[FRIAM] Is consciousness measurable?

Wed Oct 19 20:49:24 EDT 2022

Based on his Facebook info, Jan died.  One of his friends gives the details.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Wed, Oct 19, 2022, 2:13 PM Douglass Carmichael <doug at dougcarmichael.com>
wrote:

> Hard to imagine a computer saying “that’s disgusting” with conviction.
>
> Ps: anyone know what happened to Jan Hauser? I can’t reach him from
> California.He did have a heart event'
>
> On Oct 19, 2022, at 12:10 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abbott at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The test is whether reasonably appropriate emotions arise without the
> entity being told which emotions it should have--not whether it can
> generate text consistent with a specified emotion.
>
> -- Russ
>
> On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 4:55 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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