Mar 9 2012: Those tests are a starting point, but I don't think they address the 'hard problem' of consciousness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness) which is the part that really matters. It's possible, and a little disturbing, to imagine a sort of android that acts exactly like a person, including in those behavioural tests, but which doesn't have consciousness. If we didn't look inside its head (I mean that literally), we could never tell whether or not it was a person. You suggested elsewhere that perhaps nothing unconscious could manifest all the signs of conscious. That'd be a fantastic discovery if it were ever confirmed, but, on the face of it, it seems like something that would be almost impossible to find out without first knowing what consciousness is.
Mar 9 2012: Maybe not your human condition. But that caveman-robot might equally despair at the impossibility of creating a human capable of understanding the caveman-robot condition :P
Mar 9 2012: Logan, you seem to have missed my point. Without consciousness there would be no 'they'. There would be only some objects that move and make noises in such a way that we are fooled into thinking there is a 'they'. The idea that they really are conscious just because =from outside= they look for all the world as if they were conscious is absurd. The difference is that, while it appears =for us= as though they are conscious, there is no =for them=. You have a right to say that you are truly conscious just because you have an experience of any kind. This is Descarte's 'Cogito ergo sum', put slightly differently.
But I'm not being a dualist about this. When I say 'from the outside' I mean 'in day-to-day life'. I expect that once we work out exactly what physical processes go on in our brains we will probably be able to discover what consciousness is, and how it happens, in objective physical terms. We should then be able to construct new consciousnesses artificially. If I'm wrong, it may be that some sort of primitive consciousness is a fundamental part of all existence, and my worries are misplaced.
'Of what value, then, are our meanings, values, and civilisations' if we can't tell the difference between fakes and the real thing? The value we place in things (including one another) is made 'true' or 'false' not because of how the things appear to us but in virtue of the way they really are. To take an example, this is why we respect the wishes of the dead in the form of wills: we are doing right by them even though by definition they cannot know about it. Or why we would rather know the truth than believe a comforting lie. Our civilisation is of immense value, and an unconscious civilisation would be of very little, because of factors we don't yet know how to detect. That doesn't mean those valuations are mistaken.
Interesting story, Howard. I'm always dubious of the appeal to absurdity in philosophy. The unthinkable has frequently turned out true in the past.
Mar 7 2012: I agree with you, but we have to try. And imagine how fantastic it would be if we succeeded - we'd finally have an answer to one of the biggest questions there is.
Mar 7 2012: Johannes, your argument seems to be 'We don't know how emotional changes of mind etc. happen, so we never will, and we'll never be able to build machines that do the same'. I'm sure you can see the flaw when I put it like that. Anyway, the bigger mystery is how come we have conscious experiences - the 'hard problem' of consciousness. I'd put my money on someone coming up with a scientific answer for it, eventually, and the rest of us going like Thomas Huxley, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!' But we're nowhere near that point right now.
Mar 7 2012: Warren, the biggest problem with that Blade Runner scenario is that it's entirely possible that we could create machines that are advanced enough to fool everyone into thinking they're people, but which aren't actually conscious. That would mean that these machines' 'friends', 'lovers', in fact anyone who treats them as a person, would be living a lie. Nobody else on this thread seems to have twigged this despite me spamming it all over, and it has me worried. What if we were to end up handing over our civilisation to robotic 'successors' who weren't actually conscious? It would be the end of all meaning and value in the universe.
Mar 7 2012: There's no reason why we couldn't, in principle, work out how to build a machine capable of 'human intuition and experience'. If push comes to shove, we could do it by simulating an entire human brain. You're mistaking 'not knowing how intuition works' for 'never being able to find out how intuition works'. And even if we can't work it out, past human experience shows that fantastic discoveries and technologies will come out of the attempt.
Mar 7 2012: If you want real randomness, you could put together a piece of hardware with a radioisotope in it which spits out numbers on the basis of the number of atoms of it that decay at any given time. Lack of real randomness is not an obstacle to computer intelligence.
Mar 7 2012: You're talking as if technology were one thing, with some sort of essence. This is a distressingly common mistake. A piece of technology is just an arrangement of matter. So is a person. There is no reason why we should not, at some point, work out how to produce an arrangement of matter which is both. And the reason why that arrangement of matter would be able to do creative things when previous pieces of technology could not would be that we had not previously worked out how to make things that do that. Please try not to be superstitious about things like 'nature', 'life', and 'technology'. They are just categories we impose on the world.
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A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
But I'm not being a dualist about this. When I say 'from the outside' I mean 'in day-to-day life'. I expect that once we work out exactly what physical processes go on in our brains we will probably be able to discover what consciousness is, and how it happens, in objective physical terms. We should then be able to construct new consciousnesses artificially. If I'm wrong, it may be that some sort of primitive consciousness is a fundamental part of all existence, and my worries are misplaced.
'Of what value, then, are our meanings, values, and civilisations' if we can't tell the difference between fakes and the real thing? The value we place in things (including one another) is made 'true' or 'false' not because of how the things appear to us but in virtue of the way they really are. To take an example, this is why we respect the wishes of the dead in the form of wills: we are doing right by them even though by definition they cannot know about it. Or why we would rather know the truth than believe a comforting lie. Our civilisation is of immense value, and an unconscious civilisation would be of very little, because of factors we don't yet know how to detect. That doesn't mean those valuations are mistaken.
Interesting story, Howard. I'm always dubious of the appeal to absurdity in philosophy. The unthinkable has frequently turned out true in the past.
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?
A reply on Conversation: Can technology replace human intelligence?