IEEE Spectrum: Can Machines Be Conscious?

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6278

by njrc • 17 years ago

5 4 17 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

rjprins• 17 years ago

Sigh, you first need to define consciousness before you can answer any questions about it. What is consciousness? My dream is to develop artificial intelligence, so I've thought about this a lot. Generally people have it very wrong.

I would define it in two parts:

1. Consciousness of facts: What you "know" is what you are conscious of. Machines are already conscious because they have memory.

2. Meta-consciousness: You know that you know, or you know what you know. This is a feedback loop on knowledge, unlimited in recursion. Sort of like the check if a pointer is null (and a check if the check is null, etc.).

I know hardly anybody agrees with this, but I'm pretty serious about it. People tend to confuse what they see as the world with what any entity should see. To make computer more human, is to create human senses, simulate human techniques of interpretation and memory and add a comparable experience of time.

But in my eyes there is no reason not to claim that computers are already conscious. Consciousness just isn't the goal.

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Indeed,

Consciousness might not have anything to do with intelligence as such or the human brain. It might just be a muddled cultural remnant of Western philosophy or a glitch in the endocrine system or an artifact of our language or something else.

thepanister• 17 years ago

Hello, Your type of thinking/analyzing is deeply needed when developing the AI - at least this is what I think.

I am very interested in reading more of your analyzes... Do you have a blog? AI is one of the main topics that I love to read about.

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

This article was pretty vague on what it meant by integrated intelligence as the criterion for consciousness. For example it was not even clear to me as to whether or not linear separability was a requirement of their "integrated intelligence system", i.e., whether a conscious system should be able to solve linear separable problems. Using a term like "integrated intelligence" does not say what, specifically, needs to be integrated.

IEEE Spectrum: Can Machines Be Conscious?

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