Level of Consciousness
S. C. Tindall
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that basing the value of intelligent agents on 'life' leads to a dead end and proposes 'consciousness' instead, offering a life-independent definition of 'consciousness' and components for measuring a 'level of consciousness'. The author contends that biology classifies living entities rather than ranking their value, and that the observed set of living things is incomplete and environment-dependent, complicating comparisons between artificial and living intelligence. |
Abstract
It is argued that a false value assertion is made by referring tòLife' as valuable. `Consciousness' is proposed instead. A `Life' independent deenition of`conscious-ness' is given and the components for a measure of thèlevel of consciousness' are introduced. A brief discussion follows on some ethical problems that arise. Prologue Mankind has based many of its values and judgments on some previously made choices. Unfortunately following the conventional path which starts fromìife' as the core concept leads the discussions of thèvalue of an intelligent agent' to a dead-end. The growing existence of artiicial intelligent agents and their progress potential emerges the issue of the need for a generally applicablèevaluation criteria of an intelligence'. The idea up to this time was to approach the problem by translating the features of the intelligent agent by some similarity transformations to the domain of`properties of living entities'. Since the ordering among the living agents, is fairly well established (or assumed to be so) it is easy to proceed to some conclusion. This method can be criticised on the following aspects: `Properties of living entities' is a multidimensional feature space. The scientiic discipline that governs this subject area is Biology. But, it is a fact that biology pays an equal interest in all those features and seeks a classiication and taxonomy of the vast number of species rather than evaluating them as more/less valuable. The observed spectrum of living entities is surely not exhaustive. It is heavily environment dependent and it is admitted that under diierent conditions other life styles may (have) develope(d). So, the set the comparison is referring to, is incomplete. The conjunction of the properties that deene a living entity is restrictive. It is hard to talk about a `living entity' which does not`multiply', or a bug (a bug surely does not rank very high in the spectrum) without a `survival instinct'. Hence it will be diicult to nd a `living' counter part of an artifact that isìntelligent' and has nòsurvival instinct'.