I think consciousness can be determined by an organism''s abitity to spontaneously kill itself...
Think about it, I could just sit here and starve my self to death, I would know that the results of my actions would cause me to cease to be and that the natural thing to do would to go eat and that there would be a force compelling me to eat. But I could resist the urge to eat and just stay there and starve. I believe this could be a measure of consciousness, the ability to remove oneself from one''s environment.

Or how bout this one... the ability to effect one''s environment to improve one''s condition. Though this would lead me to conclude that birds are conscious because they build nests...

I personally think that the first true human created inteligence will be an accident and that this intelligence will live on the internet.... really, almost ever computer is connected to every other computer, these computers can all be used to preform different functions at once, like SETI... It would have access to thousands of Terabytes of storage, millions of years of CPU time, terabytes of RAM... and this probably won''t happen for a few decades, by which time the net of computers will have increased dramatically... just food to chew on...

movies dealing with this topic: The Matrix, The 13th Floor, Dark City.. all great movies.. any others to compare ideas with?

quote:Original post by morfe

My old lecturer when I was at uni once mentioned that there was a project at MIT to write a program that would analyse thousands of books and publications and determine a solution to conflict among humans. Apparently, it spat out the ten commandments so they scrapped the entire project and moved to military AI contracts.

Dunno if it was true, but he sincerely believed it was (and he had done postgrad work there).

Scrapped it? Seems to me it was a complete success.

Grst are you a (*sharp inhalation of breath*) Christian?

Mike

P.S. morfe, it''s blatantly an urban myth btw.

All of this has been discussed so many times going back to the 1950s that I''m at a loss why such a superficial discussion is taking place here. There are endless books and papers to read on the subject, though most of them are older because the whole "true AI" topic was recognized as a red herring maybe 30 years ago.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." --Edsger W. Dijkstra

I don''t think mankind can become God if such a thing exists, Creating life is not omnipitance just ingenunity.
As for the origional post whats happens when a computer becomes self aware? I don''t believe this can ever trully happen as consciousness probably doesn''t exist at all, but thats an even question and should be answered first.

first of all I would like to say that I fully agree with zadkeil's views on the subject. I believe that by calling ourselves consciousness we are really just defining that the human mind as a type of system that can self organize, and self modify.when I say self modify I dont mean it in a maraculus way I mean that the human mind can change the way it processes information from outside factors, for example stimuli it recieves through the sences or chemical changes in the body. I also believe that it is possible to create a system that contains properties simular to our own conscious system and that we can accomplish this in an infinite amount of ways. for example It could be simulated in serial ways such as a program on a computer or a person manualy executing that same program with pen and paper, or in a parrallel way such as a network of people communcating with one-another using a strict set rules controling when and what they communicate. This brings me to think of another type of system that might also be considered to diplay concious behaviour. when humans (and there minds (: ) begin to communicate its possible that they will generate rules and customes for further communication. when these rules/customs are set in place things such as the stock market, buisness, consumer market, cities/towns all become possible, and if you look at these systems as wholes each one takes in external input, relies on its inner mechanisms to decode and react to the input to produce new output, also in the systems I mentiond the mechanisms(people) have the ability to change there individual style of decision making. This has a very basic likeness to how the brain self modifies. Although these systems may behave simular to our own system system(from my perspective) Im not saying that there conciousness has any resemblence to our own. There concious systems could be less limited than our own such as structures as large as the united states. systems this large can process huge amounts of information(stimuli),for example stimuli from sientific reaserch, politics, internal/global events and can act on all of this in very unique and creative ways. While smaller systems such as the stock market can be more restricted than we are because its input can only consist of buying and selling of stocks, and its output --the raising and lowering of stock prices.

I will end by saying that through evolution man has aquired both the ability to reason and adapt to his environment, and the ability to work with others towards a common goal..... from what ive observed anyway.

this is just my humble opinion and I could be just as wrong as the next guy atempting to explain conciousness,I hope I havent offended anyone too much.

later, the ciscokid




Edited by - ciscokid5447 on December 27, 2000 2:12:45 PM