Talk:Synthetic consciousness

message: I'd like to avoid interminable discussions about weak vs stong implementations, with an emphaisis on the transitive sense of consciousness, i.e. consciousness of various phenomena, rather than the philosophical debate about whether machine consciousness is possible per se, as this is well-covered elsewhere in wikipedia, e.g. at artificial intelligence. I realise this limits the scope of the article, but this is intentional. I think the spring board for this notion is that an implementation needs to be pro-active in some respect. Perhaps a good example is an alarm clock. A clock is aware of the time - it's consciousness, if that is the correct term, springs into life when the alarm goes off for the purpose of waking me up on time. Now, most would argue that conscious is not the correct term here. But what about an alarm clock that decided for itself what time to wake me up, based on inputs that it possessed, say, by noticing whether I was in my bed, by knowing what day of the week it was, by measuring how much sleep I had had recently, by weighing my unopened mail, by listening to whether my cats were hungry, and so on? Such an alarm clock might qualify as being synthetically conscious of my sleep needs, and my relationship with it would lead me to consider it as conscious as if I had a man-servant to perform the same function. Although I fabricated the above example, there are robotic machines that perform useful functions based on awareness of their environment and on drives that are in-built. These are the models for synthetic consciousness that I have in mind here. Note also the constraint imposed by the use of synthetic in the title. Here I aim that synthetic consciousness means built with an intent, rather than naturally occurring, which arises spontaneously as a result of, say, a biological process. This disqualifies any notions of super-human consciousness, perhaps such as the all-pervading consciousness portrayed in the film The Matrix. Matt Stan 09:14, 6 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: You raise the interesting point that one's perception of an entity's consciousness might be a function of one's relationship with that entity. Children imbue their dolls with consciousness and talk to them as though they were real people. Religious people do likewise with their gods and animistic religious with various artifacts and natural objects. This means that an assesment of any implementation is not going to be child's play, as Paul illustrates with the conscious alarm clock above. The implication is that a conscious machine might be genuinely conscious as far as some people were concerned, but not as far as others are concerned. I'm not sure how one would reach consensus on this issue, without getting into an 'Oh no, it's not' / 'Oh yes, it is' - type argument. It may be that rationality has nothing to do with it but the marketing law would apply. The marketing law is "The truth is what the people believe the truth to be." In fact, I'm surprised people aren't already using synthetic consciousness as a marketing ploy for all sorts of gadgets. Perhaps it's because the common perception of machines that seem too smart is that they're a bit scary, and therefore it's better for the marketeers to play down any notion that the thing might actually be conscious. I remember being surprised, and delighted, when my new car some while ago complained (by beeping) that I'd left the lights on when I got out. There was nothing in the manual about this feature, and it did seem that the car really cared about its battery not going flat. Now I know that the car didn't really care, but it seemed so, an I was happy to go along with the idea of a car that had consciousnesses of things that I was not even aware it was conscious of. The BMW that stays in lane is a better example. Here is a car with a will to avoid crashing even when the driver goes to sleep (i.e. loses consciousness). In that event the car itself can take over an aspect of the driving. What's that, if not an implementation of synthetic consciousness? Matt Stan 08:12, 11 May 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  What to avoid 

message: Well, it's been over a year since the last discussion here and there's been nothing done with this article, whereas Artificial_consciousness has grown quite large. Does anyone still object to this page redirecting there? — Schaefer 05:05, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redirect