Comment by daseiner1
7 days ago
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love
There are two concepts of "may" at play here:
"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".
A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.
But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
nicely done and well put. one of the better intros to the “hard problem” i’ve read, truly
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
It gets complicated, is what I'm saying.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
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bingo
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
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