Jed,
I basically agree. I think many animals including most mammals and
birds are conscious, but there is a wide range of intelligence.
I am baffled by the mysterious, esoteric properties of consciousness
that academics often apply to it, ruling out all animals.
AA
On 12/16/2016 5:32 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
a.ashfield <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I think it follows we will have a "conscious" computer even
earlier than Kurzweil forecasts.
I think there are various levels of intelligence. Roughly speaking
here are three points on the spectrum:
1. Thinking. You can make a case that even guppies and earthworms do this.
2. Conscious. Awareness of surroundings. Some ability to make choices,
rather than purely instinct driving, hard-wired brain functions. I
expect that mice are conscious. In this article it was estimated that
present-day artificial intelligence computers have roughly as many
virtual synapses as a mouse brain has.
3. Sentient, or self-aware. At the lowest level, this means knowing
that you are an animal and an object in the real world. There is no
doubt that apes and other intelligent creatures have this. At the zoo
in Boston, when you take a picture of a chimpanzee with a digital
camera, it will pose and then demand to see the back of your camera.
Especially males do this, according to my daughter, who is studying
biology.
My guess is that computers are somewhere between 1 and 2. They have
probably not achieved 2 because people who design computers are not
trying to achieve this at present. Perhaps consciousness will emerge
on its own as a meta-phenomenon.
There are an infinite number of steps between each level. There are
various mental achievements. For example, male crickets are capable of
fighting for domination, which is sophisticated behavior. It is
impressive for such a small brain. Surely, this is a form of thinking,
even if it is mainly instinct driven. Unfortunately for the crickets,
they cannot tell one another apart, and they cannot tell the
difference between a cricket and a plastic model of one. So,
naturalists who wanted to give a male cricket an inferiority complex
engaged in ritual combat with him using a plastic model of a cricket.
They did this over and over again with the same plastic model. The
poor guy-cricket did not realize he was fighting the same dummy
cricket every time. Apparently this sapped his male hormone supply,
a.k.a. precious bodily fluids.
- Jed
