WildcatSun, Oct 26, 2008 Shandora: "I Iike much the manner in which you describe the triangle: intelligence - consciousness – awareness - Entangled. As you say the tension between those concepts brings about an unstoppable drive, which brought us thus far. Let me ask the following: If, as you suggest, there potentially can emerge conscious phenomena without the aspect of self awareness, will it still have any drive to expand or self-iterate (like the human race is continuously doing)? "
What you point to here is one of the most difficult conceptualizations there exists; The tension I referred to, between intelligence, consciousness and awareness is a by-product, an emergent property really, of evolution and not an inherent trait of sentiency (sentiency in this case can be argued to stand for intelligence in action, being able to appropriate resources and influence the ecology that gave it birth). I would argue that sentiency when appropriately inhabiting a substratum of whatever kind (bio/sili/nano/morpho-energetic/etc..) reaches a state of total ambientation (ecological harmony) – maybe autopoeisis. Ok, so now I have coined a new term (you should have realized by now that I am addicted to coining new words..;-) ambientation, and using this new term I shall now try and define consciousness again: Consciousness- a cluster of universal interests manifested in a particular form of ambientation. If and when said cluster, undergoes an emergence of reflectivity, it can be said to be self aware (i.e. knows that it is, or knows that it knows that it is), if and when it becomes self-aware, it’s on going drive to self expand converges asymptotically, to infinity. In this case it will never reach Nirvana but forever after will strive to approximate a state of existence that is universally equivalent to itself (which we need remember it will never reach). If however such an emergence does not happen, but ambientation does occur, the system in question, in our case an AI ,can be said to be conscious but not self aware, in this case its striving will be to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis, its drive to expand will then be limited by the power of its intelligence and its distribution; actually that may very well be the point where an AI becomes a Polytopian instance... nice (needs more thinking) .
Shandora: "I Iike much the manner in which you describe the triangle: intelligence - consciousness – awareness - Entangled. As you say the tension between those concepts brings about an unstoppable drive, which brought us thus far. Let me ask the following: If, as you suggest, there potentially can emerge conscious phenomena without the aspect of self awareness, will it still have any drive to expand or self-iterate (like the human race is continuously doing)? "
What you point to here is one of the most difficult conceptualizations there exists; The tension I referred to, between intelligence, consciousness and awareness is a by-product, an emergent property really, of evolution and not an inherent trait of sentiency (sentiency in this case can be argued to stand for intelligence in action, being able to appropriate resources and influence the ecology that gave it birth). I would argue that sentiency when appropriately inhabiting a substratum of whatever kind (bio/sili/nano/morpho-energetic/etc..) reaches a state of total ambientation (ecological harmony) – maybe autopoeisis. Ok, so now I have coined a new term (you should have realized by now that I am addicted to coining new words..;-) ambientation, and using this new term I shall now try and define consciousness again: Consciousness- a cluster of universal interests manifested in a particular form of ambientation. If and when said cluster, undergoes an emergence of reflectivity, it can be said to be self aware (i.e. knows that it is, or knows that it knows that it is), if and when it becomes self-aware, it’s on going drive to self expand converges asymptotically, to infinity. In this case it will never reach Nirvana but forever after will strive to approximate a state of existence that is universally equivalent to itself (which we need remember it will never reach). If however such an emergence does not happen, but ambientation does occur, the system in question, in our case an AI ,can be said to be conscious but not self aware, in this case its striving will be to reach an equilibrium or homeostasis, its drive to expand will then be limited by the power of its intelligence and its distribution; actually that may very well be the point where an AI becomes a Polytopian instance... nice (needs more thinking) .