I'm feeling exceptionally disgruntled about my job today.

Ironically, if I would just stop thinking beyond doing the things that need to be done today it wouldn't be a problem.

I guess I'm just feeling sorry for myself. I don't have to like my job I just have to do it.

...

So, what do you all think about machines and sentience? Do you believe that a machine will ever achieve something recognizable as sentience?

For some reason I've been thinking about it a lot lately. No good reason, just something interesting to while away a few idle moments with. I guess it harkens back to my science-fiction fixation.

In the end I suppose I can't really pinpoint my own sentience. That, in turn, makes it difficult to think about how it might arise elsewhere. Where is the ghost in shell? How might it have come to be?

I can't get away from the idea that at some point the whole mess must boil down to the simplest kinds of stimulus/response. Coming from someone that believes in emergent behaviors I suppose this shouldn't come as a surprise. I can plot out an evolution on this basis in the realm of the concrete but how do you then explain our ability to work with abstractions? I think the ability to operate in both the abstract and concrete worlds is one of our defining characteristics.

Is it possible for self to exist in the absence of symbolic thought? I is a symbol. Is it possible to think about the absence of symbolic thought? My feeling is that one would have to be exceptionally disciplined to do so.

Would machines evolving to sentience have to come to it via an analogous route? That seems improbable to me. Wherein lies their route, then? Will the breakthrough actually come from work in AI or will it appear of its own accord? Has it already and we're not aware of it?

Opportunity for navel lint gathering abounds.

Extra

Links

So if you want to make my dreams come true, you'll be a lighthouse keeper too...
m4dd4wg
Gettin' Selfish?
Hey, I read, "Is it possible for self to exist in the absence of symbolic thought?" and I wondered if a self is necessary for conciousness. I'm reading a book for class, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that argues the self is a fiction or personal construction that beings need in order to function in Late Captialist society, rather than an essential part of human existence. Moreover, the conception of self is fragmented now that capitalist culture calls on persons to play multiple roles and exist in multiple semiotic systems, so each person has multiple identities coexisting with each other, and each self is an aggregation of signs. By this reasoning, symbolic thought is necessary for a sense of self.
loophole
*chuckles*

Ok. Interesting point. What I really need as a basis for this discussion is some kind of working definition of consciousness. It's interesting and counterintuitive, at least for my vantage point, to think of self as non-essential. I will have to read the argument and see if I can make some sense of it.

If consciousness were defined as awareness of ones own actions in relation to the environment that would seemingly imply self as essential... but that's only at first blush. It is conceivable that you could be aware of the world around and of your actions but not differentiate somehow. Sorta mind-bending to think about.

Love thinking about this sort of thing.

sjbrodwall
"The Age of Spiritual Machines"
The book by Ray Kurzweil. Have you read it? I was on the fence about the possibility of sentience in machines until I read that book. Kurzweil basically says that machine intelligence is limited primarily by our lack of processing power, but that Moore's law makes it nearly inevitable that that problem will no longer be an issue in the future. 'Course, a lot of people believe Moore's law canot continue to hold indefinitely, not to mention the fact that we don't even know how to organize even the little amount of processing power we're able to work with today. Kurzweil's book is an easy read and interedting, regardless of whether or not you agree with him. I love thinking about this kind of stuff, too. I'm even trying to get a degree in it, although hell if I know what I'll do if I ever do manage to get that degree.
loophole
Ray Kurzweil

I haven't read the book yet but I've been meaning to for ages. It's in the to-read pile. I love the KurzweilAI site.

I wonder if it is just a question of processing power. That would be interesting and strange. There's a certain appeal to the idea.