[ExI] Digital Consciousness .

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Wed Apr 24 19:45:39 UTC 2013


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Well, whenever something worthwhile happens in philosophy it is no longer
> called philosophy. The scientific method, logic, Occam’s razor, decision
> theory and most philosophy departments come from philosophy. That doesn't
> mean 99% of it isn't verbiage, of course.


Just like when something breaks out of "artificial intelligence" as soon as
it becomes close to real? Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Game
Theory, Natural Language Processing,  Information Retrieval, Knowledge
Representation and Reasoning, Speech Recognition, OCR, Genetic
Programming, Machine
Learning and so on and on... Once we get enough of these things understood
and programmed up, it is going to eventually be possible to program up a
simulation of a human being, perhaps me or you. When that happens, and you
ask that simulation do they experience consciousness, if it is a good
enough simulation, it will obviously say "yes", and you will not be able to
effectively argue it out of it's stated belief that it is indeed conscious,
even if it isn't "really" in some sense.

The old problem of telling whether another person is conscious in the same
way you are is also an outstanding problem in my mind.

Thus, it will probably always remain a kind of "faith" that we will have to
exercise in other sentient beings who say that they are conscious. We will
each individually have to come to a decision. I think when we start to fall
in love, in large numbers, with non-humans, or post-humans, then we will
have a shift in the zeitgeist, and everything above a certain level of
intelligence will be considered conscious by most people and our generation
of thinkers will be thought of as closed minded in the same way we think of
our grandparents for being closed minded relating to minorities and women.

Sometimes, we find consciousness and intelligence surprising. If you have
ten minutes, and aren't afraid to cry, try this on for size.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34xoYwLNpvw

-Kelly
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