Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Consciousness is a continuum. Rocks (also stones and pebbles) have zero consciouness, humans have unity (these may be approximate measures). In between 0 and 1 you will find a lot of numbers.

Gordo

But... "a chicken is a vegetable with legs."

Gordo.

It's not reasonable, bacause it is unrelated to the standard meaning. A dog or cat can, plainly, be unconscious or asleep. Therefore it is clear that a dog or cat can, at other times, be conscious or awake.

On the contrary, I am pointing out that, if the construction is spelt out, all that remains of your post is pointless tautology.

- Gerry Quinn

SNIP

Steve you have jumped to the wrong conclusion about what I believe.

My last sentence which I did not snip out was a summary saying that the confusion over the legitimate use of the words "free" and "will" are a result of make believe religious beliefs. It is the idea that we have (or are) a "soul" that can act independently and with full knowledge of right vs wrong and thus can be held accountable for our actions.

There is no evidence for this. Indeed, the evidence is that all our actions are the result of a physical deterministic brain.

Physical systems, including brains, have degrees of freedom.

The more intelligent you are the more degrees of freedom you have when it comes to generating an action for any given situation. If you are cold (situation) and know how to make fire (internal) you will be able to "free" yourself from the cold.

Then it's a shame then that the "shame-based religions" don't have free choice to change how they think :)

We all act on our beliefs, even if they are determinate in nature.

-John Casey

My initial thoughts after reading your post was that you are unlikely to be a pet owner. Most -- if not all -- pets exhibit signs of thinking on a quite regular basis.

That statement in and of itself points out the flaw in your argument. If a cat is hungry, it eats. It knows it should satiate the urge to eat. If a cat knows that when it is hungry, the human it lives with will provide food, that makes a great case for self-awareness. The concept of a cat being able to identify a human as being capable of serving its needs means that it must have learned that the human provides for it. This also points to the cat examining its needs, and determining how they can be best satiated. Unless your definition of self-awareness and consciousness deals not with thought, in which case, humans don't fit the bill either.

I could also make the point that modern day humans rely on others to provide food in one form or other, and fewer and fewer people (thanks to industrialization) are needing to survive by their own skills at hunting and so forth. Reliance on others does not disprove consciousness.

------------------- If you can't handle reasoned opposition is one.

-Steve

---------------- Allegation for which there is NO proof, not even an offer of supporting example.

------------------- A range doesn't validate the continuity of a function!!??!!

-Steve

----------------------------- A dog can be blue if painted, and so can we. It's unrelated to the ineffable nature of full self-awareness. Sleep is not provably necessary to awareness, nor is any other feature we share with other animals, hunger, sex drives, etc. These are things that while shared, only WE are aware of!!! To say they "share" ANYTHING is simply inaccurate if by that you mean share OUR manner of Experiencing them!

------------------------------ It's far from pointless. There is NO WAY to justify the assertion that awareness is demonstrated by "shared" behavior features between our species and LOWER animals that DOES NOT involve the full recursive grasp of self-existence!! I can't think of ANY feature of animals of their nature or behavior, that justifies an assumption of awareness on their part ABSENT AN ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH US THAT MAKES THEM LOOK AS FRANTIC TO DO SO AS A HUMAN MIND TRAPPED IN ONE OF THEIR BODIES WOULD INVARIABLY DO!! Human self-awareness is a feature of our existence that is NOT shared with lower animals, or it would PROVE itself by extensive NON-normal FRANTIC efforts to communicate with us and have us understand the levels of reason we would then share.

-Steve

---------------------------------- Yes. Ooops, did I err?

------------------------ Indeed.

--------------------- Yup. Okay.

-Steve

------------------- Connective memory, discernment, and solution, are not required to be functions of awareness, and can be carried out without self-awareness. These can be evolved without the requirement of aware attention over them. Looking is NOT awareness, anymore than eyes mean awareness.

--------------- Nope. Doesn't. As I said, solution can be carried out by unaware processes, and the proof is that we know how to program simple robots to do so. Unless you're willing to grant robots awareness now that is not programmed, or willing to leave our awareness as some mere phantom inherent in the process, which is irrational.

------------------------------- There are many methods of problem solution: Hunger. One is to model the self and the world and decide a strategy based on a model of possible futures, this is called self-awareness, since the entity must them awarely go through its knowledge base and make temporal inferences.

But the way that cats and other lower animals do it is actually non-conscious. Their memories are stimulated to make random connections by their hunger agitating them until the smell memory and the memory of attendant circumstances of its satisfaction are inadvertantly juxtaposed and the connection of events causes them to wander to the right area where they were last sated. this is NOT self-awareness.

This is a process that they need not be at all aware of, and it simply brings them to where they may find food using their reflexes without any realization of what has brought them, that is, without awareness.

This is shown by the idiocy of squirrels looking for nuts they buried, and by many other features to the strivings of lower animals that do NOT bear the systematized effort that the much more complex internal modeling of the self and others and the world by an attentive process called awareness produces, as cognitive science has now determined.

----------------------------- Nor did I say it does, but we being aware of whom we rely on on an ongoing basis is a judgment that ONLY an aware human can make, even after you feed the cat, the cat doesn't know it "relies" on you, or even has any things called "ideas" such as that. That requires a model of the self in the world, and lower animals don't have them.

-Steve

Well, no. They have just decided humans are not worth talking too. ;-)

[ And please don't shout. ..I have a hang-over. ]

-- Andrew Thompson

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-------------------- Then they'd better get nukes or resolve to be lunch.

