Monday, June 14, 2021

Math can answer all your questions.
Exception: if you don't know what questions to ask, math can't help you.
Knowing what question to ask is what consciousness is for. 

Likewise, it's very possible to build an unconscious robot or raise a p-zombie which could carry out your decisions exactly the same way your evolution-designed body can. However, the robot's distribution of decisions would be wrong. It can make the decisions, but it can never figure out why to make them.
If someone attacks the robot, why would it defend itself? It doesn't want to be alive, nor does it want to be dead, the same way the number 8 isn't intrinsically orange. "Are circles left-handed or right-handed?" The question is wrong. The robot can defend itself or choose not to defend itself, such as when it's not under attack, but it can't tell the difference between being attacked and not being attacked, because for the robot there is no difference to notice. It can't make the right decision. Or rather, there is no such thing as a right decision for the robot, because it is indifferent to its own survival.
Insects are almost totally robotic and can't figure out why they're doing the things they do, and subsequently you can trap them in lethal behavioural loops. They will play with you until they die, because they don't and can't care.

2 comments:

BSRK Aditya said...

Personality's job is to tell the how to do something, Consciousness's job is to tell why one/we should do something.

Alrenous said...

For some reason it's possible for google blog's comment notification emails to get stuck in gmail's spam filter, and this happened to you. Luckily I have backup comment-noticing systems.