From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2008 - 10:56:35 MST
--- Lee Corbin <lcorbin@rawbw.com> wrote:
> Matt writes
> > The fact is that experience doesn't exist. Of course you will disagree.
> > So will the robot.
>
> "Experience doesn't exist"? You mean to say that you don't have an
> experience right now of sitting in front of a monitor? That you have
> not the experience of reading an email or watching TV? You mean to
> say that the experience of skiing down a slope doesn't exist? You
> are using the word in a way that I've never heard before.
Of course I believe in my own experience or qualia. But there is a difference
between believing something exists and it actually existing. You can't prove
that anything exists. I can't make any argument that a robot couldn't make.
When I suppress my evolutionarily programmed beliefs and analyze the question
logically I have to conclude that either a robot experiences or I don't. But
in the common sense meaning of the word, humans experience and machines don't.
But do animals? Embryos? Terminally ill Alzheimer's patients?
> Whether a robot has an experience depends on its complexity. We
> can safely say that the very nice robots the Japanese have recently
> built have no experiences, any more than a car has experiences.
> (Granted, at some level, it may be argued that everything has
> experiences, but those of ants, viruses, and stones are infinitesimally
> rudimentary.)
>
> Eventually robots could have "inner lives" as complex as ours or more,
> when one day they have enough intelligence/consciousness.
How do you measure complexity? How many bits are required for consciousness?
A program like autobliss ( http://www.mattmahoney.net/autobliss.txt )
simulates reinforcement learning. Would it be moral to run a version of the
program capable of learning more complex functions? Suppose I add episodic
memory, i.e. it can recall the training sequence? Where do you draw the line?
And note that I can teach it the exact same function using only reward or
only punishment. Does it make any difference?
-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
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