X-Message-Number: 14776
Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 22:49:02 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Zombies; things in two places at once

Bob Ettinger, #14764, offers a reply to my posting (#14757) that seems
reasonable in many places, and I do not feel a particular need to respond,
but I did want to reply to one position he takes: 

>Mike also reiterates his position that sentience may be a quantitative 
>function of goal-seeking behavior, and even simple mechanisms may have it in 
>some degree, and he implies that therefore perhaps we already understand it 
>to some extent.
>
>I strongly disagree here. I can't say whether insects or microbes have a 
>degree of sentience; possibly they do. But to say (for example) that Grey 
>Walter's tortoises (little automatons that look for electrical outlets to 
>plug themselves into) have sentience is going much too far. The extreme in 
>this direction is the position--actually taken by some--that even a 
>thermostat has a degree of feeling. ("It's too cold in here" or "It's too hot 
>in here.")  Again, this position, it seems to me, is equivalent to just 
>waving your hands in the air and saying "feeling emerges" --somehow-- 
>whenever the system displays behavior patterns similar to those of systems 
>known to be sentient. As Donaldson has pointed out, you might as well say 
>that a movie of a person, or of Donald Duck for that matter, is sentient. 
>(Yes, such movies can be made interactive too.)
>
Can a thermostat have nonzero sentience? If we take the sentience level of a
human as 1, should we rate a thermostat at, for example, 10^-20 rather than
absolute, exact, zero? What about more advanced artificial systems like Sony
Corp's new toy, robot dog Aibo? In some interesting ways it behaves like a
real dog. Is its sentience, again, absolute, exact zero, so that its
behavior is purely unconscious imitation, or does it reasonably have a
degree of sentience, albeit far less than the real dog it imitates? I would
vote for real sentience here, and thus, that again, we do understand
sentience to a degree, and it is not fundamentally mysterious. Much of this,
I'll admit, is just hunches, plus a certain desire to be able to be nice to
a creature (or creation) that seems to be able to respond accordingly. But I
really don't see any evidence of a mysterious "sentience circuit"--if that's
what you would call it, that is found in some animals with brains but never
to the remotest degree in any artificial system we have yet built. Maybe
we'll find it--but again it seems unlikely.

To Dave Pizer, who in #14765 says "No *one* thing can be in two
places at the exact same time in this universe that I know of yet"--I
answer, not so, as physicists are now learning. A particle *can* in effect
be in two places at once. Quantum weirdness. Unfortunately it's late and I
will have to break this off now--more later if you are interested.

Mike Perry

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