Re:An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t h...
by to1y on Thursday January 16, 2020 @09:39PM
(#22071369)
>Don't worry, if it is conscious it will fight back and have a will of its own. It won't be hard to tell.
If life was a cartoon maybe.
Although i'm sure many people would argue if it believes its conscious we have no right to dispute, as we cannot know and even may be essentially the same.
Re:An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t h...
by retsibsi on Thursday January 16, 2020 @05:42PM
(#22069828)
Why are you confident about any of these things? Unless you're simply stipulating a definition, and not worrying too much about whether it corresponds to 'consciousness' in the sense most of us care about.
But we could quickly settle this question if we checked some things first: does it need anything (have necessities)? does it learn? can it act on its environment? Can it evolve? Is it part of a group or alone? If no, then it's probably not conscious.
All the conscious agents I know have one and the same ultimate goal - to exist and reproduce themselves. All their other goals are just subgoals.
By my definition a virus and AlphaGo which was trained as a population of interacting agents with a winner survives rule are both conscious of their environment, which is just a board for AG.