Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[DoktorZ]

Like Tiberius, my view is that consciousness / sentience is an emergent property of material conditions. As nanotechnology advances, it only stands to reason that sentience will inevitably emerge out of tomorrow's "supercomputers." The question is *when* we acknowledge it as sentience. Considering the history of racism and slavery, I reckon that it will appear sooner than we acknowledge it; this has, in fact, been a perennial theme in global science fiction. The transition to giving non-human artificial life full rights will surely be as, or more, traumatic than the end of slavery.

On another note, it might be worth asking which animals already possess sentience, and what rights they should possess. Sorry if this has already possessed, but I'm a bit pressed for time and thought the subject interesting enough for comment.

Z

[jonb]

We have consciousness only in the form that we are aware of our actions after being forced into performing them.

I heard on the radio a few months ago about a paper seeming to support this, but I have been unable to find the links.
As I remember it showed that we only became concious of our actions after the decision to make the action was already in place. The consciousness only being a sort of way of justifying ourselves.

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Hypothetically speaking .. would there be pleasure-bots with special skills?

That's how the wife uses me now.

[jonb]

On another note, it might be worth asking which animals already possess sentience, and what rights they should possess.
Z

Yes and it is interesting that most societies that think about peoples rights also have limitations on how animals should be used. This might be as limited as they should no be tortured for pleasure, but those limitations are there, and for things which cannot protest about abuse. Even the hunting lobby will often seek to justify their actions as being for the greater good, rather than just saying it gives the hunter pleasure.
Anglers constantly protest the fish does not feel, and will see it as important to return the fish to the water in good condition. This shows that in some way there is at least a little allotting of rights to the animal. Although I have as yet to come across anyone protesting about the feelings of maggots.

[DoktorZ]

On another note, it might be worth asking which animals already possess sentience, and what rights they should possess.
Z

Yes and it is interesting that most societies that think about peoples rights also have limitations on how animals should be used. This might be as limited as they should no be tortured for pleasure, but those limitations are there, and for things which cannot protest about abuse. Even the hunting lobby will often seek to justify their actions as being for the greater good, rather than just saying it gives the hunter pleasure.
Anglers constantly protest the fish does not feel, and will see it as important to return the fish to the water in good condition. This shows that in some way there is at least a little allotting of rights to the animal. Although I have as yet to come across anyone protesting about the feelings of maggots.

Did everyone see this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20523950

OK, let's dispense with the "weird German" sex jokes.

The issue here is that animals, under German law, cannot be considered to be capable of giving consent. This means that, sexually and legally, they are in the same category as juvenile humans.

What I find interesting about this, being neither interested in animals or children (!), is how "consent" is defined through concepts of consciousness.

I remember having a friendly argument with someone about economic choice / responsibility--I mentioned that his 2 year old daughter probably had a lower cognitive capacity than an adult chimp. He was nonplussed.

Z

[Whateverist]

It all depends on what consciousness actually is. If it is just the result of chemical reactions in the brain, there are no reasons why this same result could not be achieved artificially by a complex computer.

If consciousness is more than that, it may well be impossible.

As you are someone who seems to know a fair bit about programming I appreciate hearing your views on this. I agree in that I know I don't know exactly what consciousness is apart from my naive intuitions as a hypothetically conscious person.

I'm not a believer in "consciousness" or "free will". Both are most likely illusions. We have consciousness only in the form that we are aware of our actions after being forced into performing them.

I'm not interested in discussing free will but I'm obviously interested as hell in discussing consciousness. Unlike yourself I do think there is something we mean by consciousness even though it is hard to distil what that is exactly. So I believe in it and have intuitions up the kazoo regarding what consciousness may involve. Sometimes I am moved by the admonition that goes something like "that which cannot be said plainly should be passed over in silence" but obviously that is not stopping me here.

