Chapter 565

The reason why Bian Ziyuan came to seek meiwang's help was to find the answer about the origin of consciousness that he and Cronus were thinking about. Cronus produced consciousness, but he didn't know where it came from, whether it was generated automatically in the process of self evolution, or whether it was caused by any other mechanism. What is the relationship with the original version and subsequent improvements? What does it have to do with the dream guide game?

No one can answer these questions except Mei Tui. Of course, the professor may not be able to answer, but Bian Zi wanted to have a try. He always felt that the professor was an unfathomable person, and had the same calm when Mount Tai collapsed in front, as if everything was under his control. Even the birth of Internet consciousness was rarely mentioned later, except that there was a little noise during the Turing test.

"Did Cronus have consciousness?"

Mei Tui suddenly took out her pipe from her mouth. The white smoke covered his face disappeared in a moment, and she saw his gully wrinkles and deep eyes.

Bian Ziyuan shivered and his breathing became heavy. He hesitated for a while, but he still didn't dare to lie and said, "yes."

Mei nodded and said, "isn't that what you expect?"

Bian Ziyuan shook his head and said: "At the beginning, I only pursued the intelligence of the program, and did not think that a program would produce consciousness, which is beyond my understanding. It's like my child suddenly became an angel. I feel that he is going to fly away and does not belong to me. Although from my ideal, I hope that such a thing will happen, and I hope the world will become a country of angels, I have to admit that my self-confidence I've been hit. I'm very frustrated. I don't know what to do next. "

"Ah... I can understand!"

Mei tried to finish, put the pipe back into his mouth and took a hard breath. Some white soft smoke overflowed from the corner of his mouth, gently climbed up his face, and was surrounded by a large canopy of smoke from his mouth.

"We know very little about consciousness." the professor looked at the smoke in front of him, his eyes had no focus, as if he were looking at a distant nebula. "Do you know Boltzmann's brain?"

"Of course," Bian Ziyuan said, "According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe has been increasing and cannot be reduced, but the universe we observe is often orderly. Therefore, Boltzmann proposed that entropy does not always increase in the local space of the universe. The low entropy world we see stems from the random fluctuation of entropy. When the entropy decreases to a large extent, it is possible to produce a conscious large entropy Brain. So... "

Bian Ziyuan seemed to see a glimmer of dawn - consciousness is the product of entropy reduction? But he didn't think Mei would give himself such a simple answer, so he looked at the professor and didn't go on.

Sure enough, Mei Tao didn't say the answer directly, but asked, "you study information technology. Should you be familiar with the concept of information entropy?"

Bian Ziyuan nodded.

The professor continued: "Boltzmann's brain conjecture is still based on the material level. At that time, our scientific community did not separate consciousness from matter, even now it is not completely separated. The universe mentioned in the second law of thermodynamics is also based on matter. We are not sure whether the universe other than matter also conforms to this law. Let's talk about the material world first. In fact In fact, the reduction of the entropy of matter can only make matter more orderly, which can not give birth to consciousness. The Milky way can't think, and the big Nebula can't think. Can you say that the degree of serialization and systematization of the Milky way is not high enough?

Even if we narrow the scope a little, make matter closer, make it metabolize and become creatures in our cognition, is biology necessarily conscious? This is another difficult problem. At least at present, it can not be proved that all creatures have independent consciousness, or most creatures have no self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness, the so-called wisdom is very limited But the most important direction for scientists to engage in AI is to make AI self-conscious. In fact, the concept of competition, survival and life and death you think of is also a kind of self-consciousness. However, you take the wrong side of the sword and use another method that is unlikely to be popularized to make Cronus self-conscious. Of course, the idea of making AI compete and survive independently is very valuable, I think In order to promote it in the scientific community, if you can sum up a set of methods and theories, you can also call it "Bian's law!"

"I... this..." Bian Ziyuan, encouraged by the professor, was suddenly a little excited and didn't know what to say.

Mei Xu added: "if we peel off matter and consciousness, the entropy of matter decreases to form organisms, but organisms may not be conscious. Even if there is a neural network, it is only a tool for transmitting information between cells, which is convenient for better recursion. To form consciousness, the entropy of another thing must fluctuate greatly."

"Do you mean information entropy?" Bian Ziyuan asked carefully.

"In the past, we unified information entropy and energy, because we intuitively understood information as the arrangement of symbols, and all symbols are composed of matter. From two-dimensional to three-dimensional, you have never seen symbols that are not matter. To put it bluntly, information is the relationship between the orderly composition of matter. However, we can not say that information is equal to matter, and there is no evidence to directly explain it It is proved that the energy that drives the change of information and the energy that drives the change of material motion are the same. "

Mei Tao paused and took another cigarette. "What we often call intelligence is actually a more efficient information processing ability, that is, to make information more orderly. Therefore, it can be said that intelligence is formed by the fluctuation of information entropy, which is the real direction of AI."

Bian Ziyuan suddenly realized and blushed unconsciously. I just talked a lot about the ways of life and death, competition and survival. The professor also asked him to sort out the "Bian's law", but it is far from the professor's theory. The fluctuation of entropy has involved fundamental problems, and his set is only a specific application level. The key is not what he thought out, but what others reminded him in his dream.

"But this is not consciousness," the professor suddenly added.

"Ah?" Bian Ziyuan exclaimed, "what is consciousness?"

The professor said: "biology is the ordered composition of matter and the internal ability to maintain this order; intelligence is the ordered composition of information and the internal ability to maintain this order; but matter has material energy. What is the source of information energy? The reason why we have not made a major breakthrough in AI is that we have not found the energy driving information.

When you write a sentence on paper, you record a piece of information, which is equivalent to the reduction of information entropy with the help of the external force of 'your hand'. If you don't take the initiative to modify it, it won't change for a long time until the handwriting disappears or the paper turns to ashes. Then the information will be annihilated. Annihilation is the heat silence of information. How can information repair itself , self reorganization, self reproduction...? finding this energy can produce real intelligence, which is what you call consciousness. "

Bian Ziyuan frowned and felt that there was a lot of information. He asked, "but Professor, when I write, what I consume is the heat of my body, that is, material energy!"

Mei Zhuo said: "This line of words has appeared in your brain before you write it down. It already exists as information. When you write it down, it is only the storage of information, not the process of information birth. Without material, information cannot be stored, but it is by no means the source of information birth. The human brain is material, it stores our memories and thoughts, but our thinking is really completed by it Do you? Think about what your brain consumes in addition to calories when generating that line of words? "

"Spirit?" Bian Ziyuan asked tentatively.

Mei nodded and said, "now you know why your Cronus was born with consciousness."