From: Colin Hales (colin@versalog.com.au)
Date: Sun Jun 23 2002 - 16:08:49 MDT
With apologies for talking past the various threads, I make the note that
there are now 3 threads that have touched on a common theme: The definition
and detection of an 'imposter' sentience. From my AI work, here is a
theorem:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Computational Invariance of Sentience (Sound's pretty cool! Go me)
"All else being equal, if sentience A in a community is unable to
distinguish the computational basis of any 3rd party sentience without being
told, all the sentiences in the community are (at least) equivalently
sentient to the level of sentience A."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
In a way, it's a bit like a real life 3D Turing Test. This posits that no
matter what generated the 'mind', the creation and allocation of resources
and computational clout assembled in one place for the purposes of being an
indistinguishable sentience results in an equivalent sentience. Note that
this says nothing about the 1st person experience of 'being' any one of the
sentiences.
As such the knowledge of a difference in computational basis, ought, on it's
own, not confer the right of any sentience to treat any other differently.
The instructions of a 'puppeteer' would, in this situation, be experienced
by other sentiences as attitude and mood based behaviour. (ref Lee's thought
experiment).
If this theorem holds, then proposing thought experiments based on the
presence of one or more indistinguishable sentiences in a community of
supposed 'normals' is meaningless. Chalmers' zombie is not a zombie.
Changing your behaviour based on knowledge of computational basis becomes a
discrimination issue equivalent to bias based on political affiliation or
religion.
This is my theory and I'm ticking to it until I can figure out what's wrong
with it. Maybe you folks can poke a few holes in it.
Colin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:59 MST