Making Robots Conscious of Their Mental State (2002)
www-formal.stanford.edu
www-formal.stanford.edu
Internal state is a necessary part of the machinery of consciousness, it one of the things one is conscious of.
McCarthy breaks consciousness down to some specifics which would be useful to robots and can be said to be useful partial descriptions of consciouness.
The totality of consciousness in ourselves seems greater by some indefinable essentialism - this is not the part of consciousness McCarthy is interested in for robotics.
After all the article title clearly states this is about 'their' (the robots) mental state not 'ours'.
The problem with saying things like that is that no one actually defines what consciousness is any objectively verifiable terms.
> However hard it may be to define, and however partial it may be, there's still something that makes it clear that I am I: cogito ergo sum; je pense donc je suis; I think therefore I am. I don't want to say that we'll never get there with computers, but so far, we don't even have the slightest idea how to make that happen.
No, that misses the real issue: the real issue is that we have no idea what that even means. We have an internal subjective experience that we describe as consciousness, and we assume other people do, too, because they look like us and act like us and it just makes it simpler to assume that underneath they are like us. But we don't have any way of determining that a thing is or is not conscious -- so not only do we have no knowledge of how to make something conscious, we have no knowledge of whether something is conscious, and no framework to develop knowledge about that, because we don't know what "conscious" means, outside of our own internal personal experience.
Prove it.
Susan Greenfield has a wonderfully challenging proposal for an implementation of consciousness. Paraphrasing from memory:
The entire functionality of consciousness is that, when the brain asks itself "Am I conscious?" the answer comes back "Yes". And it does nothing else.
She wrote a short book called 'Consciousness' about it, which I enjoyed. Such a refreshingly naughty idea.
Trying to prove that there are other consciousness other than yours is an utterly hard problem.
Trying to prove to yourself that you are conscious is non-sense. If you are trying to prove something "to yourself" you already assumed that there's an "yourself". Welcome to the rabbit hole.
The "part" of consciousness, so to speak, that most troubles modern philosophers and neurologists and the like is the subjective experience that each of us has. My favorite example of how we know we experience subjectivity is the classic "inverted spectrum" puzzle: What if what I see when I look at a red apple is the same as what you see when you look at a green apple? What if the way I experience blue and yellow is opposite from the way you do, so that if my mind was somehow "swapped" with yours the sky and the ocean would appear yellow and canaries and cheddar cheese would look blue? Is there any way to know?
Regardless of your answers to the above questions, the very fact that we can ask that question intelligibly demonstrates that we intuitively understand that I experience the world subjectively and so do you. A common conclusion of the puzzle is the idea that we can't ever know what another person's experience of color is because of course we aren't them; put another way, our experiences are inherently subjective. It's true that the light waves that our brains interpret as color objectively behave a certain way, but the actual colors that we see are the conscious experience of our brain's interpretation of the light waves.
"Yes."
"What are the nature of those subjective experiences?"
(crickets)
It works pretty well. And it's hard to refute without appealing to 'I just know'.
The thing is, we can see that our INTERNAL SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE is unlike any other thing we encounter in the world. It is unlike any process that we build or discover. For example, why am I in my body and not yours? As a software architect, I can recognize when there are arbitary constants being placed in the code. Likewise here, the distribution of "souls" to "bodies"... the phenomenon of internal experience corresponds exactly to my body, and not to someone else's. And since it is internal, I need to describe it from my point of view as "I", and not as something that is generated externally. It is the only thing I cannot view externally. So it is different from everything else.
The simplest explanation that doesn't appeal to magic is that the 'I' is created by the activity of the CNS (etc) of a body.
That seems completely satisfactory to me. It's like asking why the engine sounds of my car are in my car and not in your car.
A related answer is "because that's where your eyeballs are". If you wear a good VR headset, you can be somewhere other than your body for a while.
I don't attempt to present her argument, just the proposal. The book is interesting.
"There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are 'immediate certainties'; for instance, 'I think,' or as the superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, 'I will'; as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and simply as 'the thing in itself,' without any falsification taking place either on the part of the subject or the object. I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that 'immediate certainty,' as well as 'absolute knowledge' and the 'thing in itself,' involve a CONTRADICTIO IN ADJECTO; we really ought to free ourselves from the misleading significance of words! The people on their part may think that cognition is knowing all about things, but the philosopher must say to himself: 'When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking--that I KNOW what thinking is. For if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, the assertion 'I think,' assumes that I COMPARE my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further 'knowledge,' it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me.'--In place of the 'immediate certainty' in which the people may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus finds a series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions of the intellect, to wit: 'Whence did I get the notion of 'thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 'ego,' and even of an 'ego' as cause, and finally of an 'ego' as cause of thought?' He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of INTUITIVE perception, like the person who says, 'I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain'--will encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in a philosopher nowadays. 'Sir,' the philosopher will perhaps give him to understand, 'it is improbable that you are not mistaken, but why should it be the truth?'"
~ Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
P.S. I'm quoting Nietzsche because he pretty much condenses every objection I've ever heard about the cogito, which isn't as much of an unassailable argument as Descartes thought.
The question, on the other hand, is what does it mean to exist. Philosophers are obsessed with this question, epistemology.
Think about it... If I told you that an entire universe exists that you can never perceive or discover through any observations of the one you live in, in what sense does it exist vs not exist? If I replace the word exist With some made up word, will the sentence have any less meaning? It follows from this that existence seems to be defined in terms of perception of conscious observers. And in fact, consciousness and existence are inextricably linked. Philosophers cannot talk of existence without implying consciousness.
And the question begins anew -- what is the nature of this perspective from this world, from my body?