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People are active listeners; we create meaning where there is no meaning or nothing intended. Bender says it’s not about the octopus’s words making sense, it’s about how the islander makes sense of them.
For all their sophistication, today’s AIs are as smart as a calculator can be said to be: both are machines designed to convert input into output in ways that sane humans choose to interpret meaningfully. While neural networks can be loosely modeled on brains, the best of them are much less complex than a mouse’s brain.
Still, we do know that brains can produce what we understand as consciousness. If we can finally understand how brains do this and reproduce this mechanism in an artificial device, then would an absolutely conscious machine be possible?
While trying to imagine Robert’s world at the beginning of this article, I found myself caught up in the question of what consciousness means to me. My understanding of a conscious machine was undeniably—perhaps inevitably—human-like. It is the only form of consciousness I can imagine, as it is the only consciousness I have ever experienced. But what would it really be like to be a conscious AI?
To think that way is probably arrogance. The project to build intelligent machines is geared towards human intelligence. But the animal world is full of a wide variety of possible alternatives, from birds to bees to cephalopods.
The accepted view put forward by René Descartes a few hundred years ago was this: only humans were conscious. Animals without souls were viewed as mindless robots. Few think so today: if we are conscious, there is little reason not to believe that mammals with similar brains are also conscious. And why draw the line around mammals? Birds seem to reflect when they solve puzzles. Many animals, even invertebrates such as shrimp and lobster, show signs of feeling pain, suggesting that they have some degree of subjective consciousness.
But how can we really imagine what it must feel like? As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has pointed out, “to be like” something to be a bat, but we can’t even imagine what it is – because we can’t imagine what it’s like to observe the world through some kind of sonar. We can imagine how this could be we to do this (perhaps by closing our eyes and imagining some kind of echolocation point cloud around us), but that shouldn’t be the case for a bat with a bat mind anyway.
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