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Did Consciousness Arise out of a Process of Insentient Reinforcement Learning?
In 2020 David Silver and his colleagues from the UK-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind submitted a paper titled “Reward is not Enough” to a peer-reviewed journal. The scientists argued that intelligence and its associated abilities would primarily emerge by sticking to a simple but powerful principle: reward maximization, coupled with trial-and-error experience.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents should take actions in an environment to maximize the notion of cumulative reward¹.
The DeepMind scientists conclude that reinforcement learning is enough to drive behavior that exhibits most if not all abilities studied in natural and artificial intelligence.
In their quest to create artificial intelligence, computer scientists have designed and developed all kinds of complicated mechanisms and technologies, replicating abilities typically associated with intelligent life such as vision, language, reasoning, motor skills.
As far as science is concerned, there has been no top-down intelligent design in the complex organisms that we see around us. Instead, billions of years of natural selection and random variation have filtered lifeforms for their fitness to survive and reproduce. As a result, the best-equipped living beings to handle the challenges and situations in their environments managed to survive and multiply, while the rest suffered elimination.
Intelligence versus Consciousness
According to cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, The mind is an exquisitely organized system that accomplishes remarkable feats no engineer can duplicate.
“It is that the engineering problems that we humans solve as we see and walk and plan and make it through the day are far more challenging than landing on the moon or sequencing the human genome.”
In an April 2021 article, David Tsing argues that artificial consciousness is impossible, meaning that machines and or software that we create can never be capable of consciousness.
“The very act of hardware and software design is a transmission of impetus as an extension of the designers and not an…
