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The idea of a thinking machine is an amazing one. It would be like humans creating artificial life, only more impressive because we would be creating consciousness. Or would we ? It's tempting to think that a machine that could think would think like us. But a bit of reflection shows that's not an inevitable conclusion.
To begin with, we'd better be clear about what we mean by "think". A comparison with human thinking might be intuitive, but what about animal thinking? Does a chimpanzee think? Does a crow? Does an octopus ?
The philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there was "something that it is like" to have conscious experiences. There's something that it is like to see the colour red, or to go water skiing. We are more than just our brain states.
Could there ever be "something that it's like" to be a thinking machine? In an imagined conversation with the first intelligent machine, a human might ask "Are you conscious?", to which it might reply, "How would I know?".
http://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-think-and-could-a-machine-ever-do-it-51316
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 08 2016, @10:28PM
1) You have an experinece.
2) You notice that you had the experience.
3) You notice that you noticed that you had the experience.
The first step is to have a mind.
The second step is to have awareness.
The third step is consciousness. It can be extremely rudimentary.
N.B.: I will grant that my use of the terms is idiosyncratic, but so is everyone else's. There is no common language for thing that cannot be pointed at. When things are difficult to point at, lots of "you know what I mean" terms evolve that don't really have consensual definitions. Thoughts, minds, consciousness, etc. have been such terms, and are just starting to be pointable at as computer science evolves. (Please note, I haven't tried to define intelligence. That's one where there are multiple distinct schools about what it means that give firm answers which disagree with each other.)
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(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday January 09 2016, @12:04AM
1) You have an experinece.
2) You notice that you had the experience.
3) You notice that you noticed that you had the experience.
4) You notice that you noticed that you noticed that you had the experience.
5) Rinse, Apply, Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
You see, immediate regressus ad infinitum! That way lies Madness! Or at least a Husserlian Phenomenological Reduction, but those never really end well, in any case.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 09 2016, @01:44AM
Well, consciousness is arbitrarily recursive, limited only by your "stack depth". But you don't get it until step 3.
N.B.: You can also explaim the same thing in terms of direct experience, model of experience, model of the model of the experience, etc. It means the same thing, but I don't think it's as clear.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.