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Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by Animats on Sunday May 17, 2020 @09:07PM (#23217125)
Back in the 1980s, I had an exam question in Michael Genesereth's AI class at Stanford, "Does a rock have intensions". I answered "no". I forget whether that was considered correct.

This was back when AI had more philosophy and less number-crunching. And didn't do much. "Common sense" and "intension" came up a lot back then, but "consciousness", not so much. There hasn't been enough progress on common sense and intension since then. Common sense is being able to predict the consequences of actions, actual or potential, with enough accuracy to get something done without damage. That's a concrete problem, and one that current AI systems do not do well.

We don't know enough yet to address the "consciousness" issue.

Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by pcmaffey on Sunday May 17, 2020 @09:15PM (#23217182)
Rocks definitely have intensions. [1]

But whether or not rocks have intentions, I think the correct answer is "we don't know."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intension

Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious by enoreyes on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:14AM (#23218264)
obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/505/