[extropy-chat] I keep asking myself...

[Robert Bradbury]

On 4/7/06, ben <benboc at lineone.net> wrote:

> Now - can somebody satisfactorily define 'Consciousness'? :-P


This is problematic since we normally use it in the sense of "conscious" and
"unconscious".  Using that is how I came around to the perspective of an
emergent property of seeking to satisfy needs and/or goals.  (I expect there
is a huge body of literature in the AI community regarding consciousness and
presumably a discussion of that belongs on the SL4 list and not the ExI
list.)  To my way of thinking consciousness involves free will (freedom to
select from choices) and acting upon that free will.  Extending it a bit
further and it involves the potential to have such free will and actions --
but then of course one is rapidly wading into the swamp as the printer next
to my desk, if sufficiently "enhanced", could perform an analysis of whether
or not it wanted to print my document.  ("I" don't print when my ink is low
and I certainly don't print on Sundays.)

However, if we assume that for the most part copies are still "me", varying
perhaps to the degree that I myself may vary when I wake up on Monday vs.
Friday (or a sunny day vs. a rainy day, etc.) then we still have to wrestle
with what "rights" should be granted or recognized by society for "me".  Now
one interesting aspect revolves around the extent to which one has a
"collective" consciousness (i.e. the quantity and quality of information
being shared between what may be physically separate entities).  This is
interesting from the perspective considering what happens in individuals
with surgically separated brain hemispheres where the right and left halves
may be generally unaware (and have little control over) the actions taken by
the "other" half.

If ones right brain murders someone, does ones left brain have to endure the
punishment for that action?  I think I can construct scenarios where the
left brain could not have prevented the actions of the right brain.  Now of
course with copies one can get into very interesting scenarios -- copies 1,
3 & 4 knew copy #2 was considering killing someone but cut off communication
from copy #2 shortly before and during the act then rejoined the collective
consciousness after the action was taken.  Who is responsible?  Who gets
punished for murdering someone and who gets punished for conspiracy to
commit murder?

And of course, if one says that the solution to this is to punish the actor
(i.e. society chooses to shut down copy #2) when of course #2 is only a
roughly equal sub-part of the entire consciousness -- then one gets into the
question of when society should have the right to reach into your mind and
delete "offending" thoughts.  This is extending recent discussions of being
arrested for *thinking* about doing something "wrong" and things like AT&T
being in the news for forwarding a significant fraction of its data traffic
to the machines scanning it for the NSA. -- E.g. "society" gets to monitor
all of your "thoughts" and gets to eliminate the neurons, hard drives, flash
chips, etc. responsible for producing them.  Of course the down side to this
is perhaps a reality with significantly less creativity because presumably
it is thinking outside of the box (heavier than air flight, walking on the
moon, etc.) which has given rise to some of the things we consider to be
great achievements by humanity [1].  I don't know how one would go about
constraining a random thought generator to only produce "good" thoughts and
not produce "bad" thoughts.

Robert

1. And then of course, heaven forbid one would even *think* about using
nuclear weapons to take out Mecca.  They should of course only be considered
(as the news is reporting today) for the purpose of eliminating underground
uranium enrichment plants in Iran.
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