Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

[Roedy Green]

They lack an emotional component provided
by a higher mind.

All mammals have emotions. They even have the same brain structures we
do to support them.

 

[Roedy Green]

Are you suggesting silicon gets bored or frustated?
By what possible mechanism?

What is the mechanism by which humans feel?

If consciousness is something caused by complex electrical activity in
a confined space, which it appears to be, since unconscious brains are
not electrically active, why would not other forms of complex
electrical activity in a confined space similarly create consciousness
or something like it?

 

[Roedy Green]

My mother, right now, is
functioning adequately (clearly aware, conscious and sentient)
after having suffered a stroke last year.

You say she is conscious because she is your mother. But we are stuck
with no way of knowing for sure if she has not turned into a machine.
We go by the supposition that works like this:

I know I am conscious. Therefore things that look like and act like me
are probably conscious. I know that when I am anaesthetised, I am not
conscious. Things that behave like I do when I am unconscious,
especially things I don't have an emotional attachment to, are not.

Your Mom, by that criterion, is probably conscious.

It is pretty mathematically iffy to extrapolate to all species from
two observations on one individual.

What I find puzzling is the inconsistency with even this simple model.
Obviously chickens have more in common in their behaviour with a
conscious human than an unconscious one, yet some us flatly assert
that chickens can't possibly be conscious.

To me it smacks of some sort of status assignment. Chickens have
lower status that humans, therefore they cannot be conscious. This is
similar to thinking that slaves and horses could not be conscious.
It is economically expedient to think that. If we had some way of
synthesizing cheap delicious chicken flesh, we might change our minds
and decide chickens were conscious after all.

 

[Roedy Green]

How many animals have made obvious and overt attempts to communicate
with you

Yes. See http://mindprod.com/intel.html

 

[Programmer Dude]

What is the mechanism by which humans feel?

Not feel. Feel *emotions*. Big difference.

If consciousness is something caused by complex electrical activity
in a confined space,...

There are several completely unproved assumptions here. First,
that consciousness is a mere property of a physical system.

Second, that full consciousness is strictly electrical (there's
a lot of chemical stuff going on in the brain!).

Third, that confined space has *anything* to do with it.

...which it appears to be, since unconscious brains are
not electrically active,...

?? That's just plain wrong. An unconscious brain very definitely
has electrical activity. If it doesn't, it's dead!

...why would not other forms of complex electrical activity in
a confined space similarly create consciousness or something
like it?

Because we *know* even now that there's more to the picture, and
because many very knowledgable people suspect there's even more
to it than we suspect.

That is, the *assumption* that, if we wire up enough circuits in
the right way, we'll get a *mind* is just that: an assumption.

And a rather huge one at that.

But more to the point, there's nothing in today's (or tomorrow's)
computers that even begins to have the required complexity or
structure capable of feeling thought, let alone emotion.

 

[Programmer Dude]

read my little story about the dolphin and the paddles at
http://mindprod.com/intel.html. People's preconceived notions can
make them miss cues obvious to others.

Have read it, and as I've said, animals are clearly capable of
communicating their basic needs and wants. Even cows communicate
distress at not being milked (and cows ain't quite the brightest
critters on the planet).

If your dolphins--or my dog--were truly sentient, they'd also
try communicating on our level, since--to a truly intelligent
being--it would be rather obvious the message wasn't getting
through very well.

 

[Programmer Dude]

But most humans exclude animals with larger brains than
ours from also being intelligent.

It has nothing to do with the size of the brain, but with the
complexity of the wiring.

 

[Programmer Dude]

this in from Kurzweil's book, the Age of Spiritual Machines..

Ah, never mind. Not a Kurzweil fan, particularly.

 

[Programmer Dude]

That's not what he is claiming. He is claiming we have $1000
machines that have the computational power of a dragon fly, not
the software to emulate a dragonfly.

In other words, a completely meaningless statistic.

How many dragonflys can run unix or Excel?
How many computers can catch and eat mosquitoes on the fly?

