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What do you mean by "self-awareness"? Do you mean "knowledge about yourself", such as realizing that you are a person, knowing your limitations, getting the wo
by justinpombrio 10y ago
What do you mean by "self-awareness"?
Do you mean "knowledge about yourself", such as realizing that you are a person, knowing your limitations, getting the word "I" right, predicting your own behavior, etc.? If so, that seems pretty easy to test. If someone/something can accurately answer detailed questions about themselves, obviously they are knowledgeable about themselves.
Do you mean the little "theater" we live in, where it feels like we're surrounded by sights and sounds and we're a little person in our head that chooses what to pay attention to? There's a book about this, and a proposed part of the brain that gives rise to it, though it's still fairly preliminary research. [1]
Do you mean our "inner narative" where we monologue to ourselves, slowly building up our "narrative identity"? [2]
Do you mean something else? These are all very different phenomenon, and you can have some without others, so I don't think a discussion can be very helpful until we've decided which we're talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity
- alistairSH 10y agoI really don't know the answer. When I use "self-aware" or "sentience" in regards to AI, I mean something along the lines of "does the AI posses "knowledge about itself" and does it have some form of inner monologue. I think it's probably a blurry line. Great apes are probably just on the non-sentient, non-self-aware side, but boy are they close by some measures.
- justinpombrio 10y agoI'm trying to argue that these are largely unrelated questions. You can ask weather Great apes are self-aware in each sense, and get different answers: (i) Great apes pass the mirror test, which certainly requires some level of self-knowledge. (ii) Bernard Baars (a neuroscientist who studies consciousness) has a hypothesis about the part of the brain that gives rise to the "theater" of consciousness. I forget what part of the brain it is, but Great apes have it too, so if his hypothesis is correct then they also have a "theater". (iii) Great apes don't speak, so they don't have anything like our inner monologue. Honestly, I have no idea which of these three attributes an intelligent AI might have. And I see no reason to assume that they go together.
- alistairSH 10y agoI don't disagree. Just thinking aloud.