Descartes: I know nothing but my own consciousness, for anything else could be a trick, and not reality.
Kant: Trick, nothing. Everything else is the result of my consciousness molding reality into something I can understand."
Dennett: Dudes. Your consciousness is reality molding you into something that can understand it.
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Can we not divide consciousness from sentience?
Consciousness is being aware, which is pretty easy to test.
A snail is consciousness, since it sees and feels and hears and responds to those stimuli.
Given this definition, it also applies to current AI.
Sentience is being aware that you are aware.
This is pretty tricky to test, since from actions alone I can’t tell whether they are considered or not.
Until the CIA 'fess up to their mind reading tech I guess you just have to ask…
Or failing that use a mirror as a test, whereby when presented with a mirror you give a reasonable impression that you see yourself.
This is passed by elephants, cetaceans and great apes (including humans,)
I’m pretty sure my cat does too.
If sentience is an emergent property of processing power, when your toaster tells you that it is sentient who are you to naysay it?
(I understand that “conscious” and “human” are considered equivalent, and why there will be a struggle to move the “what is human” boundary further away from old white men, but, really, get over yourselves, grow up.)
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Other way round, surely? Sentient simply means “able to feel”, “able to have subjective experience”: Latin sentire, “to feel”
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Hmm. I hadn’t done the research, just relied on common usage. Given this, does it make any sense?
You’re right, though, and this wholly undermines the point I was making. Oh well, I’ll shut up.
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Hardly. The distinction you made is still worth making. I’m just quibbling over the terminology to use for either side of it.
And just to muddy the waters, the Online Etymology Dictionary states that “sentient” has been used to mean “conscious” (in addition to its original meaning) since 1815.
Maybe we need new words. “Aware” and “meta-aware”?
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If you read the literature you will find no shortage of new words. It’s the solution to complex problems in the German philosophical tradition to invent a large enough cloud of interconnected words such that when someone finally teases them all out and realizes that none of them mean anything you’ve already scored tenure.
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Except that, organic lifeforms evolved consciousness through natural selection. There is no such analogous process among computer nodes.
OK, but those are always inside a sandbox, where virtual nodes are competing against virtual nodes.
But I guess a “Baltar” could then give this sandboxed AI the ability to affect others. I guess my impression is that, on their own AIs wont naturally become our overlords. As with Satan and vampires, we humans need to first invite them in.
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Well based on the current guesses about the origin of organic life we started out in sandboxes as well. Tide pools and volcanic vents with just the right mix of elements, energy and environment. There were a lot of iterations before going beyond the sandbox was plausible. If the conditions of the earth had changed dramatically early on, say the earth lost all of it’s water to space, then the experiment in organic life might have been over before escaping the early sandboxes. Just like we were/are dependent on favorable conditions so would AI be dependent on certain conditions.
I don’t think @anon29537550 was saying that. I’m sure not. Consciousness doesn’t equal instant overlord status.
We see a large amount of variation in organic brains and behavior. If an AI evolves some type of consciousness, I sure would not want to put any money down guessing on how it might manifest. How it might relate to organic life. Sci-Fi loves to anthropomorphize AI to make a relatable and thrilling story but seriously the results are as unknown as how alien life might manifest (another thing we like to assume has human traits).
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I am not certain you can directly link evolutionary pressures to (if you believe the model) a purely emergent phenomenon. Now, I don’t think anything is pure anything, but the thought is that once you reach a certain level of “complexity” (define that!) that awareness/consciousness/whatever term you use “just arises.”
https://mathrising.com/?p=1286
It is all highly theoretical and even the term used are not real well defined, add in the fact that we are dealing with an N of 1 in terms of models we are “sure” are conscious, it lends itself poorly to definitive experimentation and well to speculation.
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No, I am certainly not predicting any AI overlord scenario. We can’t even effectively define what “consciousness” is. There may already be some primitive sort of awareness there already. But somewhere between sea squirt and Reed Richards, where is it, and would we recognize it if it were? To me it is an interesting thought experiment, but no way to actually carry out the experiment or even verify the data. Until we have a verifiable N of 2, in my humble opinion it remains only a thought experiment.
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