One intuition I have about consciousness as it exists in us is that our conscious minds are only a part of our greater organism and consciousness. What we call 'the unconscious' does not lack consciousness, we're just in the dark where its workings are concerned. It isn't that we aren't that. It is rather that we are only a part of that. I think it is the fact that all volition stems from the biology of our greater organism, of which our conscious mind is only one manifestation, that gives rise to the free will conundrum.

This McGilchrist TED talk while entirely speculative, lays out what I find is a coherent theory why and how our conscious and unconscious minds are able to cohabitate and what the proper roll of each may be. (No mention of free will by the way.)

http://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchris...brain.html

[Angrboda]

We have consciousness only in the form that we are aware of our actions after being forced into performing them.

I heard on the radio a few months ago about a paper seeming to support this, but I have been unable to find the links.
As I remember it showed that we only became concious of our actions after the decision to make the action was already in place. The consciousness only being a sort of way of justifying ourselves.

I believe the work you are referring to is that of Benjamin Libet. It's been discussed at length in the literature, as ti's not at all recent, but you might want to pay particular attention to Daniel Dennett's responses on the subject.

Also of relevance here are the adaptive unconscious and experiments on split-brain subjects (pioneered by Sperry and Gazzaniga). (Jonathan Haidt's "wag the dog" idea echoes something similar if I'm recalling it correctly; I think I still have that paper here somewhere.)

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First of all, let me say that I'm not suggesting (as has been done elsewhere if not here), that if you have a sufficiently complex system of computation, perhaps performing a specific set of functions that allows it to map inputs to outputs (behaviors) in certain ways that you will have what we call consciousness or sentience. It requires a complex computational machine, yes, but a complex computational machine with the right "program" (much as I hate to use that word in this context, as it misleads). This is a first fundamental distinction which needs to be made. Again, with caveats regarding the chosen metaphor, there are those who believe that consciousness is (largely) the result of the specific "software" that our brains run, and that the hardware is effectively irrelevant, and therefore it can indeed be duplicated on another, non-biological platform. Then there are those, like Searle, who argue that the specific nature of our biological hardware is essential to the genesis of consciousness (though in what way he does not say). There is a further camp which argues that not only is it the specific hardware that is essential, but that consciousness depends on properties of that hardware and their functions which science does not yet understand or appreciate adequately (quantum consciousness, microtubules and Crick's resonance hypothesis being examples).

I believe that consciousness results from a certain configuration of computational processes, but that there is nothing unique to the computational abilities of its putative host, the human brain, which make it uniquely capable of carrying out these processes. Nonetheless, consciousness, in my view, is a result of specific processes and their supporting processes, and that without them, or something functionally equivalent, you will not have a machine possessed of consciousness and sentience, just an intelligent machine. Consciousness and sentience are special in that they are distinct, identifiable kinds, but they are not special in that they require a specific hardware host, or even an exactly equivalent program.

Unreliability of introspection

"[Introspection] does not provide a direct pipeline to nonconscious mental processes. Instead, it is best thought of as a process whereby people use the contents of consciousness to construct a personal narrative that may or may not correspond to their nonconscious states."
— Timothy D. Wilson and Elizabeth W. Dunn (2004)

A 1977 paper by psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson challenged the directness and reliability of introspection, thereby becoming one of the most cited papers in the science of consciousness. Nisbett and Wilson reported on experiments in which subjects verbally explained why they had a particular preference, or how they arrived at a particular idea. On the basis of these studies and existing attribution research, they concluded that reports on mental processes are confabulated. They wrote that subjects had, "little or no introspective access to higher order cognitive processes". They distinguished between mental contents (such as feelings) and mental processes, arguing that while introspection gives us access to contents, processes remain hidden.

One observation I would make is that consciousness, popularly conceived, and as I experience it myself, does not exist in the physical world.

