🚀 go-pugleaf

> Existence (being or am-ness) precedes awareness which precedes
> thinking. Physical and chemical reactions have a lot of am-ness
> and no identifiable awareness or thinking. Even simple organisms
> show reaction to environmental events, which could be considered
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> as awareness. 

>      --> If this is so consider :  A liquid boils on heating. We can say
> the liquid reacts to its surroundings.Does this mean the liquid has
> awareness? The problem is awareness cannot be measured thru physical
> activity or inactivity. Neither can "one" awareness realise another.
> This is to say one can never be 100% sure whether another physical
> object has awareness or not. We can only speculate about it. <--

> More complicated animals have definite self-awareness
> (if they did not they could not communicate territorial messages).

>          --> I don't think this is because of  awareness. It could be
> due to the instinct of survival. Imagine a computer with a program
> running. Suppose this program is such that it kills anyother program
> which is running in a computer beside this computer. Can we say this
> "killer" program has "awareness"?  <--

> Thinking can be broken into two catagories: a) symbolic which can be
> transferred into other computational systems b) semantic which cannot
> be transferred into systems that are unaware.

> As food for thought in support of my last statement, think about the easy
> paradox 'the next statement is TRUE; the last statement is FALSE'. This
> paradox is nonsense to unaware systems (i.e. no self-awareness). 
> To an aware system (such as you!) this paradox provides a clue that 
> symbolic reality (your thoughts) and physical reality (your existence)
> are not identical.

> When we communicate about human semantic events (e.g. being in love)
> we construct symbolic messages about events that are meaningless at a
> purely symbolic level yet convey important information to another
> person who has experienced similar events.

> Purely symbolic systems can perform phenomenal feats. Yet they don't
> even have the simpliest instinct for self-preservation. Would you 
> rather trust your life (paycheck, wife, children, etc.) to systems
> that cannot relate to your desire for a happy continued existence, or
> to your fellow man who might share some of your same ideals.

> While it's wonderful to explore the limits of symbolic computation,
> unless we are willing to discuss building self-aware systems the term 
> artificial intelligence will reamin a misnomer.

> Robert Lindsay (uunet!amsctg!root)

> My own opinions! - not that of my employer!

>       --> The problem is , even if ,by some freaky chance, we built a
> system that is aware of itself we won't know about it. THis is so
> because we don't yet have a test for "awareness" like Turing's test.
> First of all, we don't even have a test to tell whether our fellow human
> beings are aware of themselves are not, apart from reasoning that since
> they look like us and behave somewhat like us they have awareness.
> But,if this reasoning is accepted , then the Turing's test itself is a
> test for awareness of artificial systems. <--

         S.Narasimhan
          sn13+@andrew.cmu.edu