Artificial Consciousness: Our Greatest Ethical Challenge

[Philosophy Now]

Paul Conrad Samuelsson takes the perspective of the computer for a change.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/132/Artificial_Consciousness_Our_Greatest_Ethical_Challenge

[jayjacobus]

My comment is a narrow focus on this troubling article.

There is a difference between enhancement and replacement.

Knives, saws, drills spoons, etc. are enhacements for a hand but none replace the hand.

Machines can be enhancements but they are enhacements for the manager and often replacement for the workers.

A backhoe is an enhacement for the machine operator but not an enhacement for the gang of ditch diggers, It is a repacement for the gang of ditch diggers.

A computer is an enhacement for a single intelligent person but it can be also be a replacement for a group of people.

AI is an enhacement for some people and a replacement for others but no matter how you see it, AI is not intelligent. It is a substitute for intelligence.

How can computer experts be so very wrong with their misleading terminology.

They will tell us that the connotation of intelligence was changed by Alan Turing and few people criticized Turing's connotation. So Turing's connotation has become a standard definition. If I say that intelligence comes from the brain's function and consciousness' function, the computer experts will say, "Too late. You had your chance to restrict your definition and you didn't. If you hear what I say but don't know what I mean, that is your mistake, not mine."

I have this sinking feeling that whatever the computer experts accomplish will make me a mistake. In this regard the omputer experts intend screw with me. Computer experts as a whole are untrustworthy. BEWARE!

[jayjacobus]

What does the auther, Samelson, mean when he writes AI. Does he mean connotation A or connotation B?

Am I being nitpicky? Time may confirm my perspective. But maybe not.

[jayjacobus]

I have accused the computer experts of changing the conotation of words.

I cannot change the connotation of words but I can try to convince you (logical people) to change a connotation.

The terminology that needs a new connotation?

Computer crimes.

(Read the article.)

[jayjacobus]

[jayjacobus]

[jayjacobus]

[Impenitent]

computers operate according to their program

there is no program for freewill which would be prerequisite to free choice and subsequent moral consequence...

-Imp

[Univalence]

computers operate according to their program

there is no program for freewill which would be prerequisite to free choice and subsequent moral consequence...

-Imp

Given the weak criterion entropy is sufficient for "free will".

When Buridan's ass recognises the deadlock in its own decision-making, it needs only surrender the choice to a chance so as to avoid certain death.

Flip a coin.

[jayjacobus]

computers operate according to their program

there is no program for freewill which would be prerequisite to free choice and subsequent moral consequence...

-Imp

Given the weak criterion entropy is sufficient for "free will".

When Buridan's ass recognises the deadlock in its own decision-making, it needs only surrender the choice to a chance so as to avoid certain death.

Flip a coin.

You can't know an animal's reason for doing what it does. You can speculate, make an opinion or analyze but only by guessing. The animal won't tell.

Moreover the animal (whether it is aware or not) will be swayed by the situation. It won't have a physical cause. Perhaps it has a subject value of the item(s) at three locations. It will choose location A or location C unless location B has the highest subjective value (location B is where the animal starts from). If location A and location C have equal subjective values he will pick one seemingly at random but he won't stay at location B if location B has a subjective value of 0 which seems to be the case in the dilemma.

If you throw a "smart" robot into the dilemma, the robot will have a random number generator to make decisions about equal choices. The computer in the robot can't have a preference and can't be swayed by "enticing" items.

[Univalence]

If you throw a "smart" robot into the dilemma, the robot will have a random number generator to make decisions about equal choices. The computer in the robot can't have a preference and can't be swayed by "enticing" items.

The computer in the robot is programmable. You can make the algorithm do anything you want it to do.
Including using entropy for deadlock resolution.

That is quite literally how humans break indecision in every day life. Flip a coin.
Either you will let the coin decide, or you will assume the contrarian position and do the opposite of what the coin tells you.

Either way. The action following the decision is yours.

[jayjacobus]

Descartes can take a test and Newton can take a test and score the same. You cannot say the two are identical because one of those may have superior insight or superior some other trait but if two robots score the same on a test, they are most likely identical in every way.

[RCSaunders]

Consciousness cannot be created. No machine will ever be conscious. Before I explain why, I'll point out that even if a machine could be made conscious it would be impossible to ever know it. A fundamental property of consciousness is that it can only be known by that consciousness. No one can be conscious of any other organism's (or machine's) consciousness.

