
Making Robots Conscious of Their Mental State (2002) - musha68k
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/consciousness/consciousness.html
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smithkl42
Hate to disappoint these folks, but data structures that represent some
internal state is not consciousness. I'll be the first to admit that I don't
know exactly what consciousness is, but that's not it.

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deepnet
Consciousness covers wide ground.

Internal state is a necessary part of the machinery of consciousness, it one
of the things one is conscious of.

McCarthy breaks consciousness down to some specifics which would be useful to
robots and can be said to be useful partial descriptions of consciouness.

The totality of consciousness in ourselves seems greater by some indefinable
essentialism - this is not the part of consciousness McCarthy is interested in
for robotics.

After all the article title clearly states this is about 'their' (the robots)
mental state not 'ours'.

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talles
If McCarthy would have called it "Artificial Consciousness" (as the A in AI)
the philosophers wouldn't bother with his work.

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EGreg
How can we ever figure out whether a computer experiences things remotely the
way we do? Especially when we know how it works?

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FranOntanaya
I would collect huge amounts of statistical data from humans during self-
awareness tasks -- and I mean everything, from reaction times to how often
they pick their nose. Find the patterns, do the same with the computer where
possible, compare. Eventually we'd catch the difference between self-awareness
running bare-carbon and running at a higher "I'll do this because I learned it
makes me get away as human" simulation context.

~~~
EGreg
No dice. Simulation isn't the same as a subjective experience. The Turing test
is about fooling an outside observer.

