Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
-
(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
-
Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
“So what distinguishes us from today’s man-made robots is not that we are not robots – a “robot” is simply an autonomous sensorimotor system with certain performance capacities – but that we happen to be robots with performance capacities that vastly exceed those of any robots build by us so far. And a further capacity –but not a performance capacity – that our current robots lack is the capacity to feel.”
ReplyDeleteI think this is an important point that Professor Harnad has addressed in many articles and in class: robots are autonomous sensorimotor systems with performance capacities and lacking the capacity to feel like all organisms do. Essentially the hard problem is trying to look at the causal mechanism of how and why we feel, Turing Test does not solve the hard problem and current AI technology cannot reverse engineer cognition and consciousness. This point is also concluded in the question about machine consciousness:
“What are the theoretical foundations of machine consciousness?
There are no theoretical foundations of machine consciousness. Until further notice, neither AI nor neuroscience nor any other empirical discipline can even begin to explain how or why we feel. Nor is there any sign that they ever will.”
I liked the part on performance capacity. I think one of the reasons we are creating robots is to replace some of the performances we can do to make our life easier. If you take for example how machines in some work places are replacing people since machines can do things humans can do. But the overall distinction is how a robot can never feel what it’s doing and we can. I can feel my fingers typing as I write but a robot wouldn’t feel if it would be typing. It wouldn’t also know the purpose of why it’s typing because it’s simply following computational instructions whereas I know why I am typing and the purpose of my actions. Since I am a conscious being, I know the how and why I am typing but a robot with no conscious wouldn’t know the how and
ReplyDelete“managing to explain all known properties of life using only the four known forces. But will those suffice to explain feeling? They no doubt suffice to generate feeling, somehow, but not to explain how or why they generate it”
ReplyDeleteThis question of how and why (living matter) organisms that feel can feel is the most burning question in our existence. In my mind this question is at the core of the human existential struggle – why are we here? For many this question is as easily answered as it is posed – because God put us here. But for many of us the closest we can come to addressing this question is through the study of cognition. And a once promising avenue of scientific study – robotics - has now been eliminated as a source of enlightenment about how we have come to feel, or so Stevan says. All is not lost, I will continue to put my trust in science. After all, it has brought us this far in explaining all the known properties of life, why not this one?
“First we have to agree on what we mean by consciousness. Let us not mince words. To be conscious of something means to be aware of something, which in turn means to feel something. Hence consciousness is feeling, no more, no less. An entity that feels is conscious”
ReplyDeleteFrom the previous reading (10B) it was noted in one of Professor Harnad’s comments that pain is included in ‘feeling’ as it is a sensation that cannot be measured in the third person (i.e. it relies on self-report). This suggests that any organism that can feel pain is thought to have consciousness. This almost suggests that we could use reaction to pain as a litmus test for whether an organism is conscious. However, by definition we cannot measure whether an individual or an organism is feeling, or experiencing pain. This also relates to the Turing test level T3, Isaure and the other minds problem. Following this definition of consciousness, there is no way to tell for sure whether a given organism is conscious. For all we know everyone else who passes T3 (like Isaure) and every other organism that appears to ‘feel’ may, in fact, not feel but just appear to do so. There is no way to know for sure that anyone other than ourselves are ‘feeling’.
2. “What are the theoretical foundations of machine consciousness? There are no theoretical foundations of machine consciousness. Until further notice, neither AI nor neuroscience nor any other empirical discipline can even begin to explain how or why we feel. Nor is there any sign that they ever will.”
ReplyDeleteThis implies that there is a machine consciousness, but I think that by Professor’s definition of consciousness, feeling is required in the organism in order for them to have consciousness. Therefore, for this reason machine consciousness is logically impossible.