The idea that consciousness can be "created" is possible because the nature of consciousness itself is never clearly identified. The failure to identify the true nature of conscious leads to the baseless assumption that consciousness is something called an "emergent" attribute. From the article:

Those who argue against even the theoretical possibility of digital consciousness seem to disregard the fact that human consciousness somehow arises from configurations of unconscious atoms.

There is no such fact as, "human consciousness somehow arises from configurations of unconscious atoms." If nothing else were known about consciousness, the magic somehow is the clue that such ideas are simply made up.

The Nature Of Consciousness

Consciousness has at least nine characteristics that are impossible to the merely physical.

Individual and Private - Consciousness pertains only to individual organisms. It is not possible for any organism to be conscious of any other organism's consciousness.

Continuity - An organism has only one consciousness and it is the same consciousness from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year. It is the same consciousness from the moment it becomes consciousness until the organisms dies. Hypothetically, all of the physical parts of an organism could be changed, but it would still be the same organism, because it would still be the same life process and the same consciousness.

Unity - For any organism, there is only one consciousness and it is the same consciousness that perceives what is seen, what is tasted, what is heard, smelled, and felt. This aspect of consciousness is almost never recognized. It is one reason, for example, no computer or computer program will ever create consciousness. It would be impossible, at the physical level, to make all the discrete physical events required for detection of separate phenomena be a single event.

Furthermore, every individual is only one consciousness, one person, conscious of what one is thinking, seeing and hearing, and what one is feeling, emotionally; and one is conscious of these, and all the other things one is aware of, simultaneously and continuously.

Consciousness of Physical not Physical - Consciousness and that which we are conscious of cannot be the same thing. The physical is that which we are conscious of (directly perceive), consciousness is directly perceiving (being conscious of) the physical. It is this fact that has led so many philosophers to posit some kind of dualism. The mistake is the assumption that consciousness is something separate from the physical attributes of an organism. But life is an attribute of a living organism, without which it would not be an organism, and consciousness is an attribute of those kinds of organisms that see, hear, feel, smell and taste, without which they would not be those kinds of organisms.

Tasting is the Only Test - Just as the nature of consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms neither can conscious perception itself. There is no way to determine from the physical characteristics of anything how it will taste, for example, or what any particular chemical will smell like. The only way to know what anything will taste or smell like is to actually taste or smell it.

This is true of all the perceptual qualities. It is the reason why no description of sound can make a deaf person know what sound "sounds" like, and why no explanation can make a blind person know what anything "looks" like. Yet, it is quite possible to explain all the physical and technical aspects of sound to a deaf person and of light to a blind person.

Pain - What is particularly interesting about pain is the fact it is not a physical quality, though it is consciousness of the physical, which all of perception must be. Unlike color, for example, for which there is a corresponding physical attribute (the transmission, reflection, or emission of light at a specific wave length) there is no corresponding physical attribute of any physical existent that is pain.

There is another aspect of pain that helps illustrate what consciousness is. When I feel pain, I generally react to that feeling, like holding the finger I just hit with the hammer and yelling "ouch!" or something stronger. But I do not have to react at all. I can "ignore" the pain, if I really have to. Nevertheless, I feel the pain just as much—it is the pain I feel that is the conscious experience, not my reaction to it. (So much for behaviorism.)

No Physical Description - No description of any physical aspect or physical process related to perception explains or describes any perceptual quality or aspect of consciousness.

No matter what physical (mechanical-electrical-chemical) actions are described, that is all they can describe. When the biologist and physiologist have described all that the nervous system and brain have done, they still have not described consciousness—they have only described a complex of physical events, which no matter how complex will never be a description of consciousness or any aspect of it.

TV in an Empty Room - Conscious vision, according the physicalist, is produced by the nervous system providing information from the eyes that are processed in some way by the brain, which process is "seeing." In fact, no physical process can be vision—even if in some way information reaching the brain from the eye through the optic nerves could be processed into an image, it would be like an image on a TV—but an image on a TV is not vision and can only be consciously seen if someone is watching the TV.

The physicalist's description of consciousness is the description of a TV in an empty room. It is not an "image" that is consciousness; it is the "seeing," of the image.

