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Robot Demonstrates Self-awareness
shinyplasticbag writes "A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. ... The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
...I just can't stop looking at myself. I'm so damn sexy!"
Actually, robots with "emotions" (I use the term loosely) would be a rather beneficial thing, especially in the rescue/ safety field. If a robot could sense urgency in a person by examining their facial features, it would be able to better communicate their need for help to any rescuers. (A more advanced version of those miniature treaded bots used in earthquakes, in other words)
the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim.
Edsger Dijkstra
Now, before you dismiss it, he also said one of the great truths:
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Do the fields of AI or evolutionary psychology have any definitions of "self-awareness" or "consciousness"?
I see a lot of stuff in the popular press about a robot or computer becoming aware, but everyone seems to totally ignore what exactly the definition is. How do we know that most people are aware? If I say that I know that I am aware, what exact claim am I making?
I had a philosophy professor in college, Tom Kasulis, who studied Eastern and Western philosophy. He had a breakthrough moment when he went to study in a Zen Monastery. In order to enter, he had to do a 'pre-interview' with the abbot, a Zen Master. The master asked him, "What is Zen"? Kasulis mumbled somthing about it being a practice, not a belief. The Abott responded, "Zen is -- knowing one's self. It is the same undertaking that Western Philophers undertook."
Kasulis taught my class about Hindu philosophy of the self or soul and the supersoul ( Atman and Brahman ). I thought some of it might be a useful high-level definition of self-awareness in AI. It goes something like this:
Q. Are you aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware...?
So, you see it leads to a never ending chain of awareness. In Hindu philosophy, the ultimate awareness, the 'unseen see-er', the entire infinite chain of awareness, is the Atman, or the supersoul that transcends the individual.
In the AI realm, we could build a machine that had two components: a perception system (vision, sound, whatever) and a detection-of-perception system ( a 'true' output if it percieves a system that can percieve ). Once the perception system falls on the system itself, it will detect a perception system. It will 'know' that it 'knows'. Then, it will detect another perception system in the original act of perception. Then, it will detect that act of perception, and in turn that act of perception... ad infinitum
The self's perception of the self has this hall-of-mirrors quality that does not occur when the self perceives others of the same kind.
You can take it one step futher and detect other self-aware systems if you can somehow detect this self-detection in other systems. However, I haven't figured out a logical argument for how to do this.
I humbly submit my hall-of-mirrors definition of self-awareness. What does the Slashdot non-liberal arts majors make of it?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Since the exact technology (artifical neurons?) is not described in detail as to how they work, ascribing "self-awareness" to this experiment is "claiming too much."
Also, use of the word "understanding" may be claiming too much in the absence of any evidence of conceptual processing in either the neurons or the software.
Still, it's an interesting bit of work, which may prove useful if it can be extended.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
That's odd.... when I look in a mirror I see some person that looks a lot like my dad in his younger days. My self-image function has not kept up with my actual appearance.... (not that I've become Gollum but I definitely can't be mistaken for the 20-something image stuck in my head).
Okay, so they've programmed a robot to understand mirrors... that's hardly the same as "self-awareness" in the sense of sentience or consciousness.
... what does that even mean?
The article isn't very descriptive, but it sounds like stupid pseudo-science:
"This so-called mirror image cognition is based on artificial nerve cell groups built into the robot's computer brain
that give it the ability to recognize itself and acknowledge others."
The real question is: was this robot programmed to recognize itself in a mirror, or did it come to the realization through observation and experimentation? If the latter, that's really impressive. If the former (more likely), this is no more "Artificial Intelligence" than that horrid chat-bot thing and it doesn't warrant any mention from anyone.
And while I'm ranting--- The term Artificial Intelligence makes me cringe. One-third of AI can be better described as computational statistics (pattern recognition), another third as an exercise in ontology (expert systems), and the other third is the territory of pseudo-scientific hacks who like say things like "this robot's computer brain has artificial nerve cell groups" when they really mean "our robot is a wheeled computer with some sensors attached"
This robot's ability is not in itself very interesting. What is interesting, though, is the way that developing the ability to recognize one's own movements "from the outside," as in a mirror image, is an important stage in the development of self-consciousness.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
In it you would learn many very interesting things. One of the more trivial things you would learn is that once one is aware that one is aware, the infinite recursion comes along for free and is mostly a red herring. Smullyan explains Godel's Theorems mathematically and also in terms of "reasoners" reasoning about their own reasoning.
IMO, Smullyan has a much deeper and more fundamental understanding of Godel's Theorems than Nagel and Newman who popularized them in their book "Godel's Proof". Unfortunately, Hofstadter got most of his intuition about Godel's proofs from Nagel and Newman so he has continued to propagate their limited understanding onto the masses.
In a nutshell, Godel's Theorems deal with the mathematics of self-awareness.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
While it seems to be successful test of pattern recognition, calling this "self awareness" is really stretching the term and making it sound like something much more than it really is. This is more like "Likelihood of object three meters ahead being a mirror - 99%. Likelihood of visual feedback within object confines being reflection of this unit - 99.9%." If that robot experienced the spontaneous thought of "My hips look fat," or "Why do I look so ugly?", I'd be more inclined to think of this as a staggering achievement that the headline makes it out to be.
I strongly disagree with Mr. Takeno's statement - "In humans, consciousness is basically a state in which the behavior of the self and another is understood," This is a vast over-simplification of consciousness, the entity of a beings "self", or soul, if you'd prefer.
