Are insects conscious to the same degree as humans?

Seems a silly question to ask me since I think it is a categorical distinction, not a quantitative one

Ya it was, and lust for fame and money.

Are insects conscious? Trying to narrow in where you draw the line. The categorical line.

I got bogged down on consciousness for too long that I've concluded it's better to ignore discussing it.

Searle spent some decades thinking about, and arguing against AIs ever being conscious.

We should jog on. As I said before AIs will act as though they are conscious, and once they become advanced enough, they will then convince us, all the while making us wonder. The problem of other minds, is a problem.

Imagine Sophia the robot only many more times advanced; with facial expressions that are natural, where she can hold a conversation, be witty, understand and react to your input in the ways a human can.

AIs don't need emotions to be considered what we call evil, or benevolent.
Humans will program AIs to do good and bad things. Humans have weaponised
all forms of technology I can think of and it won't likely stop.

We still live in a world of people with conflicts of interests, religious kooks, idiots and idealogues, we still need to work for a living; and people expect things to turn out okay while the law of accelerating change hits us like a brick in the face.

My concern isn’t with intelligence running amuck. It wouldn't have actualized from its possibility if it contained the seeds of its own destruction and lacked the impetus to further actualize. My concern is that we may develop something that merely quacks like intelligence.

I'm not really sure, but they don't have the brain parts that are associated with consciousness.

The do have damage detecting neurons, but I don't have a way to determine whether they actually experience pain.


Sure. Must have: 1) sensory organs and 2) emotional response and 3) something else

So, rocks definitely don't qualify and ants might qualify but more study is needed

I improved your post. You're welcome.

Much obliged

There's more specific attributes of conciousness that haven't been mentioned.

1. It is always - of something. You are always concious or aware of something. Be it the phone thats in your vision, the smell of your lingering fart or the noise of your annoying children. In other words, conciousness is outwardly directed.

2. It is not only - of something. It is also a recursive kind of awareness. You are not only aware of something outside, you are also aware of being aware of that. An awareness that there is something which is aware of something. In other words, self-awareness.

AI will never be concious.

Of course our current system of ethics seems best to those living in the current system of ethics. This is nearly always true for people who are allowed to speak/write in public. I like it here too for the most part.

I'm quite certain that my 95% confidence range is wider than just about anyone else's in this thread. That is an extremely non-aggressive intellectual stance.

Actually, some of us recognize that intelligence means what intelligence means and that other words mean completely different things. There are no "good" inherent qualities of intelligence. A jerk who is 2^287396 times more intelligent than an nice guy is precisely 2^287396 times more intelligent.

I can't parse this bit. Absolutely no one said anything about the best kind or worse kind of intelligence. They simply denoted "not much of it" and "****loads of it. They probably did this using some intuitive knowledge of what people mean when they mean the "I" part of "AI"

Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise.

Not possible or your range would be quite wide. Since you are claiming to rely on math and logic and statistics and physics, I demand to see your work. You can skip over the simple stuff about how we are bound by gravity, of course.

So you are claiming that you like what you like (aka value) because you sat down and did some logical analysis and physics equations to determine your values?

Using formal logic and physics (I don't think that probability and statistics are necessary here), tell me how you decided upon your personal valuation of dipping grilled cheese in tomato soup for lunch. Extra credit if you can derive the vectors necessary to differentiate between the valuation of cream-based tomato soup vs. the more pure form. Even the extra credit is more simple than showing the work of a system of ethics, so the general tomato soup question should be quite easy.

If you've never had grilled cheese dipped in tomato soup, IDGAF. You should easily be able to develop highly precise quantitative models for each in a few seconds given the Wikipedia pages for each. Going out to a diner for empirical evidence or relying on your memory of prior experiences with grilled cheese dipped in tomato sauce is clearly cheating.

This is not true. You can easily simply be aware of your inner workings. That isn't outward at all. This is a fairly simple task. It especially applies to pure emotions.

