tronvillain

snatchbalance:
No, I do not really mean the neocortex, I mean the entire brain. To say that all of our drives take place of the substrate of biology is simply to say that they depend on the action of hormones and neuron, which simply make a complex parallel network. Remember, the intelligence will probably not be the machine, it will be created by the machine, the product of its operation.

There is no reason that it should not have an "unconscious" - indeed, it is quite possible that is impossible to construct anything conscious without one. Siilarly, there is no reason it should not also get hungry and metabolize its own part if it gets "hungry", except that such additions to the program appear totally unecessary. If I never got hungry, would that affect my ability to experience other emotions? No. Still, you could make them hungry for something else, like information, and add positive and negative feedback comparable to being hungry or full.

While it is possible that we will have no common ground with them, it all depends on how they are built. Since we are the ones who would build them, we could have a lot in common with them.

tronvillain

Sammi:
Where is this proof? I hope it is not simply your assertion that "The human is NOT-BLIND to its symbolic operations WHEREAS a machine is blind to all its operations" or your comparison between a human and a bus.

Again, I will quote Dennett:
You apparently wish to point to a calculator (or a bus) and say "This calculator does not understand Chinese, therefore no machine can understand Chinese." I could say the same thing about a flatworm and organics, but the argument wouldn't be any better.

Clutch

tron, well said. Er... quoted. Dennett is wonderfully clear about this.

The other side of the coin is that humans are almost entirely "blind" to their first-person cognitive mechanisms -- including at the level of symbol processing, whatever level that is. A host of experimental data confirms this, perhaps the simplest being the serial memory task: response time varies with the length of the list, rather than the position of the probe item on the list, even though subjects report "running through the list" in the order they learned it *only* as far as the probe item.

Synaesthesia

Snatchbalance.
To say that there is some vitalistic ingredient to biological matter is an even harder contention to support.

That being said, there are very prosaic reasons why a silicone emulation of the brain would be less feasible than hardware much more lke the brain. The specific neurotransimitters used have very subtle effects. Modelling their precise behavior would be so fantastically complicated that the notion of having thousands of trillions of them modeled on a computer seems grossly implausible. (But not impossible - in principle)

Sammi,
As a matter of fact humans are entirely blind to our mechanical operations. There are many layers of feedback, but we can’t directly discern their physical nature without scientific investigation. This is perfectly possible, in principle, for an emulated human. Searle’s leap of faith remains just that.

snatchbalance

Tron,

Yes, well I guess you just illustrated my point, hormones and neurons work within a protien and water based body. Hormones cause, increase in heart rate and breathing, muscles to tense, bowels to void, etc. What comparison do have in a being of silicon circuits, no muscles, and no bowels? Like you said the brain(and there may be more than one) works in paraelle with the body, they are inseperable.

Like I keep saying, it may be a conscious machine, but it won't be an animal consciousnes.


First, somehow, an unconscious will be consciously programed into the machine. Pretty good trick.

Then, somehow, perhaps magically, silicon chips could be metabolised to provide energy; but that's not "necessary". So, consciously, a program that stimulates "hunger" will be provided, only the "hunger" will be for information, not food.

And this all, somehow, is supposed to be comparable to organic experience.

I'm sorry, but it's all too much for me.

I suppose so.

SB

[ July 14, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>

snatchbalance

Synthesia,

If you are refering to some sort of elan vital, well, I never made any such contention that there is such a thing. In fact, I tend to reject such notions out of hand.

All I can say at that point, is that it is obvious life, and certain forms of consciouness, are emergent properties of biological matter.

I agree with the rest of your post.

sb

[ July 14, 2002: Message edited by: snatchbalance ]</p>

tronvillain

This is pathetic. Sometimes I wonder why I am even bothering to talk to you.

snatchbalance:
As I have said before, there is no apparent obstacle to building something in a serial computer exactly equivalent to the complex parallel network of human neurons and hormones. If it does the same job, does it matter whether it is a chunk of organic matter or a piece of software? There is no apparent reason that it should. If having a body similar to that of a human is necessary for human style consciousness (it is not clear that it is) then a virtual body could be realized for an artificial intelligence.

*chuckle* A rather sad little attempt at ridiculing my position. Yes, it would be a good trick to construct a system with an unconscious, but evolution has managed to do it so obviously it can be done. Apparently the difficulty must lie with doing it consciously as we must, rather than unconsciously as evolution did?

As for hunger, it is not clear that it is necessary at all. I only suggested a hunger for information as a possibility if it was necessary, but is it so hard to imagine? When you have gone a while without taking in information you feel hunger pangs, you take down a book and read until you feel full. If that won't do, you could create virtual food and virtual metabolism, but it seems unlikely that it would be required. If I was never hungry or consumed food would I be incapable of experiencing other emotions? No.

Well, you show your own limitations and ignorance.

[ July 14, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>

Taffy Lewis

If being an organic system is not a necessary condition for states of consciousness then what is necessary?

tronvillain

Well, if we knew that we'd know a lot more about consciousness than we do now. A computational system of sufficient power complexity obviously, but as for the details of its organization...

excreationist

Taffy Lewis:
This is my definition for an aware system:

"...it receives input and responds according to its goals/desires and beliefs learnt through experience about how the world works
(self-motivated, acting on self-learnt beliefs ["self" refers to the system as a whole])"

Now to work out what it would need:

"receives input"
A sub-system that extracts features from the external environment (e.g. red, green and blue light intensity detectors)

"responds"
Uses motors or muscles or something that allows it to interact with the external environment in order to test its beliefs, etc.

"according to its goals/desires and beliefs learnt through experience about how the world works"
It has long-term memories that it has accumulated that it uses to predict what it needs to do in order to attempt to satisfy its fundamental drives (e.g. seek newness, seek coherence, avoid frustration, avoid bodily injury) This learning/motivational part is pretty complex...