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SurviveThrive219 karma

How is a robot that senses its water level is low and goes down the hall to the kitchen to get a drink of water until satisfied different than a human that does the same thing?

Conceptually, don't both contain attention and an inner movie of their environment that they use to act on their own behalf to navigate their space to acquire resources to survive? Don't both have a feeling of thirst and satiation? Wouldn't this be machine consciousness?

SurviveThrive23 karma

Here's what I was getting at.

Conscious functioning is a machine function whether biological or mechanical to monitor and respond to environment variables to acquire resources and manage threats for self survival. The combination and variety of systems to sense, process, and respond determines complexity.

That's consciousness.

Attention we consider consciousness is just the strongest sensed signal that is being processed, but self conscious behavior is a system function to analyze and respond to data for self survival/thriving. A cell, collection of cells, ants in an ant colony, an amoeba, plant, animal or person or groups of people that exhibit self survival behaviors are simply performing the same function whether at the level of adult human attention or not. Attention is simply the majority of cortical columns performing the same task, while many other columns and bodily systems are also performing self survival functions, but just below the max signal level of attention.

This also explains dreams, OBTW. The correlated sensory inputs we've developed into self relevant models of the environment have excitation paths that are normally initiated from awake senses. But these models can also be excited during sleep and their propagation patterns from model to model follows similarly to awake patterns but not exactly since reality and continual sensory input are not updating the propagation.

SurviveThrive21 karma

Murray Gell-Mann's perspective on quantum entanglement would suggest that information doesn't travel faster than light since both particles retained their initial state from entanglement and the reading of the separated particles is just revealing their given state. What's your take?

SurviveThrive20 karma

So, yes, then this robot would qualify as having qualia/subjective experience or no?

What would be the difference between this robot's subjective experience and a person's, other than the level of complexity?