Can artificial intelligences suffer from mental illness?

Discussion in 'Intelligence & Machines' started by Plazma Inferno!, Aug 2, 2016.

  1. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    I am not so sure of that. "I, Robot" shows how the laws can be broken. It may just be a probability function, but isn't everything a result of a probability function.?
     
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  3. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Someone asked the original question that started the thread, so it must be relevant to someone. lol

    If I could turn off a switch that allowed me to disable the AI's consciousness, then it'd be okay. I could pick and choose when I wished for my AI to be aware. Personally, I'd struggle with my robot knowing I'm using it.

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    Sometimes it is hard to fully look past our own sense of life, and so it's probably why I attach human characteristics and sensations (or plausible sensations) to the future of machines.

    Good idea.
     
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  5. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    They all stem from the core definition, which is awareness.

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  7. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Self-awareness
     
  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Reading but not really coming back in just yet

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  9. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Awareness of your surroundings...of what is happening around you. That is consciousness. Do we all need a lesson on consciousness?

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  10. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    From Mr Wiki

    About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness can be identified and categorized based on functions and experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear remote.

    awareness

    Origin: MiddleEnglish iwar,from Old English gewær, from ge- (associativeprefix) + wærwary — more at co-, wary.

    consciousness

    noun
    • : the condition of being conscious : the normal state of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you
    • : a person's mind and thoughts
    • : knowledge that is shared by a group of people
    Full Definition
    • 1 a : the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
      b : the state or fact of beingconscious of an external object, state, or fact
      c : awareness; especially : concern for some social or political cause
    • 2 : the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought : mind
    • 3 : the totality of conscious states of an individual
    • 4 : the normal state of conscious life<regained consciousness>
    • 5 : the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes
    Examples

    • a glaring problem that somehow has yet to penetrate the consciousness of the people that run this company
    First use: 1629

    Synonyms: advertence, advertency, awareness, cognizance, attention, ear, eye, heed, knowledge, mindfulness, note, notice, observance, observation

    As I noted, and breaking my own rule, the thread is not about definitions which tend to be circular anyway.

    Try using Humpty Dumpty method.

    Poe

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  11. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    The question then becomes, can consciousness be programmed into AI? Doesn't seem likely, but it would be cool if a mad genius out there could figure it out.

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  12. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Can consciousness be programmed into a human brain? Doesn't seem likely. But that's apparently what happened somewhere along the line. Moreover, it happened only through blind biological evolution.
     
  13. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed.

    Taking the self awareness pathway it may have occurred when something like a accident occurred, was perceived as pain, a automatic response generated, pain lessens.

    Later accidents which generated pain were lessened by purposeful responses.

    Suddenly the brain says 'ha I can control this what ever it is'

    Consciousness has a arrived.

    Perhaps my choice of a accident to kick start consciousness stems from my background.

    A chief might pick cooking a meal.

    However the connection was made I would not suggest it was programmed into a human brain more the dumb luck of blind biological evolution.

    Humpty Dumpty who can't believe his dumb luck.
     
  14. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Almost all animate things have consciousness. When you can observe a reaction to stimulation in a subject, that subject has consciousness. It is aware of change. This does not require a brain.
    It requires only afferent sensory equipment, such as a receptor sensitive to the stimulus to trigger a localized reaction. But when sufficient receptors are placed close together, the entire body has a consciousness , similar to a hive mind, where there is no central brain, but information is spread by chemical signals to the entire hive.

    Ant and termite hives are examples of the simplest hive minds, bees "dance" to show direction of food. The Mayfly lives 18 hours, but by means of spreading pheromones the female will attract males from as far as 20 miles (when the wind is right).

    These are all programmed responses to stimuli and can therefore be said to possess consciousness of a sort. The ability to perceive.

    OTOH, Self-awareness requires a central processor, a knowledge of *self* and ability for abstract thought (speculation), self-examination, long range planning, and taking deliberate action for future benefits.. This IS what makes hominids so special !

    Can we possibly build an AI with those capabilities? Could an AI build an AI with those capabilities?
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2016
  15. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    I thank humans along wit the help from more evolved AI will have the capability to build self-aware AI which is indistinguishable from humans... unless self-awareness is somethin more than biological an requires somethin "magical-like" that can not be duplicated.!!!
     
  16. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Question then becomes if we build an organic AI , can we still call it a robot, or does it become a species......

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  17. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    It may depend on which political party is in power at the time... but i will see it as a species.!!!
     
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  18. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I have a DVD cartoon, a fairly recent one, somewhere in my collection but I can't recall the name of it.

    How ever I do remember the opening scene where a male looking robot receives a box and calls out to a female looking robot.

    "Our baby has arrived. Now for the fun part. Making him"

    Guess if robots do it like that there is not much chance of cross breading so seperate species it is.

    Humpty Dumpty who likes the human way
    As do I. Poe

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  19. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    While this is true, I don't see consciousness ''evolving'' in AI, but that's just how I see it.
     
  20. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Wouldn't be programmed in, probably. Far more likely to be an emergent phenomenon from both hardware and "software" complexities, as it apparently is for human beings.

    We have some evidence that beings down to the level of insects are conscious to some degree.
     
  21. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    That's true but I don't personally consider AI to be equitable to ''life.'' Any life. That's why it's called artificial.
     
  22. cluelusshusbund + Public Dilemma + Valued Senior Member

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    Is the reason you dont thank AI coud be equitable to life because life has a soul an AI coud never have a soul.???
     
