[ExI] Newbie Question: Consciousness and Intelligence

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 14 February 2010 11:02, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Sat, 2/13/10, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I feel comfortable saying 1) humans have
>> consciousness, 2) some other organisms with highly developed
>> nervous systems almost certainly have consciousness (chimps,
>> etc) and 3) simple organisms that completely lack nervous
>> systems do not have it.
>>
>> It's the same with computers. There aren't any yet which
>> match the processing ability of a mouse brain, let alone that of a
>> chimp or human.
>
> If and when someone builds a human-like nervous system in a box with sense organs, I'll call that box conscious but I won't call it a digital computer. Neither will you, because it won't be one.

That's what is being attempted by Henry Markram's group. They may
fail, but probably only because they are taking shortcuts in the
modelling in order to reduce by orders of magnitude the required
amount of processing. If they model a complete mouse brain, connect it
to a mouse avatar or robot mouse, and it displays mouselike behaviour,
that would be indication at the very least that that any separate
mouse consciousness can only be epiphenomenal. As John Clark keeps
reminding us, it would then be very difficult to explain how
consciousness could have evolved.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou