On 8/31/2015 5:56 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Monday, August 31, 2015, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:On 31 Aug 2015, at 00:42, Russell Standish wrote: On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 12:34:18PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: On 30 Aug 2015, at 03:08, Russell Standish wrote: Well as people probably know, I don't believe C. elegans can be conscious in any sense of the word. Hell - I have strong doubts about ants, and they're massively more complex creatures. I think personally that C. Elegans, and Planaria (!), even amoeba, are conscious, although very plausibly not self-conscious. I tend to think since 2008 that even RA is already conscious, even maximally so, and that PA is already as much self-conscious than a human (when in some dissociative state). But I don't know if PA is more or less conscious than RA. That depends of the role of the higher part of the brain consists in filtering consciousness or enacting it. But it probably won't be long before we simulate a mouse brain in toto - about 2 decades is my guess, maybe even less given enough dollars - then we're definitely in grey philosophical territory :). I am slightly less optimistic than you. It will take one of two decades before we simulate the hippocampus of a rat, but probably more time will be needed for the rest of their brain. And the result can be a conscious creature, with a quite different consciousness that a rat, as I find plausible that pain are related to the glial cells and their metabolism, which are not taken into account by the current "copies". What is blocking us is not the computing power - already whole "rat brain" simulations have been done is something like 1/10000 of real time - so all we need is about a decade of performane improvement through Moores law. What development is needed is ways of determining the neural circuitry. There have been leaps and bounds in the process of slicing frozen brains, and imaging the slices with electron microscopes, but clearly it is still far too slow. As for the hypothesis that glial cells have something to do with it, well that can be tested via the sort of whole rat brain simulation I've been talking about. Run the simulation in a robotic rat, and compare the behaviour with a real rat. Basically what the open worm guys a doing, but scaled up to a rat. If the simulation is way different from the real rat, then we know something else is required. I can imagine that the rat will have a "normal behavior", but as he cannot talk to us, we might fail to appreciate some internal change or even some anosognosia. The rat would not be a zombie rat, but still be in a quite different conscious state (perhaps better, as it seems the glial cell might have some role in the chronic pain.In general, if there is a difference in consciousness then there should be a difference in behaviour. If the difference in consciousness is impossible to detect then arguably it is no difference.
I'd say more-than-arguably we don't know and can't know. Which is why I think "the hard problem" will be dissolved by AI engineering rather than solved by philosophers.
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