I said that certain processes:
electrons;
quanta;
charges;
absence of charges;
distorted molecules;
fields -
- are not conscious. Two questions that come up are:
(i) How do you know that they are not conscious?
(ii) What is conscious?
(i) We do not have to prove a negative. Anyone asserting a positive proposition has to state reasons for it. I confidently assert that an inanimate object is not conscious first because there is no reason to suppose that it is and secondly because every property of the object can be adequately described without ascribing consciousness to it. In practice, we assume that a chair is not conscious - until we start discussing philosophy. We can make up a story about a clockwork toy soldier obeying the order to march to war but we know that that story is a fiction because every movement of the toy can be fully explained without any reference to consciousness within the toy itself. Every statement that we make can be revised in the light of further evidence. Thus, if a chair begins to complain when it is kicked, then I will start to revise my opinion that it is not conscious.
(ii) Interacting neurons somehow generate consciousness. Thus, if artificial neurons exactly duplicate the functions of organic neurons, then they too will be conscious. The computing process is long lists of 0's and 1's, offs and ons, not an artificial neural network.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree with your argument for believing why chairs and computers are not conscious, self aware, thinking entities. It's simply fun for writers like Poul Anderson to speculate about ways and situations in which self aware AIs MIGHT come to exist. I myself have an old but more than satisfactory table top chess computer which REGULARLY beats me at chess. I know it's not factually true to think like this--but I sometimes think of my chess computer as thinking and dreaming a la the Serendipity computer as I wait for it to respond to one of my moves.
Sean
One of the rules for SF writers dealing with future tech is "don't try to be specific". You're less likely to be flatfooted that way.
Poul got better at that as his career went along. Some of his earlier stories mention tubes in use in futuristic machinery. Later, he just specifies what the devices -do-, and uses fairly vague terms for -how- they do it.
You can see him improve in the two versions of the story "Tiger by the Tail". In the original version, the interior communications of the Scothian spaceship actually use horn-signals. In the second, Flandry notes this is pure anachronistic swank and swagger; anyone who can build a FTL spaceship will have intercoms.
That story is also an indication of how well he thought out the social implications of a technological leap without the intervening developments.
Scotha is a barbarian world -- it looks like Iron Age Europe, mostly -- that got the complete interstellar package dumped on them, with a few given technical educations to operate largely automatic machinery, most of it not even on the surface of their planet. The culture that got the package then went on to conquer and unify the planet and expand out-system.
They didn't have an indigenous scientific or industrial revolution, or a renaissance or an Enlightenment; most are still peasants; their overlords are barbarian chiefs obsessed with war, booty and glory, and inter-family and inter-clan rivalries.
The contrast with the enormous technological capacities is very well done.
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