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Well, that's interesting, because there's no good scientific definition of consciousness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Neural_correlate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Defining_conscio...
There's nothing sacred about machine learning, machine vision & feedback loops, assembled into robots. This is what we are.
Edit:
Well, that's interesting, because there's no good scientific definition of consciousness.
There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful predictions and the definitions employed are only means to this end. In fact there are operational definitions of consciousness and I think they certainly deserve to be called "scientific", see for example: http…
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory
This is great news. Now that we've proven the animals are conscious, we can put more resources into communicating and reasoning with them, and convince them to stop maiming, killing and eating each other. Peace on Earth, maybe within our lifetimes! Edit:
There's nothing sacred about machine learning, machine vision & feedback loops, assembled into robots. This is what we are.
To a philistine the Mona Lisa is nothing but a bunch of pigments applied to a surface. That's what makes him a philistine, after all.
This is great news. Now that we've proven the animals are conscious, we can put more resources into communicating and reasoning with them, and convince them to stop maiming, killing and eating each other. Peace on Earth, maybe within our lifetimes! Edit:
Well, that's interesting, because there's no good scientific definition of consciousness.
There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful predictions and the definitions employed are only means to this end. In fact there are operational definitions of consciousness and I think they certainly deserve to be called "scientific", see for example: http…
It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider candidates for consciousness, other than to reaffirm our prejudices.
In other words, there's no such thing as a good scientific definition without the philosophical context. You can have as accurate an arbitrary measure as you like, but that doesn't imbue it equally arbitrarily with your desired meaning.