On Jun 5, 2007, at 9:17 AM, J Storrs Hall, PhD wrote:
On Tuesday 05 June 2007 10:51:54 am Mark Waser wrote:
It's my belief/contention that a sufficiently complex mind will be
conscious
and feel -- regardless of substrate.
Sounds like Mike the computer in Moon is a Harsh Mistress
(Heinlein). Note,
btw, that Mike could be programmed in Loglan (predecessor of Lojban).
I think a system can get arbitrarily complex without being conscious
--
consciousness is a specific kind of model-based, summarizing, self-
monitoring
architecture.
That matches my intuitions mostly. If the system must model itself in
the context of the domain it operates upon and especially if it must
model perceptions of itself from the point of view of other actors in
that domain, then I think it very likely that it can become
conscious / self-aware. It might be necessary that it takes a
requirement to explain itself to other beings with self-awareness to
kick it off. I am not sure if some of the feral children studies
lend some support to such. If a human being, which we know (ok, no
quibbles for a moment) is conscious / self-aware, has less self-
awareness without significant interaction with other humans then this
may say something interesting about how and why self-awareness develops.
- samantha
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