OT - Sentience

[AngleWyrm]

If we were to teach a computer to use English language the way children do, it might produce surprising and even scary results.

Steven Pinker recently wrote The Stuff of Thought, language as a window into human nature. You can see a video of his introduction to the book's topic in his TED talk on the subject.

[capnq]

AngleWyrm said: If we were to teach a computer to use English language the way children do, it might produce surprising and even scary results.

A computer would have to already be sentient to be capable of learning language the way that children do.

[AngleWyrm]

The New Mysterianism perspective is that there is something unexplainable about the inner workings of a person. Possibly extendable to 'there are things that are unknowable'.

This seems to me a convoluted way to accept lack of understanding, an ornate way of saying 'I'm special'.

What about the flu virus? It uses people for food, unimpeded by mankinds attempts to stop it every year. It breeds with impunity for a season, and then rests until the next. Surely it is the king of the universe, content that it too is special.

[Raapys]

It just has to do with humans' inability to accept that we're not more than we appear. We want to be special. Religion is much to blame, with the focus on soul, spirit and other mystical subjects.

[Ed Kolis]

capnq said:

A computer would have to already be sentient to be capable of learning language the way that children do.

Aren't computers already capable of learning language the way children do? Granted none of them have been very successful using that method...

[oli_chose123]

What I meant by my post was that self-awarness my not exactly be an existing quality. After all, if we program a computer to look like it is self-aware and to "think" it is self-aware, saying it isn't only prove that we could be "not self-aware" at all. Complicated to explain on text, but I understand myself
we cannot prove anything is or isn't self-aware. After all, animals could be a lot smarter, in a sense, than us, and we butcher them. (daulphins will end up leaving the planet singing...)

I like raapys' point. We are nothing more than chemical reactions in a natural computer, which animals have too, and at a lower (or higher, who knows) degree, plants too. The fact that ours is a bit bigger doesn't mean we're the only sentient beings, in terms stated above. What would make us different is the level we are at, like communication etc. After all, a brain, like a computer, is, in a way, a machine. A gearbox is too. so what matters is only the complexity of that machine. No soul or whatever bull**** religion bring to us. (sorry for religious types, no offence intended)

[AgentZero]

oli_chose123 said:
What I meant by my post was that self-awarness my not exactly be an existing quality....

The thing is, self-awareness isn't a wishy-washy concept that can mean different things to different people. It's a well-defined quality with well-defined methods for testing for it. There seems to be a train of thought out there that thinks that because self-awareness is some mysterious thing that you can't actually see, but only observe the effects of, that means they can tinker with the definition to suit their particular viewpoint. Which is absurdity, really. You don't often hear people saying, "Well what gravity means to me is..."

Last I checked, the only animals that had just shown evidence of self-awareness (not proven, but evidence points in that direction), are apes, dolphins and, oddly, elephants.

Regardless, the uses for a self-aware machine would be extremely limited. Sure, they could process information at an incredible rate, but they don't need to be self-aware to do that. Running simulations would be best left to non-self aware computers, because they will always be faster, by virtue of not having to deal with the phenomenal overhead of simply being self-aware. Same goes for designing games. We already have programs that can write other programs, and they will always get the work done faster using a computer that isn't using so much horsepower maintaining it's consciousness. And then you'd have to figure out how to program creativity, since that is not a unique characteristic of self-awareness, given how many startlingly uncreative people there are on the planet.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea and not worth pursuing, I'd love to see it in my lifetime, I'm just saying, it's application is limited. As much as I'd like to one day have a conversation with a self-aware machine, the fact remains that there really isn't much practical use for them.

Oh, and I do despise the "humans are just natural computers/organic machines/living CPUs, etc." Humans fall into the broad category of organisms, because we're alive. Machines and computers, by definition, aren't.

[Raapys]

You're limiting machines and computers to something made of metal.

There's nothing to prevent us from making biological( and thus 'living' ) computers and machines in the future, when we have mastered the art of gene manipulation. Computers would thus become living organisms too.

[AngleWyrm]

Some interesting googles:
Rise of the Biological Computer
Leech Computer
Biochip
Will Bio-computers allow AI to become persons?

[capnq]

Ed Kolis said:

Aren't computers already capable of learning language the way children do? Granted none of them have been very successful using that method...

I was going to say, "no, there aren't any computers that learn language the way children do," but when I went looking for confirmation of my opinion, I found this article from New Scientist. The main difference is that children learn language by hearing it used, but the computer software described in the NS article learns from text input.