 

[Programmer Dude]

Yes. See http://mindprod.com/intel.html

And when you asked what its favorite food or color was it replied....

(Note: two-year-old humans WILL reply!)

 

[Programmer Dude]

You say she is conscious because she is your mother.

No, more because when I spoke to her on the phone this weekend and
asked her how she was feeling, she said she was feeling well. I'd
call her responsiveness and use of language sentient.

We go by the supposition that works like this:

Again, you presume to speak for others.
Again, you are wrong.

What I find puzzling is the inconsistency with even this simple
model.

Hint: maybe your model is wrong.

Obviously chickens have more in common in their behaviour with a
conscious human than an unconscious one, yet some us flatly assert
that chickens can't possibly be conscious.

They are clearly conscious. (They are equally clearly tasty!)
What they are clearly NOT is sentient.

To me it smacks of some sort of status assignment.

Yeah, but as a species bigot, your views are clearly biased.
In fact, SO biased that there seems little point to discussion.

 

[Corey Murtagh]

The reason it matters is because when attributions are scrambled,
people sometimes get sidetracked into fights over them.

I see three solutions.

<solutions snipped>

There's a fourth... stop scrambling the attributions in the first place.

 

[Corey Murtagh]

Particularly ironic was that not a *single* word of mine appeared.

Exactly. There was no point to your name being anywhere near that
response, since it had nothing to do with you. If he'd taken the few
seconds to go up the thread to the original message there would have
been no such problems.

 

[Roedy Green]

There are several completely unproved assumptions here. First,
that consciousness is a mere property of a physical system.

Second, that full consciousness is strictly electrical (there's
a lot of chemical stuff going on in the brain!).

You asked for a plausible mechanism not for proof.

The problem is we have so little data on consciousness. There is not
much speculation you can rule out at this point.

My point is I am frustrated with everyone for being so sure about
their opinions with such an absence of hard information.

For example, the notion that consciousness is caused by bodies
inhabited by non-physical presences who move from body to body does
not even seem to me to be ruled out -- the demonic possession theory
of consciousness.

We have so few facts to work with:

1. I have an internal experience.

2. under anaesthesia I do not, at least I recall losing consciousness,
sort of fading away, and suddenly popping back out of nothing.

3. brain activity is lower when I am under anaesthesia.

4. Other humans tell me of similar experience.

5. Most animals react to "painful" stimulation much the way humans do.

6. Rocks don't react to "painful" stimuli.

7. Plants don't seem to react to "painful" stimuli, though I have read
that people have measured galvanic conductivity changes in the plants,
analogous to those that happen in animals.

8. Most animals have smaller brains that humans, but dolphin, whales
and elephants have larger.

9. Destroying the brain appears to destroy the ability to be
conscious, though we do have strange things like chicken running about
with their heads cut off. To run must require some awareness of the
ground.

10. When you poke a stick in a fellow human's eye, they fight back.
when you poke one at a stone, nothing happens. Perhaps the practical
definition of conscious is "having the ability and propensity to fight
back."


11. Alzheimer patients seem to be somewhere between conscious and
unconscious.

 

[Roedy Green]

It has nothing to do with the size of the brain, but with the
complexity of the wiring.

I have not read anything that suggest we have more complex wiring than
dolphins, elephants or whales. They have neocortexes too whacking big
ones.

 

[Corey Murtagh]

What is the mechanism by which humans feel?

If consciousness is something caused by complex electrical activity in
a confined space, which it appears to be, since unconscious brains are
not electrically active, why would not other forms of complex
electrical activity in a confined space similarly create consciousness
or something like it?

Organic brains are not purely electrical, they're electro-chemical.

Apart from that... a purely electrical (or electro-mechanical if you
prefer, for the nano-tech adherents among us) system /may/ produce
intelligence if it is complex and flexible enough to do so. Computers
are, by and large, not flexible. Software may be /quite/ flexible, but
it is constrained by the inflexibility of the underlying hardware.

