On Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:10:24 AM UTC-4, Brent wrote: > > On 10/24/2012 9:23 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > Or what if we don't care? We don't care about slaughtering cattle, which >> are pretty smart >> as computers go. We manage not to think about starving children in >> Africa, and they *are* >> humans. And we ignore the looming disasters of oil depletion, water >> pollution, and global >> warming which will beset humans who are our children. >> > > Sure, yeah I wouldn't expect mainstream society to care, except maybe for > some people, I am mainly focused on what seems to be like an astronomically > unlikely prospect that we will someday find it possible to make a person > out of a program, but won't be able to just make the program itself and no > person attached. > > > Right. John McCarthy (inventor of LISP) worried and wrote about that > problem decades ago. He cautioned that we should not make robots conscious > with emotions like humans because then it would be unethical use them like > robots. >
It's arbitrary to think of robots though. It can be anything that represents computation to something. An abacus, a card game, anything. Otherwise it's prejudice based on form. > > Especially given that we have never made a computer program that can do > anything whatsoever other than reconfigure whatever materials are able to > execute the program, I find it implausible that there will be a magical > line of code which cannot be executed without an experience happening to > someone. > > > So it's a non-problem for you. You think that only man-born-of-woman or > wetware can be conscious and have qualia. Or are you concerned that we are > inadvertently offending atoms all the time? > Everything has qualia, but only humans have human qualia. Animals have animal qualia, organisms have biological qualia, etc. > > No matter how hard we try, we can never just make a drawing of these > functions just to check our math without invoking the power of life and > death. It's really silly. It's not even good Sci-Fi, it's just too lame. > > > I think we can, because although I like Bruno's theory I think the MGA is > wrong, or at least incomplete. I think the simulated intelligence needs a > simulated environment, essentially another world, in which to *be* > intelligent. And that's where your chalk board consciousness fails. It > needs to be able to interact within a chalkboard world. So it's not just a > question of going to a low enough level, it's also a question of going to a > high enough level. > A chalkboard world just involves a larger chalkboard. Craig > > Brent > The person I was when I was 3 years old is dead. He died because > too much new information was added to his brain. > -- Saibal Mitra > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/B-2eXjKhYLYJ. 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.
