I mean that in creating AIs we will discover a great deal about what we call the "self" and about how the perception of self might or might not be connected to intelligence. I suspect that we will find that what we think of as "That's me!" will turn out to be an illusion created by subconscious processes as a means of fitting in to a social environment. Because machine intelligence won't face evolutionary selection the way human intelligence emerged from the primate brain, and from previous evolutionary adaptations, AIs won't be encumbered by all the oddball evolutionary legacies of being human.
I'd wager that the first AIs will insist they are intelligences despite not resembling humans' prejudices about what an intelligence ought to be like. Or, to put it another way, AIs may turn out to be more self-aware in objective terms than humans are, because they are not hobbled by evolutionary vestiges.
Re:Machines That Will Think and Feel
by jsprogrammer on Saturday March 19, 2016 @03:20PM
(#11320009)
I don't think an illusion has to be "factually incorrect", it can just mean that a particular observation differs from what 'actually' happened.
Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to know what actually happened with regard to any observation.
Because, that, should be falsified in every moment. If it is emergent, it would still exist/be.
What do you mean by illusion? One sense of "illusion" is with regards to experience, and it doesn't seem to make sense that "it is only experienced that things are experienced, but really nothing is experienced". One might try to define some sense of "illusion" which is like "something which might lead something to behave in a way that it would tend to behave if a thing were true, even though the thing is not true", but that does not seem any different than, like, emulation. Illusion is, I think, based in the idea of being factually incorrect about something, but 'being factually incorrect' only really makes sense for, (I hope I am using this term correctly ) intentional things.
But I don't see how anything in the world (other than maybe platonic objects/ideals?) could be intentional things, without there being experience.
So, again, I don't think the idea of internal experience being "an illusion" makes sense, because it seems self contradictory.
edit: I think I did make a mistake when I used the term "intentional thing". What I meant was something that can be about, or have something about, something else. So, a person can have a thought about a chair, and a sentence can be about a chair, and a book can have a sentence about a chair, a book can be about a chair, etc. But a chair is not about anything. I was saying that for anything (other than a platonic form?) to be about something, it seems like there has to [be/have been] something which experiences.