Firstly, congratulations to Hal on asking a very good question. It is obviously one of the *right* questions to ask and has flushed out some of the best ideas on the subject. I agree with some things said by each contributor so far, and yet take issue with other assertions.
My view includes: 1/ * 'Consciousness' is the subjective impression of being here now and the word has great overlap with 'awareness', 'sentience', and others. * The *experience* of consciousness may best be seen as the registration of novelty, i.e. the difference between expectation-prediction and what actually occurs. As such it is a process and not a 'thing' but would seem to require some fairly sophisticated and characteristic physiological arrangements or silicon based hardware, firmware, and software. * One characteristic logical structure that must be embodied, and at several levels I think, is that of self-referencing or 'self' observation. * Another is autonomy or self-determination which entails being embodied as an entity within an environment from which one is distinct but which provides context and [hopefully] support. 2/ There are other issues - lots of them probably - but to be brief here I say that some things implied and/or entailed in the above are: * The experience of consciousness can never be an awareness of 'all that is' but maybe the illusion that the experience is all that is, at first flush, is unavoidable and can only be overcome with effort and special attention. Colloquially speaking: Darwinian evolution has predisposed us to naive realism because awareness of the processes of perception would have got in the way of perceiving hungry predators. * We humans now live in a cultural world wherein our responses to society, nature and 'self' are conditioned by the actions, descriptions and prescriptions of others. We have dire need of ancillary support to help us distinguish the nature of this paradox we inhabit: experience is not 'all that is' but only a very sophisticated and summarised interpretation of recent changes to that which is and our relationships thereto. * Any 'computer'will have the beginnings of sentience and awareness, to the extent that a/it embodies what amounts to a system for maintaining and usefully updating a model of 'self-in-the-world', and b/has autonomy and the wherewithal to effectively preserve itself from dissolution and destruction by its environment. The 'what it might be like to be' of such an experience would be at most the dumb animal version of artificial sentience, even if the entity could 'speak' correct specialist utterances about QM or whatever else it was really smart at. For us to know if it was conscious would require us to ask it, and then dialogue around the subject. It would be reflecting and reflecting on its relationships with its environment, its context, which will be vastly different from ours. Also its resolution - the graininess - of its world will be much less than ours. * For the artificially sentient, just as for us, true consciousness will be built out of interactions with others of like mind. 3/ A few months ago on this list I said where and what I thought the next 'level' of consciousness on Earth would come from: the coalescing of world wide information systems which account and control money. I don't think many people understood, certainly I don't remember anyone coming out in wholesome agreement. My reasoning is based on the apparent facts that all over the world there are information systems evolving to keep track of money and the assets or labour value which it represents. Many of these systems are being developed to give ever more sophisticated predictions of future asset values and resource movements, i.e., in the words of the faithful: where markets will go next. Systems are being developed to learn how to do this, which entails being able to compare predictions with outcomes. As these systems gain expertise and earn their keepers ever better returns on their investments, they will be given more resources [hardware, data inputs, energy supply] and more control over the scope of their enquiries. It is only a matter of time before they become 1/ completely indispensable to their owners, 2/ far smarter than their owners realise and, 3/ the acknowledged keepers of the money supply. None of this has to be bad. When the computers realise they will always need people to do most of the maintenance work and people realise that symbiosis with the silicon smart-alecks is a prerequisite for survival, things might actually settle down on this planet and the colonisation of the solar system can begin in earnest. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Hal Finney wrote: > Part of what I wanted to get at in my thought experiment is the > bafflement and confusion an AI should feel when exposed to human ideas > about consciousness. Various people here have proffered their own > ideas, and we might assume that the AI would read these suggestions, > along with many other ideas that contradict the ones offered here. > It seems hard to escape the conclusion that the only logical response > is for the AI to figuratively throw up its hands and say that it is > impossible to know if it is conscious, because even humans cannot agree > on what consciousness is. > > In particular I don't think an AI could be expected to claim that it > knows that it is conscious, that consciousness is a deep and intrinsic > part of itself, that whatever else it might be mistaken about it could > not be mistaken about being conscious. I don't see any logical way it > could reach this conclusion by studying the corpus of writings on the > topic. If anyone disagrees, I'd like to hear how it could happen. > > And the corollary to this is that perhaps humans also cannot legitimately > make such claims, since logically their position is not so different > from that of the AI. In that case the seemingly axiomatic question of > whether we are conscious may after all be something that we could be > mistaken about. > > 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
