The reason why Bian Ziyuan came to seek Mei Yiqiu's help was to find the answer to the question about the origin of consciousness that both he and Kronos were thinking about. Kronus developed consciousness, but he didn't know where this consciousness came from, whether it came into being automatically in the process of self-evolution, or if it was caused by some other mechanism, and how it related to the original version and later improvements? What does it have to do with the game Dream Guide?

These are questions that no one can answer except Mei Yiqiu. Of course, the professor may not be able to answer, but Bian Ziyuan wants to give it a try, he always feels that the professor is an unfathomable person, and he has the calmness of Mount Tai collapsing in front of him, as if everything is under his control, even such a thing as the birth of Internet consciousness, except for the fact that the movement is a bit big when he is engaged in the Turing test, he has hardly mentioned it later.

"Did Kronos come to consciousness?"

Mei Yiqiu suddenly pulled the pipe out of his mouth, and the white smoke covering his face disappeared in an instant, and he saw his furrow wrinkles and deep eyes.

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

Mei Yiqiu nodded and said, "Isn't this what you were expecting?" ”

Bian Ziyuan shook his head and said: "I just pursued the intelligence of the program, and I didn't think that a program would produce consciousness, which is beyond my understanding, as if my child suddenly became an angel, I feel that he is going to fly away and does not belong to me." Although from my ideals, I wanted that to happen, and I wanted the world to become a kingdom of angels, I have to admit that my self-confidence took a hit and I was very lost and didn't know what to do next. ”

"Ah...... I can understand! ”

Mei Yiqiu put the pipe back into his mouth and took a hard breath, and some white soft smoke overflowed from the corner of his mouth, crawling gently up his face, and surrounded by a large puff of smoke coming out of his mouth.

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

"Of course I do." Bian Ziyuan said, "According to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy of the universe has been increasing, and it is impossible to decrease, but the universe we observe is often orderly, so Boltzmann proposed that in the local space of the universe, entropy does not always increase, and the low-entropy world we see stems from the random fluctuations of entropy, and when the entropy decreases to a large extent, it is possible to produce a conscious brain." So ......"

Bian Ziyuan seems to see a glimmer of light - consciousness is the product of reduced entropy? But he didn't think that Mei Yiqiu would throw himself such a simple answer, so he looked at the professor and didn't say any more.

Sure enough, Mei Yiqiu didn't give a direct answer, but asked: "You studied information technology, so you should be familiar with the concept of information entropy, right?" ”

Bian Ziyuan nodded.

The professor continued: "Boltzmann's conjecture is still based on the material plane, and our scientific community has not yet separated consciousness from matter, and even now it is not completely separated. The universe referred to by the second law of thermodynamics is also a universe based on matter, and we are not sure whether the universe outside of matter also conforms to this law. Let's leave this alone for now, let's talk about the material world first. In fact, the reduction of the entropy of matter can only make matter more orderly, and this cannot give birth to consciousness. The Milky Way doesn't think, and the Great Nebula doesn't think. Can you say that the Milky Way is not serialized and systematized enough?

Even if we narrow down the scope a little bit, make matter more compact, let it generate metabolism, and become a creature in our cognition, but is the creature necessarily conscious? Again, this is another difficult problem. At least at this time, it has not been proven that all living things are self-conscious, or that most living things are not self-conscious. Without self-awareness, then the so-called wisdom is very limited. Scientists engage in artificial intelligence, the most important direction is to make AI self-aware, in fact, the concept of competition, survival and life and death that you think of is also a kind of self-awareness, but you are on the wrong side, using another method that is unlikely to be popularized to make Kronos self-aware. Of course, the idea of allowing AI to compete and survive autonomously is very valuable, and I think it can be promoted in the scientific community, and if you can summarize a set of methods and theories, you can also call it the 'Bian's Law'! ”

"I ...... This ......" Bian Ziyuan, who received the professor's encouragement, was suddenly a little excited, and he didn't know what to say.

Mei Yiqiu also said: "If we look at it separately from matter, the entropy of matter is reduced 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." In order for consciousness to be formed, there must be a large fluctuation in the entropy of another thing. ”

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

"In the past, we unified information entropy and energy, because we intuitively understood information as an arrangement of symbols, and all symbols are made of matter, from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, you have never seen a symbol that is not material. To put it bluntly, information is the interrelationship of the ordered composition of matter. But we cannot say that information is equal to matter, and there is no direct evidence that the energy that drives the change of information is the same as the energy that drives the change of the motion of matter. ”

Mei Yiqiu paused and took another puff of her cigarette, "What we often call intelligence is actually more efficient information processing capabilities, that is, making information more orderly. Therefore, it can also 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. He just talked a lot about life and death, competition, and survival, and the professor also asked him to sort out the "Bian's Law", but compared to the professor's theory, the rise and fall of entropy has already involved fundamental problems, and his set is only a specific application level, and the key is not that he came up with it himself, or that others prompted him in his dreams.

"But that's not yet awareness." The professor added suddenly.

"Huh?" Bian Ziyuan exclaimed, "Then what is consciousness?" ”

"Biology is the ordered composition of matter and the intrinsic ability to maintain this order; Intelligence is the internal ability to constitute and maintain the orderliness of information; But matter has the energy of matter, and what does the energy of information come from? The reason why we haven't made a major breakthrough in AI right now is because we haven't found the energy to drive information.

When you write a sentence on a piece of paper, you record a piece of information, which is equivalent to using the external force of 'your hand' to form a decrease in information entropy. 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, and then the information is annihilated, and annihilation is the heat death of the information. How can information be self-healing, self-reorganizing, self-reproducing......? If you find this energy, you can generate true 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 the calories of my body, that is, the energy of matter!" ”

Mei Yiqiu said: "This line is already in your mind before it is written, it already exists as a message. When you write it, it's just the storage of information, not the process by which information is born. Without matter, information cannot be stored, but it is by no means the source of the birth of information. The human brain is material, it stores our memories and thoughts, but is it really what makes our thinking done? Think about what your brain consumes when it generates that line of words, in addition to burning calories? ”

"Spirit?" Bian Ziyuan asked tentatively.

Mei Yiqiu nodded and said, "Now I know why your Kronos gave birth to consciousness." ”