Robot Dog and Consciousness Article

[Ben Iscatus]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... telligence

The article is pretty good - quotes David Chalmers. When these articles quote BK, we'll know we've arrived.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Woof! WOOF!! Woof-woof-woof!!!

[Ben Iscatus]

My interpretation: "Woof!" = "I agree the article is pretty good"
"WOOF!!" = "Very pleasantly surprised that it quotes David Chalmers"
"Woof-woof-woof!!!" = "It will be brilliant when these articles quote BK".

Marks out of 10, Dana?

[Soul_of_Shu]

My interpretation: "Woof!" = "I agree the article is pretty good"
"WOOF!!" = "Very pleasantly surprised that it quotes David Chalmers"
"Woof-woof-woof!!!" = "It will be brilliant when these articles quote BK".

Marks out of 10, Dana?

No idea ... the dog hijacked the laptop

[AshvinP]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... telligence

The article is pretty good - quotes David Chalmers. When these articles quote BK, we'll know we've arrived.

This is perhaps the greatest short-term threat humanity faces - the threat of mechanization. The materialist approach will not last much longer, IMO, so the biggest obstacle may be from those who come to reject materialism but continue to think of life, even 'spiritual' life, in terms of mechanization. As the author points out, most people cannot speak of inner qualities of experience and their essential nature without referencing mechanistic computer metaphors. Yet is that only limited to materialists? It would be a great exercise for everyone here, for ex., to take notice of when they are employing such imagery to characterize essential processes. I am explicitly aware of this danger and try to avoid it whenever I am thinking about it, but I have no doubt a few of my recent essays/posts also have employed such imagery or metaphors here or there.

Today, artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality. These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.
...
Many people today believe that computational theories of mind have proved that the brain is a computer, or have explained the functions of consciousness. But as the computer scientist Seymour Papert once noted, all the analogy has demonstrated is that the problems that have long stumped philosophers and theologians “come up in equivalent form in the new context”. The metaphor has not solved our most pressing existential problems; it has merely transferred them to a new substrate.

Apparently the article was an extract from a book, so I am not sure how much more she develops her observations. I have a feeling that it may not go much further, though. The threat of mechanization boils down to one thing so simple that we continuously fail to notice it - our refusal to imagine knowledge which can transcend mechanistic science. We criticize the hell out of it but continue to play by its rules, to let all of its rigid concepts rule over our own intuitions. It is an epic metaphysical case of Stockholm Syndrome. We acknowledge that concepts born of the sense-world can never approach questions of infinity or eternity, which is really what we are dealing with when asking about the "essence" of consciousness, but refuse to acknowledge that the sense-world is not the only knowable world, even if that conclusion is necessitated by non-materialist and non-dualist metaphysics. It is the mother of all self-inflicted wounds, but the Good News is "by His wounds, we are healed"... if we just choose to wake up.