They are still quite primitive. I can certainly that a car, after going through a construction zone for a day or two, could learn the zone, and slow down before it and not be surprised. Ditto for times and places where you can expect to have to stop for a traffic jam. It would be more responsive than starting fresh each trip.
Practically speaking it is easier for us to keep track of what we are doing if we put the learning in a table instead of in the code. But the situations are basically equivalent.
The computational paradigm isn’t important either for thinking about this - for implementing it, yes. And except in the most trivial of cases self-modifying code does imply new code.
I actually do this in a sense. I need to fetch data from a remote site, and only the new data. What I do is to create an expect script containing the sftp commands required to fetch the files that are new from the last time I ran, and then execute that script to sftp the files. It is a trivial example, but the ability to change this code is crucial. It is an obvious solution to an old compiler writer.
So I’m having a conversation with my daughter about our cat an consciousness. Both of us feel pretty certain that she has it just based on her perceptiveness. She also has some sense of future because she somehow calculates exactly how much effort it will take to get up in the ledge without going over the other side. She also has some sense of past, even if it is just operant conditioning, because she remembers where the food is hidden and meows for it. But it got me to thinking; is temporal awareness (that which we call time) an exclusively human construct? I know that animals can’t tell time on a circular clock the way we do ( I also know many youngsters who can’t as well), but I also believe time is a mental construct that groups of humans have agreed upon. 2 o’clock has no meaning outside of humans. It does not exist outside of our frame of reference. Things happen. Planets revolve around suns. Planets rotate on their axis. These things are real, but we define them and give them names and measurable quantities. Perhaps an awareness of time, including time that predates or comes after our individual existence is a component of consciousness as well.
But, Aunt Hillary has/is an “I” of her own, distinct from those if any of her composite ants; the Internet – at its present stage of development – has not.
Once upon a time I read a fascinating hypothesis that early humans were capable of communication with one another but did not “think”. Rather, they “heard” a godlike voice in their head telling them what to do. The beginning of consciousness was the de-personification of this voice and accepting it as one’s own intentions.
I don’t claim this as being authoritative, I just found it a very interesting concept.
This is almost certainly the Julian Jaynes “Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” idea. (The link is to the Julian Jaynes Society, which might not be objective, but which presents the idea in its most attractive form.)
A lot of people don’t agree with the idea. (Many of us think it’s utter bunk.) But it definitely is interesting, and has spurred significant debate, discussion, and awareness.
Sometimes, even bad philosophy is good to have around!
ETA: have I mentioned how much I like your login name? Very cool! It’d be nifty to serve aboard that ship!
Malthus: Dunno. I’ve never read the book, and don’t intend to.
However! Breaking news! Latest issue of Scientific American reports experiments that suggest that birds are “conscious” – or, specifically, aware of their own thinking. I can’t really give it in proper detail – and I don’t completely get it myself – but scientists did some experiments with Western Scrub Jays, putting good in containers where the Jays could watch, and then noting how the Jays acted on the knowledge. (There’s much more to it than this…)
Yes, it strikes a lot of people as bunk—I’m currently reading The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach by Christof Koch, and the footnote in which he discusses Jaynes’ work basically ends with “…but obviously, his basic idea is completely wrong.” Still, the idea has a certain flavour of ‘it would have been cool if’ about it, which I think is why it continues to find some resonance.
No, no, it is the bowl of petunias. Watch for the bowl of petunias, if you can catch them, you might be able to find out what the “Oh no, not again.” was all about.
After that, you should start looking for the question.
I often feel like inanimate objects almost seem to have a consciousness, like mountains for instance. Maybe presence more like. I know this is impossible, but sometimes I get the sense that they just watch us silly humans rushing about, pretending to be important, while they just sit back thinking, yup, seen that before. Sort of like the way George Carlin said the earth would just shake us off like a bad case of the fleas.
It seems whenever we talk about consciousness, the focus is on self-awareness. Perhaps because in everyday parlance “conscious” just means an alert state, not asleep.
But that’s one of the relatively “easy” problems. The far more intractable issues with consciousness are things like how we experience qualia such as pain and conscious identity (see the many threads on the star trek transporter hypothetical for what is meant by the latter).
And the simple answer to the OP is there isn’t a good model for these things yet. We don’t know.
Well… Is a sunflower “alert?” It has senses that can cause it to react to stimulus…
What I think we’d like to do is to establish end-points, boundaries beyond which we can say, “Okay, over here, we’re all agreed.” No one holds that rocks are conscious, and pretty much all of us (I hope!) are agreed that the typical, standard, blue-stripe generic human being is conscious.
Then we can practice Platonic reductionism, taking away faculties one at a time, until we have moved our (unfortunate) test subject from one end-point to the other.
Part of the difficulty perhaps is that we can never escape our own consciousness to experience life from outside of ourselves. The best we can do is extrapolate and assume that other people’s conscious is more or less like ours. That however may be mistaken assumption, since our environment also shapes our consciousness. Hence, if I was born Galway around the world in a state of war, what I would be aware of is that war is a normal state of affairs. I’m not sure how truly conscious any if us ever becomes until we emerge from our cocoons.
Exactly. So often when we have this debate everyone just discusses responses to stimuli, which is a Behaviourist’s dream (if that’s not a contradiction in terms…).
But the elephant in the room is really the phenomenon we’re supposed to be discussing.
I think this won’t go so well either, as there’s not great certainty even here.
Are there any human p-zombies? I don’t know, I act as though the answer is no for various practical reasons.
Do all animals with a nervous system feel pain? I don’t know, I act as though they do for various moral reasons.
And so on. So yeah, at the far extremes we can draw lines; I’m confident a single neuron is not conscious, for example. But they are pretty much the only situations we can draw such lines.
