Do Robots Deserve Rights? What If Machines Become Conscious?
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I seem to intuitively think of machines as "bottom-up" constructs consisting only of smaller parts, whereas I view creatures as "top-down," that is to say that I consider the whole as the only significant part. I have a lot of preconceptions on this matter. Maybe it's because I know that all machines are deliberately constructed, whereas biological organisms develop organically.
To me, the ship of Theseus is a machine, which renders Theseus' paradox moot and purely semantical in the canonical thought experiment. But when Theseus' paradox is applied in the context of, say, brain cell replacement, I find it much more challenging and risky (and I'm afraid of the potential loss of life).
Expressed in a more useful way: is there something that makes our consciousness different from a deterministic, systematic logical process? Is that all we are?
I'm conflicted about this, the main reason being that as the creators of AI, we start with a nearly full and certain understanding of it and all of its possibilities. The same cannot truly be said for humans, since the study of humanity, consciousness and the brain happens from the other side: we start with nothing, and must experiment on the black box that is the brain in order to understand it.