I have been reading Homo Deus by Yuval N. Harari, and when I came across chapter 3, I found myself really fascinated with all the stuff about consciousness and origin of emotions.
I had some ideas come to my head about computers being conscious. So, I want to try to develop those ideas with this draft.
What is Consciousness?
With respect to sentient beings, we think of being conscious to be associated with the ability to think, have memories and feelings. There are numerous additional criteria that can be associated with this as well, but for simplicity sake, let’s just go with these three:
- Ability to think and be creative
- Ability to form memories
- Ability to feel emotions and desires
How do computers compare?
With the advent of the age of AI, a question that is regularly brought up is that will computers ever be completely sentient as humans as today? Right now, I would say that computers already have attained partial consciousness.
Ability to think
We know for sure that computers can perform operations on a set of data. And this is what conscious beings do when they think! Thinking is just the process of manipulating data in such a way that we can come onto new conclusions from previously derived ones. This is what we can define creativity as, too.
Creativity is the phenomenon, thinking is the process.
So it would not be false to say that computers are technically already able to think and be creative as we see in today’s image generation tools that can use information from all over the web and manipulate it in such a way that, they are able to generate completely new and creative results.
Ability to form memories
There is no debate that computers have the ability to store memories. We just discussed that they are able to reach onto new results by creatively using previously derived ideas.
So, if a computer is able to store the new result in such a way that it is able to use it in a further computation, that is a memory. And that will in no way be different to human memories. When we try to think of something new, we look for something similar in our memory and remix it to create something novel.
Ability to feel emotions and desires
This is the area where computers start losing the race for consciousness. We don’t know if machines are capable of feeling emotions or desires on their own accord if not programmed to do so.
But it is certain that language models will be able to at least imitate human emotions in such a way that is in distinguishable to a real human certainly able to to ace the Turing test
How do I know if a computer is actually conscious?
The Turing test is a very popular way to actually test if a machine can actually imitate a human being in all of its responses. But it only ensured complete imitation and not the intrinsic feeling of emotion.
But what exactly is the intrinsic feeling of emotion? Is there any way we can confirm or measure this?
The solipsism problem, poses an interesting question that how can we know that anyone is actually conscious? What if everyone around is just pretending to be conscious like a computer? If we are not able to distinguish this intrinsic feeling from imitation then does this intrinsic feeling even exist?
No one is actually conscious
Imagine an infant with no concept of any kind in its mind. What are the emotions that this baby can experience? We can say just basic mammalian emotions that every animal feels. The other concepts of complex emotion are built on top of these basic mammalian instincts and are shaped by society into the mind of the infant. So here are the two types of emotions
- Primate emotions (irrespective of society)
- Complex emotions (shaped by society)
We can understand that complex emotions evolve from the society that raises a person, but from where do these primate emotions come from?
Well, these primate emotions must arise from the genetic make-up that we all are programmed with. It is engrained in our DNA.So how is this different from a computer programmed to imitate emotions? Does this mean that everyone is playing an imitation game of emotions?
Now imagine a computer that can successfully imitate primate as well as complex emotions. What if we somehow enable it let those emotions evolve? Just like we can build complex emotions on top of simple primate emotions, no one can imagine what AI can build on top of these already complex emotions.
