Category: Sentience in Machines
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Some problems of the very intuitive evolutionary emergentist paradigm trying to explain consciousness from neurons
Some problems of the very intuitive evolutionary emergentist paradigm trying to explain consciousness from neurons, thanks to Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Chris Percy at Qualia Research Institute: The “Slicing Problem” is a thought experiment that raises questions for substrate-neutral computational theories of consciousness, particularly, in functionalist approaches. The thought experiment uses water-based logic gates to…
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Kolmogorov theory of consciousness. An algorithmic model of consciousness
Characterizing consciousness is a profound scientific problem with pressing clinical and practical implications. Examples include disorders of consciousness, locked-in syndrome, conscious state in utero, in sleep and other states of consciousness, in non-human animals, and perhaps soon in exobiology [astrobiology] or in machines. Here, we address the phenomenon of structured experience from an information-theoretic perspective. ……
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Susan Schneider on whether we should create intelligent beings with AI
Our children are, in a sense “ours:” they aren’t our possessions, obviously, but we have special ethical obligations to them. This is because they are sentient, and the parent-child relationship incurs special ethical and legal obligations. If we create sentient AI mindchildren (if you will) then it isn’t silly to assume we will have ethical…
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Robots need civil rights, too
If “consciousness” is a similarly broad concept, then we can see degrees of consciousness in a variety of biological and artificial agents, depending on what kinds of abilities they possess and how complex they are. For example, a thermostat might be said to have an extremely tiny degree of consciousness insofar as it’s “aware” of…
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Sentience in machines and anti-substratism: Can machines feel?
First version: Dec. 2016. Updated: Jan. 2017 I have created this text from the materials I prepared for the talk I gave at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Santiago de Compostela on December 15, 2016 along with Brian Tomasik, which was entitled “Outlook and future Risks of artificial consciousness”. “Digital computers have…
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Opportunities for an astronomical reduction of suffering
This is a list of situations, projects or initiatives in which there could be an “astronomical” (huge) reduction in the amount of suffering compared to what currently exists or is expected. Many of these situations (but not necessarily all of them) involve a high risk in the sense that they are difficult projects whose probability…