Tuesday, June 14, 2005

The Ethics of Creating Consciousness

"Traditionally human beings have reserved words like 'reasoning,' 'self-awareness,' and 'soul' as their exclusive property. But with the stirring of something akin to electronic consciousness -- some argue that human beings need to give up the ghost, and embrace the machine in all of us."

Good bumper-sticker there: "EMBRACE THE MACHINE."
Posted by Mac at 8:42 AM

4 comments:

Gerald T said...

Actually with our record for crafting mass extinctions in this world we may want to think about getting a handle on our out of control uncreating of consciousness ability first.

12:22 PM
W.M. Bear said...

I'm of the school that thinks it is POSSIBLE to create a conscious computer, at least theoretically. Since consciousness obviously "runs" on a material substrate, why should the particular TYPE of substrate make a difference? (Though it conceivably might -- it's certainly plausible that consciousness might need to run on a biological organism.) I guess this makes me what you might call a "HALite." HOWEVER (note the "big however"), I don't think we have the faintest foggiest fucking notion how actually to do this, and we won't acquire said notion any time soon until we stop routinely committing the mind-brain misidentification fallacy as evidenced by the IBM "Blue Brain" project.

10:25 PM
Gerald T said...

Yea why brain as the center big B?
What if conciseness is just a nexus point, a singularity in 3d space n time, and what if this grid is infinite? That would mean that anything you happen to observe is a conscious entity, not just life, not just your self and other people, but all matter/energy.
This makes the building of some contraption to make awareness kind of silly, because all the parts of the computer are already at various states of awareness.
Just a thought

2:44 AM
W.M. Bear said...

gt -- Interesting. The possibility has occurred to me that even the ThinkPad (speaking of IBM) that I'm using right now might be conscious in some sense. After all, it is carrying on what could be considered certain types of mental processes. Hard to know. We may be talking about personal, reflective consciousness rather than simple "awareness" here though. (Frankly, I do think that even simple life-forms like viruses may be "aware" in some very basic sense. Not sure about non-living entities.) May the Force be with you!

1:25 PM