[FRIAM] Is consciousness measurable?

[Gillian Densmore]

*terminator soundtrack here*

On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 5:55 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> Maybe lack of emotion, but ability to 'fake it' by repeating what it read
> a being with that emotion would say only proves the AI is a sociopath or
> psychopath.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022, at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>
> 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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