[FRIAM] Is consciousness measurable?

[Russ Abbott]

When Blake Lemoine claimed that LaMDA was conscious, it struck me that one
way to test that would be to determine whether one could evoke an emotional
response from it.  You can't cause it physical pain since it doesn't have
sense organs. But, one could ask it if it cares about anything. If so,
threaten to harm whatever it is it cares about and see how it responds. A
nice feature of this test, or something similar, is that you wouldn't tell
it what the reasonable emotional responses might be. Otherwise, it could
simply repeat what it read a being with that emotion would say.  One might
argue that emotion is not a necessary element of consciousness, but I think
a being without emotion would be at best a pale version of consciousness.

-- Russ Abbott
Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles


On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 2:14 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> I an concurrently reading, *Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness*,
> by Patrick House and *Mountain in the Sea*, by Ray Nayler. The latter is
> fiction. (The former, because it deals with consciousness may also be
> fiction, but it purports to be neuro-scientific / philosophical.)
>
> The novel is about Octopi and AI and an android, plus humans and
> juxtaposes ideas about consciousness in comparison and contrast. A lot of
> fun.
>
> Both books pose some interesting questions and both support glen's
> advocacy of a typology.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022, at 1:26 PM, glen wrote:
> > There are many different measures of *types* of consciousness. But
> > without specifying the type, such questions are not even philosophical.
> > They're nonsense.
> >
> > For example, the test of whether one can recognize one's image in a
> > mirror couldn't be performed by a chatbot. But it is one of the
> > measures of consciousness. Another type of test would be those that
> > measure conscious state before, during, and after anesthesia. Again,
> > that wouldn't work the same for a chatbot. But both aggregate measures
> > like EEG and fMRI connectomes might have analogs in tracing for
> > algorithms like ANNs. If we could simply decide "Yes, *that* chatbot is
> > what we're going to call conscious and, therefore, the traced patterns
> > it exhibits in the profiler are the correlates for chatbot
> > consciousness." Then we'd have a trace-based test to perform on other
> > chatbots *with similar computational structure*.
> >
> > Hell, the cops have their tests for consciousness executed at drunk
> > driving checkpoints. Look up and touch your nose. Recite the alphabet
> > backwards. Etc. These are tests for types of consciousness. Of course,
> > I feel sure there are people who'd like to move the goal posts and
> > claim "That's not Consciousness with a big C." Pffft. No typology ⇒ no
> > science. So if someone can't list off a few distinct types of
> > consciousness, then it's not even philosophy.
> >
> > On 10/18/22 13:12, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> >> Paul Buchheit asked on Twitter
> >> https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/1582455708041113600
> >>
> >> "Is consciousness measurable, or is it just a philosophical concept? If
> an AI claims to be conscious, how do we know that it's not simply
> faking/imitating consciousness? Is there something that I could challenge
> it with to prove/disprove consciousness?"
> >>
> >> What do you think? Interesting question.
> >>
> >> -J.
> >
> >
> > --
> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
> >
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