Summary:
On one side the mathematician Roger Penrose. On the other side the philosopher Emanuele Severino. A double lesson by two masters of thought to understand future scenarios: philosophical, but also practical.Some A.I. scientists believe that one day machines will have consciousness, but Roger Penrose said that would never happen as a machine, no matter how bright it was, would never be aware.A computer can take in data and give out information or new data. It can record light, heat, colour, and can detect taste. It could become so sophisticated that it might even look a human and have thoughts, ideas, emotions, be emphatic, but it would still not be conscious, says Roger Penrose. It would be just inputting data and implementing actions but be completely unaware of what it is doing. It would
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On one side the mathematician Roger Penrose. On the other side the philosopher Emanuele Severino. A double lesson by two masters of thought to understand future scenarios: philosophical, but also practical.Some A.I. scientists believe that one day machines will have consciousness, but Roger Penrose said that would never happen as a machine, no matter how bright it was, would never be aware.
A computer can take in data and give out information or new data. It can record light, heat, colour, and can detect taste. It could become so sophisticated that it might even look a human and have thoughts, ideas, emotions, be emphatic, but it would still not be conscious, says Roger Penrose. It would be just inputting data and implementing actions but be completely unaware of what it is doing. It would not be alive.
Roger Penrose had fierce debates with proponents of AI about this and I think he was right. And since reading Tim's article on -
Tam Hunt — Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate?
- I think Roger Penrose is even more right. Consciousness is written into the fabric of our universe and the simplest of creatures didn't suddenly reach a point in evolution where they became consciousness, but they were accumulating more consciousness all the time as they evolved.
Now we might be able to build a machine that is far more intelligent than an ant, but the ant would be conscious and the machine would be just a machine. Roger Penrose describes it like this, imagine you have a man in a room and you put slips of paper through a letter box with binary written code on and he reads the code and then pushes the right buttons or levers to initiate action, but the man has no idea what the code means or what his actions are actually doing. Now replace the man with a robot and it is now a pure machine without any consciousness at all. It doesn't matter how intelligent or sophisticated you make the machine, or even a humanoid, it will not have consciousness. And if Tam Hunt is right, and I think he is into something, we now know why.
As an aside it interesting how in Blade Runner the humanoids were so lifelike and sophisticated that occasionally some of them would become conscious after which they would be considered dangerous as they wanted to free, rather than be slaves, but they were much stronger and intelligent than most people. So they would escape and Harrison Ford was paid to hunt them down and kill them.
The humanoids developed simple emotions, and even love and affection, and you see them awkwardly trying to kiss. Harrison Ford tracked one of them down and almost killed him many times over but in the end the humanoid won, and although badly wounded, he held Harrison Ford from the top a building to drop him to the ground, but he had developed compassion, and so spared his life. To me that was an awesome scene. Turn the other cheek! The humanoids was more sophisticated and advanced than the human.
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