Difference between revisions of "Consciousness"

Revision as of 13:34, 29 November 2022

Full Title or Meme

A simple idea of "self aware" well-know by most people, yet raised to a religion by philosophers,

Context

• Descartes declared "I think therefore I am" as his first principle. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist. From this Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."
• John Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.^[1]. This is now known as empiricism.
• Alan Turning proved to have the best definition while claiming not to address the definition of it at all. He described an interrogator, who is given the task of trying to determine which of two players: A or B on the other end of teletypewriter links is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to questions typed into a terminal to make the determination. Turing proposed his test in 1950 to help answer the question "can machines think?"^[2] See the wiki page on the context of knowledge.

Problems

• There is not generally accepted and rigorous definition of Consciousness. So, arguing about where or when something thing is conscious is futile.
• What it's like to be a bat
• What it's like to have Artificial Consciousness. (Click on the link.)

Solutions

• At there very simplest level even an amoeba is self-aware to the extent that it can swim upstream in a sugar gradient. This behavior is labeled "tropism" and seldom considered the source of conscienousness, but there doesn't seem to be any basis as the path from tropism to Consciousness seems to be a straight path. Really the point of any organism is to survive in the Ecosystem that it inhabits. It seems obvious that the less stable the Ecosystem the more adaptable the organism must be. So it would seems that instability is the direct cause of complex Consciousness.
• Hod Lipson of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University decides to address Consciousness experimentally, since none of the recent philosophers had achieved much just by philosophizing.^[3] “We used to refer to consciousness as ‘the C-word’ in robotics and AI circles, because we’re not allowed to touch that topic. It’s too fluffy, nobody knows what it means, and we’re serious people so we’re not going to do that. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s almost one of the big unanswered questions, on par with origin of life and origin of the universe. What is sentience, creativity? What are emotions? We want to understand what it means to be human, but we also want to understand what it takes to create these things artificially. It’s time to address these questions head-on and not be shy about it.”

References

1. ↑ John Locke An EssayConcerning Human Understanding (1689)
2. ↑ Daniel Dennet Can Machines Think (1950) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285475907_Can_Machines_Think
3. ↑ John Pavlus, Curious About Consciousness? Ask the Self-Aware Machines. (2019-07-11) Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-aware-robots-20190711/

Other material

• Turing Test
• Dualism