Dream Guide

The reason why Bian Ziyuan came to seek help from Mei Yiqiu was to find the answer to the origin of consciousness that both he and Cronus were thinking about. Cronus developed consciousness, but he doesn’t know where this consciousness came from, whether it was generated automatically in the process of self-evolution, or was caused by some other mechanism, and how it is related to the original version and subsequent improvements. ? What does it have to do with the game Dream Guide?

No one can answer these questions except Mei Yiqiu. Of course, the professor may not be able to answer it, but Bian Ziyuan wanted to give it a try. He always felt that the professor was an unfathomable person, and he had a calmness that remained unchanged despite the collapse of the mountain, as if everything was under his control. Among them, even things like the birth of Internet consciousness were hardly mentioned after that, except for a bit of noise when the Turing test was conducted.

"Did Cronus become conscious?"

Mei Yiqiu suddenly took out the pipe from his mouth. The white smoke covering his face disappeared in an instant, and his furrowed wrinkles and deep eyes were visible.

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

Mei Yiqiu nodded and said, "Isn't this what you expected?"

Bian Ziyuan shook his head and said: "I was only pursuing the intelligence of the program. I never thought that a program would produce consciousness. This is beyond my understanding. It's like my child suddenly turned into an angel. I felt like he was going to fly." It’s gone, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. Although from my ideal point of view, I hope that that happens, and I hope that the world becomes a country of angels, but I have to admit that my self-confidence has been hit, and I am very lost. Don’t know what to do next.”

"Ah...I can understand!"

After Mei Yiqiu finished speaking, he put the pipe back into his mouth and took a hard puff. Some soft white smoke overflowed from the corner of his mouth, climbed up gently on his face, and was surrounded by a large puff of smoke sprayed out from his mouth. Living.

"We still know very little about consciousness." The professor looked at the smoke in front of him, his eyes unfocused, as if looking at a distant nebula, "Do you know about the Boltzmann brain?"

"Of course I know." Bian Ziyuan said, "According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe has been increasing and cannot decrease. However, the universe we observe is often in order, so Boltzmann proposed that the entropy of the universe is always in order. In local space, entropy does not always increase. The low-entropy world we see results from the random fluctuations of entropy. When the entropy decreases to a larger extent, it is possible to produce a conscious brain. So..."

Bian Ziyuan seems to have seen a glimmer of light - is consciousness the product of entropy reduction? But he didn't think Mei Yiqiu would give him such a simple answer, so he looked at the professor and said no more.

Sure enough, Mei Yiqiu did not give the answer directly, but asked: "You are studying information technology, so you should be familiar with the concept of information entropy, right?"

Bian Ziyuan nodded.

The professor continued: "Boltzmann's brain conjecture was still based on the material level. At that time, our scientific community had not yet separated consciousness and matter, and even now they are not completely separated. The universe according to the second law of thermodynamics It is also a universe based on matter. We are not sure whether the universe other than matter also conforms to this law. Let’s forget about this and let’s talk about the material world first. In fact, the reduction of material entropy can only make matter more orderly. Consciousness cannot be born. The Milky Way cannot think, and neither can large nebulae. Can you say that the Milky Way is not serialized and systematized enough?

Even if we narrow the scope a little, make matter more compact, let it undergo metabolism, and become a living thing in our cognition, does the living thing necessarily have consciousness? This is another problem. At least it is not yet proven that all living things have autonomous consciousness, or that most living things do not have self-awareness. Without self-awareness, so-called wisdom is very limited. When scientists engage in artificial intelligence, the most important direction is to make AI self-aware. In fact, the concepts of competition, survival, and life and death that you think of are also a kind of self-awareness. It’s just that you are taking an eccentric approach and using another one that is unlikely to be popularized. The method gave Cronus self-awareness. Of course, the idea of ​​letting AI compete and survive independently is very valuable. I think it can be promoted 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, who was encouraged by the professor, suddenly became a little excited and didn't know what to say.

Mei Yiqiu added: "If we separate matter and consciousness, the entropy of matter decreases to form living things, but living things may not be conscious. Even if there is a neural network, it is just a tool for transmitting information between cells to facilitate better recursion. To form consciousness, there must be a large fluctuation in the entropy of another thing."

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

"In the past, we unified information entropy and energy because we intuitively understood information as an arrangement of symbols, and all symbols are composed of matter. From two dimensions to three dimensions, you have never seen symbols that are not matter. To put it bluntly, Yes, information is the interrelationship between the ordered components of matter. But we cannot say that information is equal to matter, and there is no evidence that can directly prove that the energy that drives changes in information and the energy that drives changes in the motion of matter are the same."

Mei Yiqiu paused and took another puff of cigarette. "The intelligence we often talk about is actually more efficient information processing capabilities, which means making information more orderly. So it can also be said that intelligence is the increase in information entropy. This is the true direction of AI."

Bian Ziyuan suddenly realized it and blushed unconsciously. He just talked endlessly about life and death, competition, and survival. The professor also asked him to sort out the "Bian's Law", but it was far from the professor's theory. The fluctuation of entropy already involves fundamental issues. problem, and what he said was only a specific application level. The key was not that he came up with it himself, but that someone else reminded him in his dream.

"But this is not consciousness yet." The professor suddenly added.

"Ah?" Bian Ziyuan asked in shock, "Then what is consciousness?"

The professor said: "Biology is the ordered composition of matter and the inherent ability to maintain this ordering; intelligence is the ordered composition of information and the inherent ability to maintain this ordering; but matter has material energy, information What does the energy come from? The reason why we have not made major breakthroughs in AI now is because we have not found the energy to drive information.

When you write a sentence on paper, you record a piece of information, which is equivalent to using the external force of 'your hand' to reduce information entropy. If you don't take the initiative to modify it, it will not change for a long time until the writing disappears or the paper turns to ashes, at which time the information will be annihilated. Annihilation is the heat death of the information. How to make information self-repair, self-reorganize, self-reproduce...? Finding this energy can produce real intelligence, which is what you call consciousness. "

Bian Ziyuan frowned, feeling that the amount of information was so large, and asked: "But professor, when I write, what I consume is my body's heat, which is the energy of matter!"

Mei Yiqiu said: "This line of words has already appeared in your mind before you write it down. It already exists as information. When you write it down, it is just the storage of information, not the process of information birth. Without matter, information cannot Storage, but it is by no means the source of birth information. The human brain is material, it stores our memories and thoughts, but is our thinking really completed by it? Think about your brain and generate that line of words Besides consuming calories, what else are you consuming?"

"Spirit?" Bian Ziyuan asked tentatively.

Mei Yiqiu nodded and said: "Now you know why your Cronus was born with consciousness."