You guys are seriously irritating me.
You are talking such rubbish. But it's collective rubbish - the
collective *non-sense* of AI. And it occurs partly because our culture
doesn't offer a simple definition of consciousness. So let me have a crack
at one.
First off, let's remove consciousness-as-sentience. That's important, but
it's secondary.
The real issue of whether an AGI - a computer - should have consciousness,
is, I suggest, should it have a "world-movie" ?
IOW should it run a continuous sensory movie of the world around it?
That's what every living creature from single cells upwards runs - a
continuous
sensory movie of the world around it, (although it took time to get to
visual movies).
That movie is clearly the central business of consciousness. And it is also
clearly what evolution thought the absolute foundation of intelligence.
Amazingly, it didn't listen to you guys, smart as you are - it didn't start
with logic or mathematics or language, or anything that AI considers to be a
sine qua non.
That sensory movie is the absolute foundation of human intelligence too, the
thing that never ever stops. Even you guys sometimes stop thinking in
language, or maths, but your movie of the world around you never stops. And
when you sleep, your mind keeps running movies of imagined worlds around
you.
Even then language and maths are at best only occasional participants in the
movie.
If you could stop thinking about just your computers, and start thinking -
as you absolutely must here - about robots as well, then it is, I suggest,
obvious that the first thing a robot needs is a world-movie .
How can you survive in the world if you can't see the world, can't see where
you need to go, or what's coming at you, (or which keys to push on your
computer)? Even your fictional superAGI, if it were to be independent, would
have to run a movie of the world around it, to protect itself from all the
dangers of the world, like human programmers, bent on harming it, and ensure
its supply of energy and other necessities.
How too can you know about the world if you've never seen it, on-the-spot,
firsthand, and in person through your free-roaming world-movie? ("Sure I
can. Wikipedia tells me everything I need to know about the world and life".
Right).
If you continue to think robotically, you also won't have any need to
include high-falutin' forms of self-consciousness in your definitions of
consciousness.
Because that movie will obviously have to be an "iworld-movie." Any robot or
agent moving through the world must have a continuous sense of self - its
integrated
body, brain and sensors, rather than some homunculus - in relation to the
world around it - and therefore
a sense of itself watching the movie. There can be no consciousness WITHOUT
self-consciousness - no world-movie without an I/eye/camera. You have to
estimate continuously
where things are in relation to yourself in order to shift your POV, or move
this way or that, towards or away from things, as required. So no
high-falutin' "yes, but who am I really - I mean deep down" kind of
self-consciousness is required, just the most basic kind, that even
schizophrenics have.
It should be obvious that consciousness is your world-movie - it's what
you're looking at right now, the show that never stops. How could you
survive in the real world, without that world-movie?
But when you're incredibly smart, and rational, and logical, like AI-ers,
and are deeply prejudiced against anything to do with movies or images or
imagination let alone bodies, you can't see the obvious - the
couldn't-possibly-be-more-obvious.
And you are prepared to
settle for a totally sense-less, deaf-dumb-and-blind, brain-in-a-vat
conception of intelligence.
Then you end up resorting to the most desperately contorted arguments to
justify your senselessness - I can see this one coming - "ah but my cousin
has been a total vegetable in a coma for the last twenty years, and he's
conscious."
-------------------------------------------
agi
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