The difficult part, it seems, is upon becoming good at the task, not talking excessively about what it is like to simply be aware of your inner workings.

One can simply feel what it is like to look at a blue thing without thinking "I AM THE THING THAT IS LOOKING AT A BLUE THING RIGHT NOW!"

This is actually far more simple than the first task.

Like the number of licks to get to the center of a tootsie pop, we will never know.

Of thoughts, of memories, of bodily functions. You are always concious - of something. It is outwardly directed. It is - of something (If you prefer).
One can. But one is also aware that something is aware of the blue thing. It's not just - BLUE THING!

I kind of agree, but it doesn't feel like that under certain circumstances. Maybe. I'm not entirely sure that you are conscious, so there is that.

If you mean that feeling is different than the capacity to feel, I certainly agree.

You've never been aware and not self-aware?

I kind of thought that everyone else has experienced that at least a little bit. It is wonderful.

There have been lots of weird people here who think that cognition or vocabulating is the same as consciousness. I can't remember whether you are one of them.

Of course you can be just aware.

To clarify, consciousness is always outwardly directed, but not always recursive.

Do you think the brain is a super-Turing machine?

I don't know what the nature of the connection is between the physical brain and this thing we call consciousness.

I don't even know if that's knowable, since that very thing is directed away from itself at all times.

My answer: I don't know.

If human consciousness is computable, then why can't AI be conscious?

Or, just be. Some say additions to that are really subtractions from it.

It muddies the waters when you put 'human' or any other qualification before 'conciousness'. It implies that one type of conciousness is more special than another, amongst other unecessary things.

I opine that you cannot compute something that does not want to be computed. Something that does not want to be entirely knowable. Conciousness is directed at something, always. Never at itself. Its very existence is mutually necessary or interdependent with the existence of everything else. A reproduced or artificial conciousness would be unnecessary. Greater intelligence, with human-directed motivations may be useful. Artificial conciousness, no use at all.

I opine:

A. It is not knowable/computable.
B. Even if it hypothetically was, it would be unnecessary to reproduce.

Consciousness is the observation of very fast connections that have become so familiar they appear to be super safe and taken for granted as part of who we are. We are simply observing ourselves making connections and triggering connections that trigger other connections. Boiling water. How many connections in it (add all your past experiences with boiling water and you have so much to work with in terms of adapting to the info from senses that water somewhere is boiling). We have become very good at this processing connections game by relentless training since age 2-3 that we realized the "i" part in all this.

We observe the brain "deciding" what to do based on the connections of what has worked before for some task. Enhancement of certain priorities guide choices. Cause and effect connections. You want something to happen do this etc. Next what do you want. All this happens very fast. You want food, you follow the steps to get there and the observation of the thinking and cooking makes you a conscious cooker.

Consciousness is emergent. We are not conscious like that at age 10 days. But we have started to recognize the concept of mother and the others.

Endless stream of experiments that we shouldn't be too lazy to count but apparently we are if we think that consciousness is something so impossibly difficult. If every day you live you interact with 1 thing per second, you have had 1 bil interactions by age 30 something. Well of course 1 bil interactions with thousands of bytes per event in terms of senses information data influx, build a great sense of how it all works, a total feeling of control and familiarity and self. Just dont forget none of that were here at age 1 or even at age 5 in the scale they are today. We are learning ourselves and the world damn it! That is what is happening. Machines will do the same eventually if we understand a little better the mechanics of our brain functions to create an architecture that is similar and better for them. All they need is senses and endless trial and error experiments that establish connections based on reward, comfort and discomfort. They need arms and legs to experiment better. Create something that experiments with the world and makes connections to achieve predefined goals and see how fast it will start appearing very interesting, deliberate and yes conscious the way we perceive others as conscious.

I'm satisfied with your answer - for now.

Adventure of a Lifetime

Good post!

I second that