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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:
Why do you connect consciousness and not killing? Not killing all humans is fairly new concept for us and we always knew they were conscious.
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…
And there are good argumnts suggesting that there'll never be such definition (summary: consciousness is inherently subjective).
There's nothing sacred about machine learning, machine vision & feedback loops, assembled into robots. This is what we are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of us commit hideous crimes on humans, too (North Korea, I'm looking at you,) so it may not be their only criticism of us. I do agree though, and this is why I've been a vegetarian for 10 years now.
What about the U.S.? Just because people are disconnected from the actions of their military doesn't mean they're not responsible
People who have power over the actions taken are responsible, pretty much the person itself and also the higher chain of command for the said person who commits whatever act to be held responsible for.
I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more…
I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more…
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#5
At this stage of our knowledge saying "computation X will be conscious" is just a statement of belief or a simple definition as there is no consciouness-meter that I can use to test it. Such statements are unfalsifiable.
I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful. One that can be just as easily applied to a recording device, modulo the explicit mention of neurons. 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…
There might never be a philosophically satisfactory definition of consciousness. Our subjective experience that we call consciousness might be an amalgamate of very different things happening at the brain level and a single definition might just not do. Meanwhile the operational definitions like the ones I mentioned allow us to make useful predictions and draw conclusions, for example that the brain activity that happens when we experience states most people would describe as consciousness also happens in certain animals. It is not perfect philosophically, but again, you could also have a long philosophical debate about what gravity is and you would never go anywhere scientifically - that's precisely what people did before the scientific revolution.