There are two properties of consciousness which I suspect we all share (though please do speak up if you don't). Using my consciousness as a model, I experience myself (my consciousness) as a thing existing somewhere behind my eyes, located here, in the present moment. This appears to demonstrate that consciousness appears to, a) be unified spatially, it exists in one central, undistributed place, and, b) it is temporally unified, it is not spread out in time, it exists at an infinitesimally small "here" in time.

Neither of these can be true of any brain process we currently understand. Neurons and neuron assemblies take time to fire and coordinate their activity, so if consciousness is "occurring" then it is occurring spread out in time. Consciousness' perception of itself existing in the here and now is either an illusion, depends on some property of brains not currently known or understood, or isn't happening in the physical brain at all. Personally, I'm credulous of the latter two hypotheses, especially as I have a model of consciousness which accounts for all of consciousness' properties without need to appeal to such unknowns. (I think, anyway; a lot of dots need connecting, and it would need to undergo rigorous criticism before I was truly satisfied with it.) The other property, that consciousness is unified and localized in one spot, whether behind the eyes, or somewhere else, likewise falls to the same criticism. (See Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained for more on the subject.)

In a nutshell, if consciousness is a physical process of the brain, based on known physical processes, then it cannot have the properties which it thinks it does have.

[The Grand Nudger]

Nonetheless, consciousness, in my view, is a result of specific processes and their supporting processes, and that without them, or something functionally equivalent, you will not have a machine possessed of consciousness and sentience, just an intelligent machine. Consciousness and sentience are special in that they are distinct, identifiable kinds, but they are not special in that they require a specific hardware host, or even an exactly equivalent program.

B-mine

What do you imagine might be a barrier to a functionally equivalent process in the case of a machine (if you think there may be one, of course)? I know we don't know, but AI is the realm of imagining anyway, so, take a stab? Or, if you prefer, how might we call something intelligent (and is it a special use of the word in those cases) without reference to consciousness or sentience? Similarly, what sort of examples might we be looking at with regards to something that is both conscious and sentient (or either, individually) but not intelligent? Just how easily can any of these terms cut the cord, so-to-speak, from each other?

[Ryantology]

If you accept that everything which makes a person what they are (emotions, thoughts, memories, and consciousness itself) is the result of chemical processes and electrical impulses going on in the meaty substrate of the brain, then there is no reason to doubt the possibility of replicating the effect in the non-meaty substrate of computers, once the computers and our understanding of the workings of the brain advance to certain points.

The definition of 'consciousness' is, of course, the trickiest part of that; how can you prove a machine is conscious? You never can, I think, because any test you devise to measure 'consciousness' is going to contain inherent biases of one kind or another; there is, after all, no objective way to measure it. I think, at the point where an AI tells us that it is conscious, and can convince a majority of people that its thought processes are independent and unique, we have to start giving them the benefit of the doubt (as we do naturally to every other person we encounter) and call them 'conscious'. And, I do believe that may happen in my lifetime.

[Angrboda]

The definition of 'consciousness' is, of course, the trickiest part of that; how can you prove a machine is conscious? You never can, I think, because any test you devise to measure 'consciousness' is going to contain inherent biases of one kind or another; there is, after all, no objective way to measure it. I think, at the point where an AI tells us that it is conscious, and can convince a majority of people that its thought processes are independent and unique, we have to start giving them the benefit of the doubt (as we do naturally to every other person we encounter) and call them 'conscious'. And, I do believe that may happen in my lifetime.

There's actually another way.

If what we call consciousness is an effect of a set of brain processes which we can describe and characterize, and whose function we can understand, verifying consciousness in another entity would largely be simply a matter of verifying that a similar aggregate process is present in that entity.

[Ryantology]

There's actually another way.

If what we call consciousness is an effect of a set of brain processes which we can describe and characterize, and whose function we can understand, verifying consciousness in another entity would largely be simply a matter of verifying that a similar aggregate process is present in that entity.

Certainly, that's true. I think, in a practical sense, we will probably duplicate the effect (or create a convincing facsimile of it) by chance before we understand it in that level of detail, however.