Various projects exist today aiming at building a true Artificial Intelligence. Sometimes these researchers use the term AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, to distinguish their projects from mainstream AI which tends to focus on specific tasks. A conference on such projects will be held next year, agi-08.org.
Suppose one of these projects achieves one of the milestone goals of such efforts; their AI becomes able to educate itself by reading books and reference material, rather than having to have facts put in by the developers. Perhaps it requires some help with this, and various questions and ambiguities need to be answered by humans, but still this is a huge advancement as the AI can now in principle learn almost any field. Keep in mind that this AI is far from passing the Turing test; it is able to absorb and digest material and then answer questions or perhaps even engage in a dialog about it. But its complexity is, we will suppose, substantially less than the human brain. Now at some point the AI reads about the philosophy of mind, and the question is put to it: are you conscious? How might an AI program go about answering a question like this? What kind of reasoning would be applicable? In principle, how would you expect a well-designed AI to decide if it is conscious? And then, how or why is the reasoning different if a human rather than an AI is answering them? Clearly the AI has to start with the definition. It needs to know what consciousness is, what the word means, in order to decide if it applies. Unfortunately such definitions usually amount to either a list of synonyms for consciousness, or use the common human biological heritage as a reference. From the Wikipedia: "Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment." Here we have four synonyms and one relational description which would arguably apply to any computer system that has environmental sensors, unless "perceive" is also merely another synonym for conscious perception. It looks to me like AIs, even ones much more sophisticated than I am describing here, are going to have a hard time deciding whether they are conscious in the human sense. Since humans seem essentially unable to describe consciousness in any reasonable operational terms, there doesn't seem any acceptable way for an AI to decide whether the word applies to itself. And given this failure, it calls into question the ease with which humans assert that they are conscious. How do we really know that we are conscious? For example, how do we know that what we call consciousness is what everyone else calls consciousness? I am worried that many people believe they are conscious simply because as children, they were told they were conscious. They were told that consciousness is the difference between being awake and being asleep, and assume on that basis that when they are awake they are conscious. Then all those other synonyms are treated the same way. Yet most humans would not admit to any doubt that they are conscious. For such a slippery and seemingly undefinable concept, it seems odd that people are so sure of it. Why, then, can't an AI achieve a similar degree of certainty? Do you think a properly programmed AI would ever say, yes, I am conscious, because I have subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, etc., and I know this because it is just inherent in my artificial brain? Presumably we could program the AI to say this, and to believe it (in whatever sense that word applies), but is it something an AI could logically conclude? Hal --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
