[extropy-chat] Creating software with qualia

[gts]

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005 19:11:56 -0500, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:

> My point is to show a model for how agents that have various
> problem-solving capabilities would naturally come to speak and act as
> if there were something mysterious about their consciousness and qualia.

This is a behaviorist approach to the problem. Behaviorism denies/ignores  
subjective experience and asserts that only outward behavior, including  
speech, is important to understanding the psychology of humans or in this  
case robots. It "answers" the qualia question (if you can call it an  
answer) by sweeping the question under the rug.

If it can't be measured objectively, says the behaviorist, then it is not  
a proper object of scientific study. And he's right, technically speaking,  
but qualia nevertheless happen or exist and are the object of our inquiry  
here.

Most everyone will admit to experiencing qualia in addition to speaking  
and acting "as if" they do.

This is not to say that I think your robots do not experience qualia. I  
think they very well might, but that given their relative simplicity in  
comparison to humans, their experience would probably not be something we  
would recognize.

> Suppose you met a race of aliens.  You discuss consciousness and qualia
> with them and from what they say, they experience these pretty much
> the same as humans.  Which would you predict: that they are like the
> robots, fully physical and natural, acting and talking as if they have
> consciousness when they actually don't?  Or that they are like you think
> humans are, with some extra physics or something going on, so that when
> they speak of having consciousness, it is really true?

I would predict that if they are robots then they are not unconscious  
robots, that they are thus like either humans or robots, that the  
distinction between humans and sufficiently advanced AI robots is probably  
false, and that whatever they are, they probably do experience qualia.

Your robots have sensors, memory, and programming to analyse their records  
of their sense data. I'm not certain I'm not one of them. :)

-gts