Being a fascination of mine, I remember reading several articles suggesting that consciousness may be the manifestation of quantum effects within protein microtubules within neuronal fibers in biological beings. Here's one reference (www.artsci.wustl.edu) that I came across offhandedly. If someone created a robot that had structures that behaved in a quantum manner as well as circutry that was purely digital, perhaps it would actually be possible to create an artificial being that actually had a "soul". The ramifications of such an achievement would be staggering.
Just as a side note - Do living beings actually have to be conscious? Just a strange thought, since it doesn't seem to be a necessary attribute for living beings to survive and evolve. And if the theorey of quantum effects being responsible for consciousness hold true, there's no way that animals other than humans could be excluded. It would be a sweet, joyous poke in the ribs to the crowd that's been tainting rational science with creationism, ID, and such.
A soul being some random effect that just happens by accident would be the cherry on the cake. :D
all this means is some programmer taught a robot to remember its limb positions and reverse the coordinates for a mirror image and compare the two. how the heck is telling a robot "your arm is here, his is in a different position, therefore, you are not the same" lead to teaching a robot how to think "that girl-bot just flashed me, i almost short-circuited my-self" and "that sob just flipped me off and passed me on the freeway, I'm going to pointlessly blare my horn for an hour at him!"
Does the concept of "recognizing self by mirror" require the concept of "mirror?" If someone doesn't understand what a mirror does, then they may fail the test but actually be self-aware.
Brain injury patients teach us that there are circuits in the brain for things we wouldn't expect. A stroke patient lost the concept of "left." She could only eat half of a piece of cake in front of her -- her brain wouldn't recognize the other half. She learned to turn the plate, so that a piece of cake would magically appear! Doing this several times, the cake was essentially consumed.
If the concept of "left" can be lost, what about concept of "mirror?" A human may be capable of reasoning out that the person in the mirror must be me, but for creatures that are less intelligent, I'm not so sure.
One of our smarter parrots does not seem to recognize herself in the mirror. She attacks the mirror image. A second parrot seems to understand the concept of "camera." I once connected a video camera directly to the TV and videotaped him -- he began to experiment with moving and watching the parrot on the TV move. All of a sudden, he began to show off and...strut. Ever since then, he shows off for cameras and struts when he sees a photo of himself. He won't strut when he sees a parrot of his own species that is not him. (Note: I don't know if he's cueing on backgrounds to tell if the parrot is him or if he can identify himself.) He's the only parrot in the house that doesn't like anacondas on Animal Planet. Raptors also upset him. Most parrots don't watch TV, the refresh rate is too slow. But somehow he does.
I'd love to know how Alex the Parrot responds to "Who?" when looking at a mirror. One could start out by positioning the mirror so that someone else is visible, someone Alex could name. Then, by changing the angle of the mirror, have Alex look at Alex.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
There is a much deeper problem in the title than this. It is, quite simply, impossible for one being to prove its self-awareness to another. We may be able to make some sort of educated guess as to things being self-aware, but there is no way we can directly observe or experience the self-awareness of another being. This is by definition, since self-awareness is that recognition of one's own existence a a separate entity that is unique to and inseparable from that entity - it is not merely the reaction of the bio-machine to its environment no matter how complex and seemingly independent that reaction.
The Star Trek TNG episode "The Measure of A Man" gives a fairly good explanation of the problem. Even if we develop a non-biological machine that mimics in all respects the behaviour of a human, down to the finest of details, we will have no way of determining whether that machine is self-aware. A corollory of this is that we have no way of determining if any particular machine is not self-aware. You are probably fairly confident your computer is not self-aware, but just try proving it. If you think that you can prove something is, or is not, self-aware, then you have probably not understood the problem.
Emotions are an awareness of an internal state and depend greatly on self awareness as YOUR INTERNAL STATE IS YOUR SELF -- hence, no self awareness = no emotions. This is why many people believe dogs, cats etc... do not have emotions, they believe that self awareness is a human trait.
I disagree that emotions are an awareness of an internal state. Emotions are an aspect of your internal state at any given point in time. Animals feel fear, an emotion. They also feel pleasure, an emotion. I believe, from my personal experience raising rats, cats, and dogs, as well as what I have read of studies on primates, that animals feel a wide range of emotions and that individual creatures within the same species, experience them differently, just as individual humans do.
The caveat being, I am of the school of thought that anything with a brain is self aware. I believe that is the sole purpose of the brain, to be aware. Even the "motor control" functions of the brain, require an awareness of what is being controlled and what those things are experiencing.
I am also open to all life forms having awareness on some level, but that is much harder for me to swallow at this point, but I have not closed my mind to it.
The mirror example is only one why this condition can be manifest. The condition can be met with reference to sound, assuming a situation where hearing is the dominate sense. Its just a point where you recongize the difference between internal sound and external sounds. Self awareness is not special, it is exactly what is says, being aware that there is a self. How can that statement have any meaning unless there is some external stimuli that you are seperate from the rest of the world? Perhaps you are just a little bias in this case
If voted, this article will win for most deceptive headline ever published on Slashdot :)
There's a huge difference between being "self-aware" as in recogizning mirror self from copies, and "self-aware" as a state of mind.
And yes my cat is in self-aware state of mind, but still attacks the mirror.