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Dogs are animals like us, so they have, or might have, consciousness. Robots most likely won't, regardless of how intelligent they may be, unless we discover wh
by eurleif 15y ago
Dogs are animals like us, so they have, or might have, consciousness. Robots most likely won't, regardless of how intelligent they may be, unless we discover what causes consciousness to occur and use that knowledge as the basis for implementing robot AI.
- evincarofautumn 15y agoAs a pragmatist, I’m willing to assume anything that’s indistinguishable from a conscious being is indeed conscious. In other words, understanding how a robot’s brain works does not preclude said brain from harbouring true consciousness—otherwise, studying our own brains would be a kind of very slow intellectual suicide.
- lurker14 15y agoWhy do you assume that consciousness is unlikely to be created accidentally? It already happened once, with humans.
- astrodust 15y agoConsciousness could be some kind of emergent phenomenon, so where the conditions are right it can spontaneously occur. The brain is an environment where this happens quite commonly, but there are occasions where that breaks down and it fails, sometimes shattering into multiple independent sub-consciousnesses or failing entirely and falling into a vegetative state. We may not need to discover anything, but instead let the machinery re-organize and evolve to discover itself.
- jdietrich 15y agoIt's a specious argument - we have no testable definition of "consciousness" or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists. Slavery was often justified with the argument that black people didn't have souls. It's just as baseless as arguing that computers are unlikely to have "consciousness". Without evidence that there is some fundamental difference between a biological and artificial mind, we must assume that a self-aware AI is entitled to the same rights as any other self-aware being.
- eurleif 15y ago>or even any evidence that such a phenomenon exists. You have evidence of your own consciousness, just as I have evidence of my own. >we must assume that a self-aware AI is entitled to the same rights as any other self-aware being. What's your testable definition of self-awareness? Is the 'top' command self-aware because it can see its own process?
- true_religion 15y agoI do not have evidence of your consciousness. As far as I'm concerned you're a biological robot.