[LINK] Machine Learning Was: Re: Robot cars and the fear gap

[David Lochrin]

On 2016-07-27 15:06 Jim Birch wrote:

> David Lochrin wrote:
> 
> Conscious minds attach meanings to symbols
> 
> Maybe in your case.  My cat is certainly conscious - i.e. aware of and responding to it's surroundings - but doesn't do a lot of symbols.
> 
> A self-conscious mind, which might be what you are referring to, does that, and, is aware of itself, located in time, separate from the environment and in an ongoing relationship to it. Symbols or some kind of internal modelling seems to be required, particularly if it's going to communicate with us.  My cat doesn't do this much.
> 
> The next step is being able to model other minds.  This is an adaption for social living and produces the the complex, nuanced life we live.  Cats pretty clearly don't do this, neither do young children and some disfunctional adults.

I don't wish to turn this into a discussion of the Theory of Mind or Cats, though that might be easy to do.  I once had a cat of whom I was very fond, and I certainly disagree that cats don't have empathy or awareness of other conscious beings as such.  I have a couple of fascinating stories.

Are you suggesting your cat is somehow conscious but not "self-conscious"?  Given the similarity in neurological structure between cats & humans, the notion that they're fundamentally different doesn't make any sense unless you're invoking religious ideas of a human soul.

Ideas regarding consciousness and whether a machine could be conscious have occupied great minds for many centuries without achieving much progress and I don't think it's going to be solved now on Link or in the Tesla labs, though it's fun to think about.  The philosopher John Searle developed an argument against Strong AI known as the "Chinese Room" thought experiment to which I referred earlier, and it's described in Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room so I won't repeat it here.  However it has stood up well against attempts to knock it off.

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Finally, consider this...   Perceptions result from electro-chemical discharges along nerve fibres terminated by the appropriate receptors such that the pulse rate reflects the strength of the stimulus.  (The output of one fibre or a bundle of related fibres can be considered a "symbol" in the sense of information theory.)   In principle we could reproduce this structure quite well in hardware and equip it with camera-eyes.  So would this construct be able to _perceive_ colour?

There's no colour in physics, only EM waves of certain wavelengths or photons of certain energies, so where would it come from?  If you can answer that you'll be famous.

David L.