Would anyone here say that a conditional (e.g., "if/else")
statement" (in some program) is conscious?
I think such statements may form the atoms of consciousness, as they
represent the point at which a program's behavior diverges based on
the inspection of some information.
Conditional statements are required for any kind of intelligent or
responsive behavior, which might be why consciousness correlates with
it.
Jason
On May 2, 2013, at 9:02 AM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
> Artificial neural networks have been trained to fly planes, invest
in the stock market, converts speech to text, recognise handwriting
and so on and so on.
True.
> For most of these cases, nobody understands how the network works,
they only understand how they created the necessary
conditions for a certain behaviour to emerge.
Also true. So you know that under certain circumstances shit
happens, and that's all that you need to know if you're just
interested in how, but not if you also want to know why. So if you
just wanted to know how to make a AI you could reverse engineer a
human brain, you might not understand why your creation worked but
that wouldn't stop it from working.
> The first activity [science] offers public rewards
It helps you figure out how the world actually works not how you
wish it works. And because what you've discovered is not just true
for you but for the external world too I'd be interested to hear
what you've found out.
> the second only offers private rewards.
Well, I suppose navel gazing might lower the blood pressure in some
people, but don't expect it to teach you anything important about
the complexities of reality, otherwise you'll be as disappointed as
the last hundred generation of navel gazers have been. And navel
gazers turn into total bores as soon as they open their mouth
because even if they really have found something it is only true for
them.
> You freed yourself from the dogmas of Christianity but not from
its morality.
Wow, calling a guy known for disliking religion religious, never
heard that one before, at least I never heard it before I was 12.
>> if you are a logical man then your doubts about the consciousness
of a intelligent robot would be no greater than your doubts about
the consciousness of your fellow intelligent human beings; and lets
face it as a practical matter those doubts must be very very very
very small.
> From a Bayesian standpoint, we are disagreeing on the value of a
prior. This has nothing to do with logic, we just place different
bets on an unknown.
I don't understand, are you saying that you actually believe that it
is likely that you are the only conscious being in the universe??
>> If you believe that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated
then logically there is no alternative, you must believe that
Charles Darwin was wrong.
> That doesn't follow.
Like hell it doesn't!! You know for a fact that Evolution produced
at least one being (and probably many billions) that was not just
intelligent but conscious too, and there is absolutely positively no
reason for Evolution to do that if intelligence and consciousness
are unrelated.
> I believe that human intelligence is a product of Darwinian
evolution and I'm agnostic on consciousness.
Then what I said before was entirely wrong, your views are not even
close to being self consistent.
John K Clark
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it,
send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