  23. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    As a proponent of biological naturalism (i.e., only a neural substrate can produce consciousness), Searle might agree. But he's not dogmatic about only living tissue having that power; he just favors that stance.

    - - - - - -

    And so the computer program, then, has not explained consciousness.

    JOHN SEARLE: That's right. Nowhere near. Now, that isn't to say that computers are useless and we shouldn't use them. No. Not a bit of it. I use computers every day. I couldn't do my work without computers. But the computer does a model or a simulation of a process. And a computer simulation of a mind is about like computer simulation of digestion. I don't know why people make this dumb mistake. You see, if we made a perfect computer simulation of digestion, nobody would think, "Well, let's run out and buy a pizza and stuff it in the computer." It's a model, it's a picture of digestion. It shows you the formal structure of how it works, it doesn't actually digest anything! That's what it is with the things that a computer does for anything. A computer model of what it's like to fall in love or read a novel or get drunk doesn't actually fall in love or read a novel or get drunk. It just does a picture or model of that.
    http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Searle/searle-con0.html

    - - - - - - -

    However, all we ever see of another person's "consciousness" is their outward actions and verbal reports. In the sense of those public states being half-equivalent to a simulation of mind minus the private experiences and feelings, the behaviorism of old would be quite content to treat that as all there is to consciousness. An embodied computer (AKA robot) running a simulated brain program could outwardly exhibit in its interactions with the environment and with people the external version of awareness which behaviorists (original school) would be satisfied with. It could perform the facial expressions and body acts of what it's like to "fall in love or read a novel or get drunk" despite being minus the internal manifestations associated with a real, biological brain.

    Supercomputer models one second of human brain activity
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolo...odels-one-second-of-human-brain-activity.html

    EXCERPT: Exascale computers are those which can carry out a quintillion floating point operations per second, which is an important milestone in computing as it is thought to be the same power as a human brain and therefore opens the door to potential real-time simulation of the organ’s activity. Currently there is no computer in existence that powerful, but Intel has said that it aims to have such a machine in operation by 2018. “If petascale computers like the K computer are capable of representing one per cent of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exascale computers - hopefully available within the next decade,” said one of the scientists, Markus Diesmann.

    The intellect aspect of mind does have precursors. It is an example of incremental emergence rather than the brute kind. Which is to say, protopanpsychism is arguably the case in regard to intelligence. The latter boils down to a complex organization of interactions and retained states with specialized functions. The raw precursors for that exist throughout the universe: Dynamic agencies, structural relationships, and the ability of physical states to be stored (even a bent metal clothes hanger is a primitive example of memory).

    But when it comes to consciousness (at least as it is in private terms as opposed to just outward body behavior), there are no non-speculative precursors. Matter is not recognized as having primitive "building-block" events for the intricate experiences, manifestations, or "showings" that arise in association with faculties, brain organization and processes.

    Thus phenomenal consciousness does appear to be brutely emergent: An utter novelty that is conjured by the correct activity or "choreography" being performed by neural operations and their elaborate, systemic connectivity.

    That superficial appearance of magic, or a "summoning" of something that wasn't the case beforehand in even a primitive stage... Is a backdoor left open for just about anything. It's why the "hard problem" of consciousness should be solved in a way that gets rid of such a radical origin, hanging there by default. But instead a majority of philosophers and scientists prefer to detour around it as if it's not important.

    Well, it actually wouldn't be significant to "soul believers" -- they should be among the last in the world who would be interested in accomplishing that goal. And not surprisingly -- in a related yet different sub-context, Susan Blackmore suggested years ago (after Ben Libet died) that the materialist camp in science may ironically be rife with subliminal soul believers. (Hey, any accusatory burr that could be placed under their butts to get those sluggards into motion!):

    Sue Blackmore: In a way the whole furore is bizarre. Most scientists claim to be materialists. That is, they don’t believe that mind is separate from body, and firmly reject Cartesian dualism. This means they should not be in the least surprised by the results [of Libet's decades old experiment]. Of course the brain must start the action off, of course the conscious feeling of having made it happen must be illusory. Yet the results created uproar. I can only think that their materialism is only skin deep, and that even avowed materialists still can’t quite accept the consequences of being a biological machine.

    Libet, unlike so many others, was wonderfully open about this. He really did believe that mind can affect body, that consciousness is some kind of power of the “non-physical subjective mind” or “conscious mental field“, and even that we might consciously survive death. Indeed, this was what inspired his experiments in the first place.

    What I so much enjoyed and admired, on that walk all those years ago, was his willingness to bring his science right into his everyday life, and his life into his science. As we walked along the street he explained how important free will was to him, that without it our lives would be meaningless and there would be no point in being good, because we would have no true freedom to choose between good and evil. He pointed towards a little girl up ahead of us on the pavement. His results, he said, showed that we cannot be held responsible for thinking of murdering, raping or stealing from people because initiating such actions begins in the unconscious brain, but we can and must be held responsible for stopping ourselves from doing those things. In this way his own results made moral sense.

    I disagree fundamentally with him. I think, and thought then, that free will is entirely illusory. So our discussion was lively and exciting and full of the most wonderful mixture of science, philosophy and the anguish of everyday life. I would have loved to have interviewed him for Conversations on Consciousness. One of the themes I tried to bring out in those interviews was how consciousness researchers fit their work into their ordinary lives, and he was one of those rare scientists whose life and work were completely intertwined.
    --Mind Over Matter? ... The Guardian ... Aug 28, 2007... Medical Research ... Opinions

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/monkeymind/2007/08/susan-blackmore-on-ben-libet.html
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2016

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