Re:A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots ...
by mojuba on Sunday August 02, 2020 @07:13AM
(#24027875)
The barrel: no, you won't lose your self-awareness because you have a memory and a whole history of your self-aware moments before the barrel. However, staying in the barrel for long enough (say 30 years?) might affect your consciousness though I wouldn't recommend experimenting with it :)
The self-driving cars are interesting in this regard, but in terms of complexity of their model of the world they are still way behind that of the most primitive insects even, I think. This is due to their limited capability of discovering the world and learning about it. A car that can also sense surfaces and hear things might have a chance to build a more complex model. Add the ability to park and connect to a charging socket by itself and you get a very, very basic organism, possibly a bit self-aware, too.
But just because a self-driving car has a model of a macro-world (roads, buildings, other cars) doesn't make it any more self-aware than bacteria.
If someone puts me in a pitch dark barrel, and then carries the barrel to an unknown to me location will I cease to be conscious by that definition even if I'm kicking and screaming and yelling for help?
I'm working on self driving cars. They know very precisely where they are, and they know very accurately what is around them. (They even have a sense of where things will be!) Does that make them self-aware?