Hey guys!
Just thought I'd strike up a bit of a theoretical topic here to help come up with inspiration for a little side project that I had been rolling around in my head.
This is something that I take time to sit and ponder from time to time. Real sci-fi type stuff. But then is it? Can a piece of software really think on it's own and obtain what other organic creatures are known to have; sentience?
You know in the way may scientist like to rationalize a problem or an issue to better understand it they like to flip things inside out. In doing so it gives you a different perspective to look at things and in doing so often gives you new ways to look at the issue.
Take for instance us. Our consciousness. Lets assume for a moment that it's not the digital world that is in question of sentience, but it is in fact us and ours that we are questioning. Pretty blasphemous isn't it? In fact many would simply balk at any such notion and say it's mere 'poppy-cock'. Ok maybe only the older of the crowd, save for maybe a few from the UK.
But if you haven't already thrown your Bible/Koran or whatever else you've got at me, give this one a spin; What if every memory, thought and anything you have learned is just a refactoring of a single altering state of electrical signals and neurons all buzzing around your warm squishy pink brain?
I mean look at software as we know it. A 'simple' set of commands ran through a central processor to execute functions across several different devices and co-processors. Each one getting stuffed with loads of data all made up from the blob of 1s and 0s we call data.
Now we made these things simple so that they could be digested a piece at a time and learned and studied and improved upon gradually and so on. Evolution is known to be a tad dirtier so we are not quite so simple as the computer you're sitting in front of readying this piece of heresy that you've loaded it into.
Now the idea that all it takes is to flip a switch and we're gone is not pretty to anyone. In fact it is natural and proper to cherish life as we do. At the same time I'm not saying that if we turn off our computers or uninstall the new copy of Gears or War we're mass murderers. Not at all. But it does give you a means to relate our own consciousness to that of an artificial one and give birth to a new form of relating how sentience can take new forms.
Look at dogs and cats. Are they as smart as us? No, but then they also see the world in different ways that we do. Their 5 senses are either grater or lower than ours. They have difference abilities as physical being as well. This attributes to their take on being conscious being too. They see their world from theirs eyes not ours so their perspective would be as skewed.
So what is a sentient being? We can take the dictionary term all we want, but truth is that this is still is a mystery to us. We have only theories and ideas so far. Truth is what we call sentient probably really is something else all together. In our struggle to simplify things and make them into smaller bits to process, we categorize and build a model to make sense of it all. It's a rational approach and it's all any intelligent being of our kind has to really learn about these things.
Who knows maybe one day we'll be beamed into a digital world of Tron or have a Matrix moment. But until that day I guess we're stuck just learning, dissecting, evolving...
Hope I've given you guys some insightful 1s and 0s to ponder yourself. Feel free to post your thoughts or comments. Or damnations. All are welcome!
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