From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Dec 17 1999 - 12:06:08 MST
orojas@data.net.mx (Octavio Rojas Diaz) writes:
> I'm very curious on how would the opinion and outlook of a being heaps more
> intelligent and capable than us would be affected by an altered consciousness
> state, would it be a detrimental, positive or neutral experience?
It all hinges on what kind of mental architecture it has. As you point
out, subconscious factors and internal conflicts may be relevant
issues, even if I think they are merely the human reflections of more
general properties of many minds (the inability of 1-1 self knowledge,
efficiency increase through data hiding, that sufficiently large
mental systems must deal with many opposed goals and so on). There are
likely many forms of altered mental function beyond just altered
consciousness - what about altered aesthetic states, altered value
states or viewing oneself from a meta level?
> I also wonder how would an AI would induce itself such an state? maybe by
> altering it's patterns and modules so they behave in a different way, maybe by
> lowering or raising the voltage of itself so it's circuits would behave in a
> different way, those are my theories anybody would suggest a new one?
It seems unlikely that AIs would be tightly bound to their hardware so
that voltage would have any cognitive effects; all changes will be
software of one kind or another. In a neural network simulation it is
easy to simulate effects of substances by changing membrane potential
or ion channel permeabilities, in a more classic AI there are likely
plenty of parameters that can be changed too.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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