Until we design hardware that is flexible enough, at best all we can
produce is a /simulation/ of that flexibility. Whether that's enough to
produce true sentience is still a matter for debate.

 

[David Longley]

And when you asked what its favorite food or color was it replied....

(Note: two-year-old humans WILL reply!)

You make some very good points, but is the process of attributing to
other animals fundamentally all that different from what we do within
our own species? With our own species, we certainly get more feedback
which serves as reinforcement and helps to both establish and sustain
communication - but it is also true that most folk get quite close to
their pets (and some to their livestock!), and whilst many may sneer at
such "anthropomorphic" behaviour, we have little evidence that what we
do there is really all that different from what we do with each other.
We have less in common with other animals, but does it make any sense at
all to use the word "intelligence" in such contexts. Just think back a
century or so when we were not so politically correct.

 

[Roedy Green]

And when you asked what its favorite food or color was it replied....

(Note: two-year-old humans WILL reply!)

Please read The Language Instinct by Steve Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060976519/canadianmindprod


see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/creole.html

He argues that human brains have a prewired program for human language
parsing. Basically what happens when you learn a language as a child
is a few configuration parameters get tweaked to tune the algorithms.

One speculation is that dolphins use a holographic language where they
paint sonic pictures.

It is rather difficult for either species to learn the native language
of the other. So the two mutually create an artificial language.

 

[Roedy Green]

No, more because when I spoke to her on the phone this weekend and
asked her how she was feeling, she said she was feeling well. I'd
call her responsiveness and use of language sentient.

However, if a machine had done the exact same thing and had the exact
same conversation, you would claim it was not conscious. In your
view, behaviour is irrelevant. Something else must be.

In this case, the logic goes like this. Mother is biologically very
similar to me in every respect I have studied so far. I thus presume
she works the same as me as far as consciousness is concerned. As long
as I am compos mentis enough to talk, I'm conscious. Likewise with
her.

Alternatively, you could make a rule that no she is not conscious
because she is female. All females are unconscious. I can't think of
an experiment to disprove this to you, other than a sex change
operation. Your rules for deciding which species are conscious seems
just as arbitrary to me as deciding that consciousness is a male
prerogative. I don't even know what your rules for deciding are. I
just know a few examples.

 

[Richard Heathfield]

Have read it, and as I've said, animals are clearly capable of
communicating their basic needs and wants. Even cows communicate
distress at not being milked (and cows ain't quite the brightest
critters on the planet).

How do you know they're not solving partial integration equations in their
heads to relieve the sheer boredom of standing around in a field all day
with nothing else to do?

If your dolphins--or my dog--were truly sentient, they'd also
try communicating on our level, since--to a truly intelligent
being--it would be rather obvious the message wasn't getting
through very well.

You assume that a truly intelligent animal would want to communicate with us
in the first place.

(a) If, somehow, an intelligent animal /did/ manage to communicate with a
human, what is the likely outcome? That the human will simply not believe
what he has heard/seen/smelt/thought/whatever;
(b) if, somehow, an intelligent animal /did/ manage to persuade a human that
it really could communicate, the human is unlikely to be silly enough to
report the fact to anybody;
(c) if, somehow, the human /was/ silly enough to report the fact to anybody,
he is very unlikely to be believed by anyone worth persuading;
(d) if, incredibly, the human /was/ believed, the animal is very likely to
end up under a laboratory microscope.

A truly intelligent animal would try to act as if it were not intelligent,
at least when around humans. The problem is that it is impossible to
distinguish such animals (if they exist) from non-intelligent animals,
provided they are sufficiently intelligent to disguise their intelligence.

If they're really bright and if they have the option, they'll choose an
environment where we have trouble following them. Sea water is always a
good bet, since we're having some difficulty destroying the sea, it being
rather larger than the average Great Lake. (It's not for want of trying,
though.)

Now, maybe there's no such thing as an intelligent, self-aware animal, after
all. We don't know. It's unlikely that we shall ever know for sure. To
claim that we /already/ know is IMHO to mistake absence of evidence for
evidence of absence.