Comment by tambourine_man
3 years ago
What I fear the most is that we‘ll keep at this “fake it till you make it” approach and skip the philosophical questions, such as what conscience really is.
We’re are probably at the verge of having a bot that reports as conscious and convinces everyone that it is so. We’ll then never know how it got there, if really did or if just pretends so well that it doesn’t matter, etc.
If feels like it’s out last chance as a culture of tackling that question. When you can pragmatically achieve something, the “how” loses a bit of its appeal. We may not completely understand fluid dynamics, but if it flys, it flys.
The answer may well be 'consciousness is the ability to fake having consciousness well enough that another conscious being can't tell the difference' (which is the essence of the Turing test). Because if you're looking for a mechanism of consciousness you'd be hard put to pinpoint it in the 8 billion or so brains at your disposal for that purpose, no matter how many of them you open up. They'll all look like so much grisly matter from a biological point of view and like a very large neural net from a computational one. But you can't say 'this is where it is located and that is how it works'. Only some vague approximations.
Sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say. Is being conscience just fooling yourself and others really well or is there some new property that eventually emerges from large enough neural networks and sensory inputs? The philosophical zombie is one the most important existencial questions that we may be at the cusp of ignoring.
The philosophical zombie is fundamentally uninteresting as a conversational piece, as they are by definition indistinguishable from a "regular" person. For all we know, you could be one. You can speak of this concept until the end of time, just as you can with all things that cannot be measured or proven. It is a matter of faith.
4 replies →
Philosophical zombie is a nice way of putting it, I used the term 'articulate idiot' but yours is much more eloquent.
I'm not sure it is an answerable question though, today or possibly even in the abstract.
1 reply →
Hello, not to be rude or anything, but please consider looking up the words “conscience”, “conscious” and “consciousness” in a dictionary and use the correct one for what you mean.
1 reply →
> what conscience really is
My favorite line from Westworld - "if you cannot tell the difference, does it really matter?"