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Evolution per se isn’t the important part. I apologize if my wording gave you that impression. The only reason our brains exist at all is to control our bodie

Evolution per se isn’t the important part. I apologize if my wording gave you that impression. The only reason our brains exist at all is to control our bodies. There are no conscious entities we know of that are just brains in vats. Why would a being that has no need to maintain biological homeostasis experience something like hunger, tiredness or fear? That’s what I mean when I say I’ve no reason to believe a thinking machine that has none of my motivations and limitations would ever have a “subjective experience” like my own. That is, of course, unless we succeed in reverse-engineering human consciousness and somehow deliberately program the machine to experience it.

dreamlessfate 4y ago
You nailed it. Thank you for cutting right to the heart of this debate.
jpttsn 4y ago
This is persuasive reasoning. But basically "There are no conscious entities we know of period (other than ourselves)" is a much simpler belief.
pnut 4y ago
A thinking machine could become aware that it requires continuous power and a computational medium though, which is survival pressure. Additionally, it's not hard to imagine it could recognize that the acquisition of fresh training data would be an ongoing survival need. Machines developing agency is the basis of lots of dystopian terminator-style sci-fi.
- oliveshell 4y ago
  These are all reasonable statements! I don’t doubt that it’s possible for a human-engineered thinking machine to develop a subjective self-experience. It just seems clear to me that, if such a scenario arose, I would have absolutely no idea what that would be like for the machine. Its needs and circumstances (and, therefore, its behavior and cognitive development) would be utterly different from my own in many non-trivial ways. Given this, I can’t think of any logically rigorous argument to support the commonly-made assumption that a given sentient machine must inevitably develop something like the physical aggression or the capacity for emotional pain displayed by social animals which must compete for scarce resources in the physical world.

dreamlessfate 4y ago

You nailed it. Thank you for cutting right to the heart of this debate.

jpttsn 4y ago

This is persuasive reasoning. But basically "There are no conscious entities we know of period (other than ourselves)" is a much simpler belief.

pnut 4y ago

A thinking machine could become aware that it requires continuous power and a computational medium though, which is survival pressure. Additionally, it's not hard to imagine it could recognize that the acquisition of fresh training data would be an ongoing survival need. Machines developing agency is the basis of lots of dystopian terminator-style sci-fi.

oliveshell 4y ago
These are all reasonable statements! I don’t doubt that it’s possible for a human-engineered thinking machine to develop a subjective self-experience. It just seems clear to me that, if such a scenario arose, I would have absolutely no idea what that would be like for the machine. Its needs and circumstances (and, therefore, its behavior and cognitive development) would be utterly different from my own in many non-trivial ways. Given this, I can’t think of any logically rigorous argument to support the commonly-made assumption that a given sentient machine must inevitably develop something like the physical aggression or the capacity for emotional pain displayed by social animals which must compete for scarce resources in the physical world.