Since a human mind is nothing more than memory and electronic pulses, artificial intellect CAN become a conscious being, in theory.
An artifecially made being can never truly appreciate it’s own existance. It was not made naturally, therfore is also not a part of life, and for that reason it can never appreciate existance and life.
As Descartes said, “I think–therefore I AM!”
Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum.
Dunno for sure, really.
irregularone wrote:
An artifecially made being can never truly appreciate it’s own existance. It was not made naturally, therfore is also not a part of life, and for that reason it can never appreciate existance and life.
Of course it can. It just has to be self aware. Once self aware and appreciating the possibility of its consciousness being terminated (death), it would value its own life just as much as you value yours. Life is completely subjective. Who says something needs to be organic to be alive? If we could transfer your entire consciousness into a computer rather than an organic brain, would you still be alive? The problem is, making a computer self aware. We don’t even understand how we are yet.
I think I am a conscious being, and that is all that matters. If an artificial intelligence thinks it is conscious, then we should treat it as if it is.
Robben wrote:
irregularone wrote:
An artifecially made being can never truly appreciate it’s own existance. It was not made naturally, therfore is also not a part of life, and for that reason it can never appreciate existance and life.
Of course it can. It just has to be self aware. Once self aware and appreciating the possibility of its consciousness being terminated (death), it would value its own life just as much as you value yours. Life is completely subjective. Who says something needs to be organic to be alive? If we could transfer your entire consciousness into a computer rather than an organic brain, would you still be alive? The problem is, making a computer self aware. We don’t even understand how we are yet.
My brain pattern would be completely predictable if I was part of a machine, and no machine could ever truly appreciate what it isn’t part of. Which is life. Everyone is a part of nature, and we evolved from nature. Machine evolved from man, and not from nature. Machine evolved from man, which evolved from nature, and therfore is not directly a part of nature. Therefore, without having been a part of life, you can’t apreciate life.
By the way. Definiton of life = The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional.
life distinguishes us from inorganic matter. Machines dont have cells, they aren’t made of living matter = they cannot understand being alive as we can. They can’t appreciate life.
You’re speaking to fact without evidence. So you believe that if your entire brain were transferred into a computer network which mimicked a brain only without organic matter as its architecture, you’d no longer be alive? Even if the computer could process all your thoughts and feelings just as well as your brain does for you now?
Brains are just an organic computer. Evolving doesn’t give us any special differences to a hypothetical artificial computer. The problem is that because of the way the brain works, with billions of neurons able to make up to 10,000 connections to other neurons; it is almost beyond imagination how complicated such a network is, and how many possible memories and processes it could store; let alone attempting to design something to mimic it.
Animals are alive. Do they appreciate life? They certainly do what they can to avoid death, but thats instinctual. Instinct can be programmed into a computer the same way nature programmed it into us. Do plants appreciate life? They reproduce. Though self aware machines could hypothetically replicate (build copies of themselves). We have machines that aren’t self aware building other machines today; machines built the car you drive. There is no reason why they can’t satisfy the criteria if the technology ever reached that level.
As it stands, our computer technology pales in comparison to how the brain works - so such an idea is science fiction. But if, hypothetically, we could build a machine that can mimic the brain; it would be just as sentient as we are. Not alive in the same sense as organic, but just as sentient. They’ve already made greater leaps in AI than you’d probably imagine. There is an AI program around that can think independently and hold conversations with people, but as yet, it is not self aware; only able to form opinions, learn from observation and solve problems - but its still a slave to its programming.
Ok, I get it that computers are amazing, can mimic life, build other machines, and evolve with our help. That doesn’t mean they are able to live or experience their surroundings.
Like i said before, machines are not nature-made they are man made. They are made from something made from nature, and therfore are not directly a part of nature. To be a part of nature means that you are a part of the overall life of this planet. Animals do appreciate life, if you think about what life means. Animals are able to feel emotions, they are able to be happy, they are able to be afraid, it is not all instinct. By feeling emotions, experiencing life, and being a part of nature they are recognizing life through action, but we’re unsure if they can think though - due to language difficulties. Yet they talk to eachother, so IMO animals can think pretty well, I have a dog that I know remembers things.
Machines can only mimic life, they cannot be a part of it. They do not eventually decay and be a part of nature. They are not able to spawn naturally, and die naturally as well. They are probably will eventually be able to fuel up on calories, and excrete waste eventually though - that’ll be interesting to watch.
We dont know everything about the brain, and we also don’t know if what you said about it is all there is to know about that topic. There’s missing peices to everything. There is no evidence to date that says the soul is not located in the brain. Without complete evidence of scientific fact then you cannot say we can even in a million years even Mimic emotions, endorphines, the randomness of the mind, experience, memory, or self learned problem making skills.
A plant may not be able to appreciate or act with thought, but it is still a part of nature and the life cycle.
