[ExI] Quantum consciousness, quantum mysticism, and transhumanist engineering

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 3 April 2017 at 07:23, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:

A robot may be aware of its surroundings, demonstrated by the fact that it
> can walk around, look for objects, pick them up and so on. But is it
> conscious? What experiment would you do to find out?
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
>  The robot is no more and no less aware than a self-driving car.  I would
> not call the robot aware.  What frustrates me is that some posters seem to
> equate awareness and consciousness and some don't, like you.
>
> The robot and the car are S-R creatures.  They receive stimuli and react
> to them according to their programming. People are S-O-R, meaning that
> above the stimuli that are being processed, there are meta functions
> checking the S-R behaviors and seeing if that's really what they want to
> do, and changing the program on the fly if not.  If robots have meta
> functions, and I know just about nothing about robots and AI, then I am
> wrong, and the robots and AI are functionally equivalent to a person.  John
> doesn't like definitions, but I do, so what's the difference between
> awareness and consciousness explicit in your question?
>

Some would say that a robot that behaves just like a human is conscious and
others that it lacks (or at least may lack) the ineffable internal thing
that we call "experiences" or "qualia", even though it seems to have
awareness.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20170403/a7b06bdc/attachment.html>