Impossible Without Life - Consciousness is an attribute of living organisms and is impossible without life.

The Nature Of Life

Those who claim that consciousness is some kind of, "emergent," phenomena are wrong about consciousness because they are wrong about the nature of life, which they also claim is an, "emergent," attribute.

At the physical level, life is manifest as a process. Every action of the purely physical (non-living) must be started and stopped in relationship to other physical existents (including internal components of machines, for example). The life process differentiates living organisms from the merely physical, because it is self-generated and self-sustained, that is, nothing outside the life process itself starts it or or sustains it.

Life is a quality that differentiates between those entities we call organisms, and all other entities. The self-sustained process, itself is performed by the organism and maintains the organism, as the kind of organism it is; so long as the process continues, the entity remains a living organism, but the moment the process ceases, the organism becomes a non-living (merely physical) entity.

The differentiation of material existence by the quality "life" does not cause or allow any quality of physical existence to be violated. Life is an attribute of physical organisms and it will never be discovered within an organism that any physical laws are violated. But the physical laws do not cause, or give rise to, or explain life.

Life is not something "added" to or "injected" into an entity, it is a completely natural attribute, like any physical attribute, but which only organisms have as an attribute. Since no attribute can exist independently of the existent it is an attribute of, the life attribute does not exist except as an attribute of physical organisms.

Physically undetectable - Physical existence is that existence we directly perceive, the world we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. We cannot directly perceive life, we can only observe the unique behavior of living organism for which life is the explanation, because it is behavior not possible to non-living entities and which cannot be described in physical terms.

The existence of life cannot be detected by any physical means, because it has no physical attributes, that is, it has no mass, no temperature, no size, no shape, no color, no electrical or chemical properties. While an organism may have some or all of these attributes, it is the physical aspects of the organism as a physical entity, which every organism is, that has those properties, but it can have those properties whether it is living or not.

Self-initiated, self-sustained Process - Life as a process is both self-initiated and self-sustained. Nothing outside a life process starts it, and nothing except the process sustains it.

From a physical perspective, only the physical aspects of that process can be directly observed, that is, science can only deal with those aspects of living organisms that are physical. The sciences that study the physical aspects of an organism are biology, anatomy, neurology, and biochemistry. What science cannot study, are those aspects of the life process that are not physical, which are the attributes unique to living organisms because of their life

Self-determined Existence - Non-living physical things do not sustain themselves. They may remain for long periods of time as the kind of things they are if substantial enough (like a diamond) or quickly change into something else (like a drop of water). But no physical thing acts to maintain itself as the kind of thing it is. All its behavior can be explained entirely in terms of physics and chemistry. An organism's behavior, as an organism, must sustain itself as the kind of organism it is, or it ceases to exist.

Sentience - My meaning for sentience is somewhat different from the meaning usually attributed to it. Sentience, pertaining to the self-sustaining life process of an organism, refers to an organism's response to external stimuli which is dependent on the life process.

A "response" to stimuli is not the same as a non-living physical "reaction" to an external influence. A container of water might react to an impact or sound waves impinging on it, but that reaction is entirely physical and totally explainable in terms of physics. The "response" of a living organism to outside influences called stimuli, is an action made possible and required by the life "process" of the organism. If for any reason, the life process should cease, that response to stimuli would cease, even though all the physical attributes of the entity remain the same. It is the process itself that reacts to the stimuli, indicating the process detects the presence and nature of the stimuli in order to react to it.

If an organism could not detect a stimulus, it could not react to it. If an organism could not distinguish the differences in stimuli, it would react in the same way to all stimuli, or react randomly without any connection between the nature of the stimuli and the action. This is what distinguishes a physical reaction from a living response. A response is the result of the organism in some way detecting (not identifying) the presence and nature of the stimuli, a reaction is an immediate action attributable directly to the external influence and laws of physics (even if the reaction is a very complex one involving a computer program, for example).

The particular things an organism will react to and the specific response the organism makes is determined by the organism's nature as an organism, that is. If the life process ceases, the organism reverts to being a mere physical entity, and its behavior reverts to that of any other non-living entity, including its reactions to external influences.

Unity - By unity I mean for every organism there is only one life and it is that life that is responsible for (makes possible) all the living behavior of the organism, and that life remains uninterrupted from the moment the organism begins living until the organism ceases to live. (This is true even when an organism is in a state of stasis or suspended animation—a seed for example.)

