Connectionists: Weird beliefs about consciousness

[Iam Palatnik]

A somewhat related question, just out of curiosity.

Imagine the following:

- An automatic solar panel that tracks the position of the sun.
- A group of single celled microbes with phototaxis that follow the
sunlight.
- A jellyfish (animal without a brain) that follows/avoids the sunlight.
- A cockroach (animal with a brain) that avoids the sunlight.
- A drone with onboard AI that flies to regions of more intense sunlight to
recharge its batteries.
- A human that dislikes sunlight and actively avoids it.

Can any of these, beside the human, be said to be aware or conscious of the
sunlight, and why?
What is most relevant? Being a biological life form, having a brain, being
able to make decisions based on the environment? Being taxonomically close
to humans?







On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 12:06 PM Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu> wrote:

> Also true: Many AI researchers are very unclear about what consciousness
> is and also very sure that ELIZA doesn’t have it.
>
> Neither ELIZA nor GPT-3 have
> - anything remotely related to embodiment
> - any capacity to reflect upon themselves
>
> Hypothesis: neither keyword matching nor tensor manipulation, even at
> scale, suffice in themselves to qualify for consciousness.
>
> - Gary
>
> > On Feb 14, 2022, at 00:24, Geoffrey Hinton <geoffrey.hinton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Many AI researchers are very unclear about what consciousness is and
> also very sure that GPT-3 doesn’t have it. It’s a strange combination.
> >
> >
>
>
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