Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!midway!midway!stephen From: stephen@pesto.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Conciousness Message-ID: Date: 6 May 91 09:48:16 GMT References: <2124@seti.inria.fr> <11611@uwm.edu> <2133@seti.inria.fr> Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (NewsMistress) Organization: University of Chicago CILS Lines: 49 In-Reply-To: ziane@nuri.inria.fr's message of 2 May 91 10: 13:40 GMT May I suggest an angle? There are a number of different things going on here, all under the vague rubric of "pain". One of them is organic distress, like when you burn your hand. This is present in most multicelled animals (at least), and is interesting because on the one hand it is often thought of as the paradigm case for pain, and on the other it is clearly distinct: you can burn your hand and have your reflexes get it OUT of there before you "feel" a thing. A second kind of "pain" is emotional distress: when you're in an untenable psychological position of some kind. But you hear people say "he's dying inside, and doesn't even know it", and it seems to be reasonably common experience that one day you sit down and have a good cry all of a sudden, and _in retrospect_ you realise that something has been causing you great distress for some time, but it just never made it to the front of your mind. Aside from the timescale, this seems to be remarkably like the first case. But there *is* this conscious pain thing, the thing that can be dulled by anaesthetics, the thing that makes being in pain different from having been damaged, and the thing that can induce (or is associated with, at any rate) panic. I'd like to suggest (oh so tenatatively) that this is the subjective experience of having computational resources diverted from cognition to survival. That's doubly threatening, of course; firstly because we learn (or are wired) to associate it with real damage and lasting problems; and secondly because we (like early AIs will be) are ugly layered systems in which different components contend for cycles on an other-than-demand basis. That diversion of resources really does limit the higher-level "self", and may actually herald a catastrophic failure, as we become incapable of solving the greater problem occasioning the stress. If there's any truth to this, then, the all-too-familiar "NFS server estragon not responding" message is the one that, once an AI becomes aware of itself, will be the reflex twitch preceding the gasp of discomfort. The higher-level self is being actively threatened by the survival needs of the organism and its filesystem... and the panic: ***Oh, FUCK! Where am I going to swap NOW?***. Of course, then you remember about the disk on thyme... pick up the sentence more or less where you left off.... :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stephen p spackman Center for Information and Language Studies systems analyst University of Chicago ----------------------------------------------------------------------