Continuity - By continuity I mean an organism's life is the same life from the moment it begins to exist as an organism until the moment it ceases to exist as an organism.

Both unity and continuity are attributes of consciousness as well, and much more important, philosophically, there.

The Physical Not All Of Nature

One reason it is difficult for the nature of life and consciousness to be understood is because it is assumed that physical attributes are the only possible attributes. It is supposed, if it is not physical, it must be mystical or supernatural. In one sense this view is understandable. The physical sciences are extremely successful and historically any suggestion that things have any attributes not be explained or identified as physical came from religion, mysticism, and other forms of superstitious. That the natural world could have attributes that are not physical seems to fly in the face of science and logic.

This view is a great mistake in philosophy and actually rejects evidence that honest inquiry requires one to consider. The most obvious evidence is our consciousness. We know we see, hear, feel, taste and smell, and all there is to hear, feel, see, taste and smell is the physical. What we cannot hear, feel, see, taste, or smell is our hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, and smelling, that is, our consciousness. We know we cannot be conscious of anyone else's conscious experience, but we often miss that fact that cannot conscious of our own consciousness. We cannot hear, feel, see, taste, or smell our consciousness. It is by being conscious of the physical world that we know it, but how do we know we are conscious if we cannot be directly conscious of it. We know we are conscious because we are. We know we can hear, not because we can hear or feel or see or taste or smell our hearing, but because we do hear.

Every physical thing we know about, and every physical attribute we understand, we know because directly or indirectly (with instruments or reasoning) we consciously perceive the physical. The physical is all that has attributes that can be heard, felt, seen, tasted, or smelled or derived from the perceived evidence. Consciousness has no such attributes. It makes no sound, has not attribute that can be felt (weight, texture, temperature), it cannot be seen or tasted. It has no physical attributes at all.

Consciousness certainly has attributes which we not only identify but describe, but none of those attributes are physical attributes, because we do not know them by consciously perceiving them, but by doing them. We know what hearing is by hearing. We know what feeling by feeling. We know what seeing by seeing. We know we are conscious because we are.

There is nothing supernatural about consciousness (or life). Like all real attributes conscious has no existence independent of the conscious organisms it is an attribute of. It is a perfectly natural attribute of reality like all the physical attributes but is only manifest in living conscious organisms.

[NOTE: This article condenses a fuller explication of these idea from the following articels:
The Nature of Consciousness
The Nature of Life
Perception ]

[owl of Minerva]

If consciousness is an attribute of the action of the senses and is invisible, non-physical, and non-dual then the senses have surpassed the laws of nature.

The three forces create the relativities of duality which we cannot escape, everything physical, whether a fine or dense force, visible or invisible, within the province of the three forces, is subject to these laws. By a physical creation or even by a concept, we can only create and perceive what is dual, physical, and visible to outer or inner sight and subject to the three forces. There is no evidence that it is or can be otherwise. This would include AI.

Some religions claim that consciousness can be experienced as is, if the senses are transcended. And some believe that the three forces through sense perception create the illusion of a physical world with its relativities of duality as in dreams.

None claim that what is material, which the organs of sense and mind are, has an attribute that can overcome the forces of nature and create something that is invisible, non-physical, and non-dual and external to its laws.

[jayjacobus]

If consciousness is an attribute of the action of the senses and is invisible, non-physical, and non-dual then the senses have surpassed the laws of nature.

The three forces create the relativities of duality which we cannot escape, everything physical, whether a fine or dense force, visible or invisible, within the province of the three forces, is subject to these laws. By a physical creation or even by a concept, we can only create and perceive what is dual, physical, and visible to outer or inner sight and subject to the three forces. There is no evidence that it is or can be otherwise. This would include AI.

Some religions claim that consciousness can be experienced as is, if the senses are transcended. And some believe that the three forces through sense perception create the illusion of a physical world with its relativities of duality as in dreams.

None claim that what is material, which the organs of sense and mind are, has an attribute that can overcome the forces of nature and create something that is invisible, non-physical, and non-dual and external to its laws.

We are just talking and talking is no ways absolute.

What you say is no more true than what I say.

So How can I answer you when you are so subjective?

I cannot.