Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[DoktorZ]

I like A's hypothetical cyborg monkeys--it saved me the time of writing that myself!

I'm of the opinion that much of the defense of free will takes the form of a frantic attempts to save a particular view of ethics.

I agree. However, having lived many years abroad in non-Christian countries, I think the appeal of free will is a lot broader than we might think. People like believing that they're free--regardless of whether or not that's true. I reckon in some ways it is connected to the emergence of global consumer capitalism.

But you should also consider the historical argument I'm making: some of the strongest opponents of liberal humanism and free will were socialist technocrats. In the minds of the masses eagerly saving pennies for some Apple product, believing somehow that this is some profound form of agency, negation of free will is tantamount to embracing Stalinism. And I'm not just talking about crazy right-wingers or slightly dumb teenagers. So, these cultural and historical factors have also unexpectedly bolstered the philosophical belief in free will, which I think emerged out of the traumas of WWII and the USSR, PRC, etc. You can throw all kinds of fMRI scans on decision making in front of their eyes, and all they hear is Koestler's inquisitor, Ivanonv.

I'm persuaded though, that when you look at the practical application of ethics, that of controlling behavior through law, incentives and punishments, the need for free will evaporates.

See, I have always found this train of thought very tempting because, on some level, I think I desire a rational technocracy. This is troubling, however, given the historical experience many of us share from the last century. Social management has proven its effectiveness time and again, which, when divorced from ethics itself, is terrifying. Who watches the watchers and so on. The application of social management techniques is not the same thing as establishing ethical principles, as I'm sure you'll agree.

In a way, this is a how religion has found a place for itself in an age of science, which is, of course, highly unfortunate because most of its ethical instructions are useless or worse.

Finally, one thing I'd like to say is that the abandonment of free will and our essential humanity (whatever that is) may very well be a good, and exciting, thing to experience. Cyborg monkeys! But seriously, when you think of the possibilities for humans, and all of the interesting "life" forms, or "sentient" machines we might encounter, or our potentially accelerated evolution, isn't it exciting? Being a hairless monkey on stuck on this polluted rock is so 2011.

Z

[Whateverist]

I can't say my IRL world is terribly interesting at the moment, being mostly composed of paperwork and past-due writing deadlines. What you're witnessing here is the byproduct of indefatigable procrastination on my part. This will probably come to a crashing halt when the better half discovers what I've been doing.

Z

I wonder if procrastination is an expression of free will or its opposite? (It is conundrums like this which dispose me to think it is a pointless question.)

[DoktorZ]

I wonder if procrastination is an expression of free will or its opposite?

No, it's ineffective social management!

If only we were all little mindless worker bees. I'll just leave this here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ

[Whateverist]

Funny, I'm not aware of feeling frantic about preserving morality. If "human nature" means anything it shouldn't need me to defend it.

I've got to say that defending pain and mortality as essential aspects of AI seems silly to me. It is like arguing that AI could also be as neurotic as we can be. I don't think any of these are things we would want to engineer into a rolling box.

[jonb]

Actually Are we anything more than robots?

It would make perfect sense to fit a robot with an awareness that part of it is not working and to make that awareness a priority so that it does not ignore the damage and gets itself fixed and to not use the damaged part. That awareness in the robot could be classified as pain.
If you created a robot that you wished to be inventive, a good driver would be that it looked about itself to find better ways of doing things. In other words it would be dissatisfied with its present conditions. If humans have evolved and our success is partly due to our inventiveness, a level of being neurotic would be an aid to that proses.

I cannot see any reason to think we are other than machines.

[Aegrus]

I voted absolutely yes, and my proof is that I wrote a book about it, and I'm magical. It's amazing. No, you can't read it or see it at all.

However, I can put the book in a hat and decode it for you with my magical stones, but it's all complete metaphor, and it'll never be the same twice.

[Whateverist]

Actually Are we anything more than robots?

I myself have been called a love machine .. that was just before the police came. Never mind. That is another story.

It would make perfect sense to fit a robot with an awareness that part of it is not working and to make that awareness a priority so that it does not ignore the damage and gets itself fixed and to not use the damaged part. That awareness in the robot could be classified as pain.
If you created a robot that you wished to be inventive, a good driver would be that it looked about itself to find better ways of doing things. In other words it would be dissatisfied with its present conditions. If humans have evolved and our success is partly due to our inventiveness, a level of being neurotic would be an aid to that proses.

If they make a movie of this robot they should cast a young Woody Allen for the part.

I cannot see any reason to think we are other than machines.

Of course we would never have been able to think of anything in any light at all had human brains not developed that capacity. Artificial intelligence is really just an extension of our own. The possibility of inorganic consciousness along with the conception of ourselves as machines are all wonderful accomplishments of our (on this thread) much maligned human brains.

[genkaus]

I think such a program has the capacity to perform the task of medical diagnosis more thoroughly and accurately than any human, and may well be able to access all the latest most relevant statistical data by way of the cloud. So in that sense I would say it is highly intelligent and potentially to a degree exceeding our own for the task for which it has been programmed. It isn't clear to me how its capacity to update and integrate new data, though highly intelligent, would ever amount to sentience.

I suspect I'm more skeptical because I play no computer games and so don't spend much time in virtual environments. Of course, this is a virtual environment but I'm not the only human here .. or am I? hock:

That would not work for me as a definition of sentience. You could set up a programme that grouped objects by various characteristics and could look for new connections and be able to assess new objects.

As far as I can see the only way of telling if a thing has a self, is seeing whether it is selfish.

In my last post, I did not give sufficient thought to the topic and thus mistakenly equated sentience with consciousness/intelligence. Havng thought about those in more detail, here are my views in a more detailed form.

Consciousness: As I understand it, it simply means awareness. For example, animals and plants can be said to be conscious if they can perceive external phenomena. The easiest way to show that something is conscious is by showing that it reacts to that external phenomena. Even some of the current machines would qualify for this definition of consciousness. However, being aware of the awareness itself may not be necessary. Thus, there would be different levels of consciousness - such as the sunflower turning towards the sun to the very complex, such as humans.

Sentience: I understand it to mean the "ability to feel" and this is how I understand it. Consciousness can be divided into two forms - external and internal. The external consciousness, i.e., being aware of objects around you is established pretty easily, since everyone can perceive the said objects. Even the physical sensations, such as pain, hunger, arousal etc. can be called external since they are of the body and not of the mind. Sentience comes with the awareness of this awareness.

Conceptually, we've already made machines and computers that are aware of external and internal processes. Technically, we can equate indication of low battery with hunger and slow processing with fatigue etc. What makes us different is that our awareness of this reaction - the sensations of hunger, pain etc., takes a particular form that we cannot objectively verify with others very easily. This is our mind being aware of what's going on inside of it.

Is the same level of complexity possible for machines? Why not? Our limitation here is that when it comes to subjective experiences, we find it difficult to imagine it in any other form than what we already have. It is equivalent to trying to describe sights to a blind man or sounds to a deaf one. The reason why humans agree on so many experiences in this subject is because we have common systems of their perception. If alternate systems are developed for machines, then they may not "feel" the hunger or pain the same way we do, but they would feel it nonetheless.

As for detection of sentience, we come back to the old Philosophical Zombie problem. That is, if everyone around you loses the capacity to be sentient but continues as if it is due to biological wiring, how would you know? Thankfully, we are making progresses in that field by actually studying the brain. By finding out which areas are responsible for which forms of awareness, we can tell if something is sentient by seeing if it actually feels emotions. The same principle can be applied to machines as well - if and when they do become sentient.