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Karl Popper famously said: “All life is problem solving.” No theory of consciousness is necessary to define the objectives of a general problem solver. From an AGI point of view, consciousness is at best a by-product of a general problem solving procedure.
I must admit that I am not a big fan of Tononi's theory. The following may represent a simpler and more general view of consciousness. Where do the symbols and self-symbols underlying consciousness and sentience come from? I think they come from data compression during problem solving. Let me plagiarize what I wrote earlier [1,2]: While a problem solver is interacting with the world, it should store the entire raw history of actions and sensory observations including reward signals. The data is ‘holy’ as it is the only basis of all that can be known about the world. If you can store the data, do not throw it away! Brains may have enough storage capacity to store 100 years of lifetime at reasonable resolution [1]. As we interact with the world to achieve goals, we are constructing internal models of the world, predicting and thus partially compressing the data history we are observing. If the predictor/compressor is a biological or artificial recurrent neural network (RNN), it will automatically create feature hierarchies, lower level neurons corresponding to simple feature detectors similar to those found in human brains, higher layer neurons typically corresponding to more abstract features, but fine-grained where necessary. Like any good compressor, the RNN will learn to identify shared regularities among different already existing internal data structures, and generate prototype encodings (across neuron populations) or symbols for frequently occurring observation sub-sequences, to shrink the storage space needed for the whole (we see this in our artificial RNNs all the time). Self-symbols may be viewed as a by-product of this, since there is one thing that is involved in all actions and sensory inputs of the agent, namely, the agent itself. To efficiently encode the entire data history through predictive coding, it will profit from creating some sort of internal prototype symbol or code (e. g. a neural activity pattern) representing itself [1,2]. Whenever this representation becomes activated above a certain threshold, say, by activating the corresponding neurons through new incoming sensory inputs or an internal ‘search light’ or otherwise, the agent could be called self-aware. No need to see this as a mysterious process — it is just a natural by-product of partially compressing the observation history by efficiently encoding frequent observations. [1] Schmidhuber, J. (2009a) Simple algorithmic theory of subjective beauty, novelty, surprise, interestingness, attention, curiosity, creativity, art, science, music, jokes. SICE Journal of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, 48 (1), pp. 21–32. [2] J. Schmidhuber. Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up! Response to The Singularity. Journal of Consciousness Studies, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, pp. 173-182(10), 2012. PC Gamer interview with Tim Willits on the making of Quake 2
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/the-making-of-quake-2/ An interesting read. They seriously considered making it into a new franchise, potentially called "Wor". I didn't know that. In so many ways Quake 2 was a step forward, but for some reason it never really connected with me. I think it's going to be hard to go back to now. Quake 2 was thematically charmless, boring and overly homogeneous.
Single player FPS games should feel like a journey. With Q2 I didn't feel like I went anywhere. Started in a concrete space dungeon, walked through a few more concrete space dungeons, beat the final boss in a concrete space dungeon. Quake was thematically charmless, boring and overly homogeneous.
Single player FPS games should feel like a journey. With Q I didn't feel like I went anywhere. Started in a brown and blue dungeon, walked through a few more brown and blue dungeons, beat the final boss in a brown and blue dungeon. I remember at least one green dungeon
Q2 for all the good things about it was definitely more homogenous, even the "palace" texture set still equated to more of the same. Basically Quake minus all map styles but base. I disagree, I feel like each unit had a theme, some were more interesting than others. My favorite was the waste/cooling facility theme. I also liked the prison level which was kind of a one-off since no other levels looked like that. The city/temple levels near the end were also cool.
There was a sort of generic grey base theme that about half the game seemed to use though, for example the “warehouse” unit was different but only barely so from the base levels at the beginning. I played through Q2 again recently.
There are some locations that really emphasize top-heavy brutalist external structures, that work your path (and the structures) in and out of natural-ish terrain, and often have a howling-wind sort of ambient soundscape. Those places are quite different from Q1 but IMO are great environments in their own way, even if they are more normal-looking built environments and not weird in any way that punches you in the eyeball. Still a neat sense of place and a feel that there is exploring to do. Whenever your path goes purely indoors and gets away from all the aspects mentioned above, my interest-o-meter dropped pretty sharply. The hub structure of Quake 2 may have served to make it seem more boring.
In Quake, the end of each map gives instant closure to it, an instant sense of progression. But in Quake 2, each map is just a subdivision of a bigger area, so it's harder to know when you're reaching the actual ending of the current mission. This gives a boring sense of "are we there yet?" to the missions. Plus, the "computer updated" crap is bloody annoying. I prefer the hub structure of games like Turok 2. It's simpler, but each map is a self-contained mission, giving instant gratification at the end, even when you revisit the maps to get items that you couldn't reach before. The simplistic hub structure in Turok 2 also makes the missions non-linear, while in Quake 2, the missions are linear (only the objectives of each mission are non-linear). Just so people are aware, I’m running another mapping event at the end of March. Further details shall be forthcoming.
Has there ever been a quake map that included a sphere ? It seems like something so basic that by now somebody would've made one, but ive never seen one
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