well as ideas that come up during these discussions. So these comments, both my own and others, are part of the project. Now that you've planted that seed of adaptation, it could very well happen. At some point.

In light of all these discussions and this project in general I'd like to share a CNN link with you all:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/07/robot.teachers/index.html

and ask yourselves whether you see this as a potentially positive move.