Re: Souls and divine sparks

Curt Welch wrote:
casey <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 20, 9:57=A0am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

The Big Dog robot that was posted here is a video of a conscious
machine. It doesn't have the same level of consciousness humans have,
but it's conscious in every sense that humans and animals are
conscious. But yet, most people in this group I reject that statement,
and I suspect a large number of people in AI would either reject the
statement, or at minimal, refuse to commit to a position on the grounds
that not enough was known yet.
Because they don't believe, unlike you, that consciousness is a
substance!
Some magic sauce. They see it as a description of a behavior and big
dog doesn't seem to manifest such behaviors.

What is this "doesn't seem to" BS? Either it does or it doesn't. If you
can't define what behavior it is you are talking about, then you aren't
talking about something real. You are talking about an undefined magical
divine spark which you believe exists in humans. Either Big does has the
behavior or doesn't. If you can define what your definition of conscious
behavior is, I'm sure we can very quickly out if Big Dog has it.

The "boolean" definition of consciousness.

There's also the sliding scale of consciousness - that gives
some measure of how much awareness an agent has of their
environment, themselves and the relationship between them.

I'm sure the Big Dog robot has a good level of awareness about
where its feet are and whether they are on solid ground, while
it might have a low awareness of whether it is banging its
"head" against a brick wall.

That means it might give out some mixed signals about its
level of conscious awareness.

There is an analogy is with the sleepwalker. The sleepwalker
must be perceiving and reacting to their environment - or they
would fall over - but we do not regard them as being conscious.
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Relevant Pages

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