-------------------- Shouldn't drink, dummy! I'm tired of people hurting themselves and then whining about it.

-Steve

But I don't - why would you imagine that I do? To say a cat is conscious is not to say that a cat shares our manner of experiencing consciousness, any more than saying a cat has hair means that a cat has hair just like ours. Nevertheless, a cat has consciousness, and hair.

Your problem is that you are trying to deny the possible existence of any form of consciousness or self-awareness that is different from ours, but your main strategy is to redefine English words, which needless to say helps not a whit in any argument related to what may or may not be the case in the real world.

Your last statement may be true, i.e. that animals with human minds would try hard to make the fact known to humans. But that does not say anything about whether animals have consciousness or self-awareness. Animals have animal minds, animal consciousness, and may well have animal self-awareness.

In short, you can't prove that animals are like clockwork toys just by proving they are not like humans. Simple enough for you?

- Gerry Quinn

... snip ...

Sounds like a human discovering the purpose of a refrigerator.

I suggest you go to the animal shelter and adopt a cat.

Or perhaps even one of Leslie Fish's culls...

URL:

-- Joe Foster Got Thetans? WARNING: I cannot be held responsible for the above They're coming to because my cats have apparently learned to type. take me away, ha ha!

No, no! I wouldn't trust him to take good care of it. Some adoptions are not successes.

On Sat, 27 Dec 2003 18:05:48 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote or quoted :

We already know for example that AI will have memory, logic and arithmetic ability far exceeding our own.

There was a time when feats of mental arithmetic or logic would have been used to prove the superiority of the human species. Quietly such demonstrations have died away. We keep adjusting the criteria to make sure we "win".

For a while we decided that perhaps pattern matching -- with vaguely defined notions of similarity -- like face recognition was what made us superior to the machines, until neural nets started beating us at face recognition.

Ability to play master level chess was once considered evidence of a rational mind, until machines started to beat us.

We have an advantage. We can study the brain and steal its structures and algorithms, improving on them, without the Darwinian constraint of installed base.

The nerve cell is quite slow. Eventually it might be possible to just replace nerve cells one by one with faster ones. Is not what you end up with still human in some sense even if the brain is entirely artificial. It is really not that different than a human with an artificial knee or heart.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

for The Java Glossary.

No, it'll be more like we'll tie into preexisting structures to add or enhance functionality. I heard of an experiment recently where monkeys were taught to play a game using implanted probes. They were able to move objects around on video displays using their thoughts. Pretty incredible.

Imagine being able to drive, or to control mechanical objects using your thoughts...

Regards Bob Monsen

---------------------- To say a cat is "conscious" is a lie because we know what OUR being "conscious" IS, and we know that a cat is NOT what ours is, because it doesn't do what WE do. It's that simple!

---------------------- No, and a cat has fur. You may call it "hair", but it doesn't look like MY "hair" and it doesn't do what I do with mine.

--------------------------- Not deny, merely question its value. Their "self-awareness" seems to be so non-real as to fail to justify for them any status in MY book that doesn't involve use of their meat or fur, or as a NON-aware lap-warmer, by human criteria.

To be aware of one's Self is, simply to be aware of one's Self! It cannot BE something "so special" or "so different in kind" that we cannot identify it. If one IS self-aware, then one knows what one looks like, and tries to communicate with others of its kind, and tries to affect its world in all manners favorable to itself. A cat doesn't even know its face in a mirror. And that's NOT self-awareness! To not get that it has to be attentive without even actually KNOWING that it IS so, IOW, it is a NON-aware consumable Bio-MACHINE!!

--------------------------- No, I merely clarify english. You may WANT to CALL something "conscious" by CLAIMING erroneously by analogy that surely everything with EYES is and must be SOME kind of "aware" in order to direct its ATTENTION to its senses, while ALTOGETHER failing to realize that you have inadventantly included robotic toys, washing machines, light switches and programmble timers IF ONLY they had fur and faces!

---------------------------- You're claiming that awareness can be less than aware. Disingenuous.

-------------------------- Of course it does. Whereas you don't KNOW, you SAY, whereas I see what I DO know, and say simply "THEY DON'T"!!

--------------------------- Except cognitive researchers have tried to find the most basic elements of "Awareness" in them by asking, "What are the outward symptoms of such an Awareness?", and they have found NADA!! ALL those processes they manifest show nothing but non-aware function. They are NOT aware of existing. They do NOT conceive of themselves with THOUGHTS! The *WORLD*, *LIFE*, in other words, the ONLY WAY AND MEANS BY AND IN WHICH WE EXIST AS WE KNOW EXISTING, IS BY MEANS OF A STORY TOLD BY US TO US ABOUT OURSELVES, A WORLD OF THOUGHTS, and THEY don't HAVE one!! THEY AREN'T EVEN HERE EXCEPT AS FEATURES INTERNAL TO *OUR* WORLD and LIFE!!!!! They are MACHINERY, FURNITURE!

---------------------

*IF* there WERE other Aware Animals who knew they existed and therefore automatically understood what WE mean here, and who live and breathe IN ADDITION to the complement of NON-aware animals on this planet, then this would be obvious to you, but merely because you have evolved on a planet where ALL OTHER species AT THIS TIME HAPPEN TO BE only pre-conscious bio-machines, your desperate affinity for hopefully believing in teddy bears and your reflex to crave some company around here on this rock, is leading you astray.

If Dolphins really were aware, they would tell us so, and have enough sense to MAKE SURE they had tried enough different ways to make it obvious to us. And by now we'd have a common language we had both agreed on!! Steve