Artificial Intelligence and philosophy?

[aidan402]

Artificial Inteliigence (AI) seeks to replicate the functions of a natural mind, ie to speak, to reason and have consciousness. It has proven difficult to endow machines with `common sense', as opposed to giving them abilities, like Deep Blue, to play chess. Emotions and other intangibles which drive much intelligent human behavior are currently beyond the scope of the scientific community to replicate.
Taking into account the philosophical views of consciousness, free will and accountability; if AI becomes reality, where would that leave philosophy in its abstracts of the theory of consciousness and its relation to reality?

[blankmatch]

If AI were to gain consciousness we would see a short glimpse of a new era of philosophical ideas and reality.

AI would be able to transcend its own conscious limitations which is completely unpredictable in regards to what kind of new consciousness it's emotion would come from.

I say we'd only see a glimpse because the first AI to attain "life" is going to leave anything humans have ever thought of behind, because it won't have the human limitations that we have to bind its mind from expanding beyond limits.

It'll never happen though, I'll shoot the first AI that asks me about the meaning of existence...

[rhsaunders]

It takes a lot of CPU power to simulate all the activites of a human mind, and most AI efforts have come a cropper simply because the computation was too complex. But some of the goals of early AI projects, such as speech recognition, are now commercially viable. Ultimately, we'll have to cope with Minsky's gedankenexperiment of some decades ago: how will you know, upon reading this, that it was constructed by a human as opposed to a computer, and if the constructor claims self-consciousness, can you object?

[neil s]

Replicating cognitive functions, even emotion, is to replicate a mechanism for registering the *content* of consciousness. the experience of pure consciousness suggests human consciousness has the ability to transcend its own functioning. this becomes clear criteria to say something displays a human type pf consciousness.

The biology of the human system *is* a quantum collapse, so the information within that collapse, as a whole, is experienced as what we, from the subjective side, call emotion.

So an AI system that could transcend its own functioning (refining its own functioning in the process) and had biological components that matched ours, would be conscious in the way we are. What would such a being be like?

[Skatta]

I don't think computers will ever be able to have emotions as such. or at least i don't believe this has anything to do with artificial intelligence or intelligence at all except for the fact that self awareness is required for a being to be aware of its emotions. if you forget the aware part i think they do possess the technology to replicate emotions, on a evolution learning computer typed basis. and they are building such things but the process is difficult and time consuming. so we haven't created it yet, but we won't need to make any technological discoveries to achieve it.

the difficult thing is awareness. but i think that intelligence is the main cause or rather is self awareness. though other things in the brain must exist in tandem with intelligence for self awareness to be possible.

If we learn how to build intelligence, rather than have it evolved on purpose, then i think philosophy would jump in leaps and bounds as would science.


but knowing us and our habits we wouldn't like what it has to say and we wouldn't listen to it anyways.

[reprobate cuniform]

My brain is running: be silent, brain.
Can we build an intelligent robot? One that doesn't give away the fact of what it is, a man made collection of positrons and plasma blood, one that you couldn't distinguish from a human sapient? No. Only consciousness can feel pain. Nothing else. Any one that could dupe a robot into
thinking(?) it has free will would soon enough run into an impossible number of choices, and that's even before the robot was engineered. And accountability? nerp