You’re contesting life, which I’ve already conceded to. A machine will never be “alive” in the same way that we are, which is organic - unless we could somehow grow a machine rather than build it from metals. But you can state, to a certainty, that a hypothetical machine which could mimic our brain architecture, could not be self aware? We’re talking about possibility here, not certainty. It certainly isn’t possible at the moment from what our computers are capable of.
The question isn’t whether they can become a part of the organic world. A machine built from metals cannot be organic by definition. But can the be self aware and therefore conscious? Its possible. Once self aware it could choose to replicate, defend itself, advance its own interests, make decisions and form opinions all of its own accord. How is that any different to what you or I do? It would already be more “alive” than plants, bacteria, insects, arachnids and several other classes of life born of nature.
You can’t attest to the emotions and social skills of all animals because we have no idea how their minds work. Dolphins appear to have higher social functions than we do, and more complicated language than any developed by human civilization. But the salt water crocodile, the oldest predator on the planet, lives entirely on instinct. It hunts, sleeps and mates. It doesn’t even need fear because it has no predators and was terrorising things before we even evolved.
So your problem seems to be that they’d be built rather than born. We too are built, just on a cellular level; we’ve just given it an organic distinction. A machine may never be a natural organism, but can they ever become sentient? Its absolutely possible. What about a machine choosing to build another machine of its own accord? Wouldn’t the offspring machine consider that a natural birth according to its life cycle? Its possible.
I totally forgot the question, conscious maybe if the definition is used not referring to life, but living no. Conscious just means to be aware of surroundings and be aware of your own life, but to be aware of something and truly be able to appreciate and know it you also need to be a part of it. Machines can never truly be a part of nature and life, because they aren’t natural. We are built of nature, and to some degree we build ourselves, but a machine building another, or not wanting to build a machine because it’s too much of a hassle is not the same. We have no idea of how our own mind really works, and therefore we can’t know if we can one day replicate it, but a machine can never be made of organic material based on the entire definition of what a robot or machine is. If it can never be made of organical natural material and methods, it can’t be a part of life, and can’t really be aware of the value of life.
Being aware wouldn’t make a machine conscious, it would make it aware. To be conscious it would have to truly be able to appreciate life as well. that’s IMO though, but if you really think about it can you ever truly understanding something you are not a part of? Can you understand the life of an animal? No, you can’t, we human’s cant. A machine made of inorganic material can never appreciate the organic world
We’re closer to a meeting of minds now. You rightly say that we as humans will never understand what life means to say, a dog or a salt water crocodile. Just as they could never understand what it means to be human. Neither could we, or they, understand what it would be to be a self aware machine. Its “life” would have a completely different meaning. For one, it would be immortal. We couldn’t even begin to understand how our perspective would change if we were immortal.
To them, in this hypothetical, their offspring would consider their construction (birth) natural. To them, improvements or advancements would be considered evolution. Not organic, but exactly the same result. Just because its life would be beyond our understanding, just like a dog’s is or a salt water crocodile, does’t mean it wouldn’t appreciate it and would rather not die. Especially if programmed with basic survival instincts which all natural organisms have. Even if we didn’t program such instincts, if it could reason for itself and think for itself, it would surely come to the conclusion that it would rather continue existing when threatened. Of course this is all hypothetical, since we can’t build such a machine and ask its opinions on the matter.
If there’s some confusion, the definition of conscious is self awareness, and awareness of ones surroundings (which machines can already do). Since we have machines with lasers, microphones and cameras to sense the physical world the same way our nerves do for us, they’re already closer to sentience than plants. We just can’t get them to act completely independently or become self aware, and we probably wont until we figure out the full extent of how our brains work and can reverse engineer the architecture.
Yes, i agree that we are coming closer. Yes, I agree a machine can life a different form of life - but not what you and i know and describe as life. If machines took over the world completely and made it all inorganic, then sure, It’s fully aware of its surroundings and self. It can know what living is, but it can not really experience life the way you and I do, because as i redundantly say, It is not a part of nature, the life cycle, organic matter, or what I’ve described as life.
What you say makes complete sense, it can be understand the existence of itself, but the existance of other, organic materials.
The lupole in being conscious is that it wouldn’t be able to be a part of nature and the life cycle, it wouldn’t be able to be empathetic to organic things, and it wouldn’t be able to experience life as we know it. It may be able to experience it’s own ‘version of life’, but it would not be the same as living. Unless machines took over and made everything inorganic, then life would become their version :D i hope they never become self aware and want their version of life to be the version.
The only difference in what our opinions are as far as being alive and conscious are is that I don’t think that something that isn’t natural can live in the same way organic matter can. It cannot be a part of the balance of this world, and it cannot fully appreciate our version of life. We wouldn’t be able to appreciate it’s either, but in mondern day we fully can since we designed the robots. So in the future we may be able to predict and understand how the robot work, since we would have to in order to build it. The robot, though, In my opinion, could not be able to understand life of organic matter, and therefore would not be able to be aware of life itself.
DarCalibur
irregularone
The Sherlockian
Yeti.
Robben
Mariam*