Vogelfrei

How would you see it? Consciousness doesn't mean sentience, so there can't be any behavioral indices to assess whether a thing is conscious or not.

How do you know your computer isn't conscious? Maybe science has achieved this goal already.

Laurentius

Yeah, maybe. Maybe technology (it's technology, not science) has achieved this goal already.

But I don't think so.

And if you think so, it is I that have the right to ask for evidence in support for your claim, not the other way around.

AVE

Vogelfrei

What if consciousness (in beings besides oneself) isn't the sort of thing for which evidence can be found?

Offhand, I always thought the "burden of proof" thing was rather silly. Facts are facts; the burden of proof, on the other hand, is a social convention useful in argument. If we want to know about the possibility of consciousness in machines, we'll want to hear all the ideas and see all the evidence (assuming there can be evidence) that EVERY side has to present. Furthermore, we'll deny a possibility not because one side failed to make a good showing, but because we've gone out of our way to argue for them, and found that, even then, the position is lacking that which is necessary for rational belief.

I suppose that's the difference between searching for truth, and being a debater. If you're interested in knowing truth, the burden of proof is always on you, no matter what the situation.

Demosthenes

Sorry for taking a while to post a reply to this thread. While the replies weren't exactly what I was expecting, they're still worthwhile.

Right now, the simulation of biological relevant details are crude but one thing is certainin the near future is that the it will get accurate and more realistic. If it reaches a point where you can't tell apart a physical organism and a virtual organism, then how are they any "different"?

Suppose you have a dog on a computer, you then transplant it into a robotic body indistinushable from a fleshy dog, or even if you want to, grow an organic body complete with an artifical brain holding the virtual dog. Is it possible to tell the difference?

Keith Russell

Laurentius said:
Yeah, but Demosthenes will argue that the picture of his won't develop seeking for equilibrium and self-preservation within its medium, while the software projecting him against the virutal environment will.

Nonsense, I've seen lots of movies where 'people' act in self-preserving ways...

Keith.

Kent Stevens

If you look at examples from science fiction it is not obvious that certain machines do not have consciousness. The holograms in Star Trek are like people and seem to be self aware. Other science fiction characters such as Data, the terminator, Hal, and David all seem to be self aware.

But we can make a computer program now that very crudely emulates a person's character. Obviously this would not allow someone to be cloned or be reincarnated in another form. A program is not going to be as flexible in it's range of behaviour as a human being. But this crude program could recieve inputs and thus have awareness. If the program was constructed in a certain way it would have knowledge about itself, and could logically deduce that it does exist. The program could also have internal moods that it monitors. Consciousness is not impossible to emulate. If the emulation is good enough then it is hard to differentiate normal consciousness from artificial consciousness.

[ October 04, 2002: Message edited by: Kent Stevens ]</p>

elwoodblues

Apparently, the only way we have of detecting this property (consciousness, will, whatever) is through looking at their actions. We look at a human and say he has this property because of the actions he takes.

It is possible to imagine a manufactured entity that takes actions 'as if' it had consciousness or will. That's not so far from where we are now. How are we to evaluate whether this entity has consciousness? If we're going to be fair, we should use the same standard that we use for humans, and that's to look at it's actions. Anything else is a double-standard.

Starboy

Demosthenes, what you would have is a real virtual cell or human for that matter. An interesting question might be, if there were virtual humans living in a computer would they be aware of each other and eventually would they become aware of us? Could they, using the scientific method, determine if reality was more then what they percieved in the virtual world? Would they detect the computer and would they think there was a creator, ID and so forth?

Starboy

Vogelfrei

A program qua program doesn't have "knowledge" and "moods" and anything else like; it only processes semantically-meaningless data. Claiming that processing meaningless data is the same as knowing means that thermostats "sense" when the temperature gets too low and "choose" to turn on the heat. And if you believe that, you're either claiming that thermometers have consciousness, or radically altering the meaning of "sense" and "choose" and so forth to include metaphor. Neither option shows that processing data qua processing data --&gt; consciousness.

It's possible that a computer program could have consciousness, but not by virtue of being a program.

Videos of people are hard to differentiate from real people, if you don't know anything about modern technology. So what? What a thing looks like, to us, doesn't change what it actually is. The problem is that we're stuck with what things look like.

Vogelfrei

I always thought it was because:

1) Actions
2) Physical make-up (esp. brain)

If 1) is your only criterion, I suppose you think the "people" that you see in your dreams are conscious. Or do you?

There are two standards you can use to evaluate whether you should believe something is conscious. The first is whether we have evidence to support that it actually is. The second is whether it's more practical and convenient for us to simply assume that a thing is -- whether the belief would be useful to possess.

Certainly, if something behaves as if it's conscious, it's probably going to be awkward to assume it's not, and we'll say that it is for sake of convenience (and we actually might find ourselves incapable of believing otherwise!). But that's quite different from saying that a thing actually is conscious. So, as soon as intelligent machines are built, I'll be happy to treat them as if they're just like humans, albeit with different body parts. But where's the evidence for the claim that they're ACTUALLY conscious? Again, behavior isn't good enough, and I gave you an example of why above. Here's another: do you think "bots" online are conscious? They act sort of like there's a retarded idiot-savant autist (or something rare like that ) controlling them, and no one thinks that retarded idiot-savant autists aren't conscious, so...

I don't know what the sufficient causes for consciousness are (in particular, whether brain material has some differential role), and until I do, I'll play the skeptic/agnostic. In practice, computers and thermometers and microwave ovens may actually BE conscious...but how can I know?

Why do you think skepticism/agnosticism is not justified in this situation?