Kimosabe, emergence is good way of thinking about brains and sentience. It moves the conversation out of the electrochemical jello of brain tissue. But that move doesn't necessarily apply to the emergence of sentience from computer systems.
Biological systems are very different than computer systems. Single cellular organisms are physically bounded things that respond to their environment in various ways. In other words they are irritable. Multicellular organisms have more sophisticated ways of receiving environmental stimuli and responding to them. The bottom line is that living things are bounded semi-autonomous physical systems that interact with their environment.
Computer systems are a different story altogether. A sensory device like a microphone can be attached to a computer. The state of the microphone changes in response to environmental conditions, but the microphone does not actually exhibit irritability or respond to the stimulus. The microphone transmits electronic impulses or numbers to the computer. The numbers are stored in software objects, which have been programmed to transform them to different numbers, which are sent to other objects, etc. This eventually results in outputs that might cause physical actions, such as movement of a robotic arm. But nowhere in the computer system is there anything reminiscent of clusters and tissues of physically bounded irritable systems.
If you could build an electronic device that is a physically bounded irritable system (like a biological cell), which could cluster with other such devices, resulting in increasingly sophisticated irritability, and which could interface with sensory devices like microphones, then we could have an entirely new and refreshing conversation about digital electronic systems, emergence, and sentience. But as long as the conversation is stuck in the rut of stored program computers, there doesn't seem to be much to say about emergence, let alone sentience. And the law of accelerating returns doesn't help because it just gives us faster hardware for computer programs, which are still non-physically bounded, non-irritable symbolic systems.
It would be reasonable to state that computers will never be sentient. But it not be reasonable to state that electronic systems will never be sentient. However, these would need to be entirely different kinds of electronic systems than what we now refer to as computers.
Obligatory haiku about computers and sentience:
Physical input
represented by numbers
An empty cosmos
Maybe it would be more appropriate for me to express it as a Fib:
Bits
and
numbers:
Emptiness
perpetually
in need of a user context.
Slashdot Mirror
Kimosabe, emergence is good way of thinking about brains and sentience. It moves the conversation out of the electrochemical jello of brain tissue. But that move doesn't necessarily apply to the emergence of sentience from computer systems.
Biological systems are very different than computer systems. Single cellular organisms are physically bounded things that respond to their environment in various ways. In other words they are irritable. Multicellular organisms have more sophisticated ways of receiving environmental stimuli and responding to them. The bottom line is that living things are bounded semi-autonomous physical systems that interact with their environment.
Computer systems are a different story altogether. A sensory device like a microphone can be attached to a computer. The state of the microphone changes in response to environmental conditions, but the microphone does not actually exhibit irritability or respond to the stimulus. The microphone transmits electronic impulses or numbers to the computer. The numbers are stored in software objects, which have been programmed to transform them to different numbers, which are sent to other objects, etc. This eventually results in outputs that might cause physical actions, such as movement of a robotic arm. But nowhere in the computer system is there anything reminiscent of clusters and tissues of physically bounded irritable systems.
If you could build an electronic device that is a physically bounded irritable system (like a biological cell), which could cluster with other such devices, resulting in increasingly sophisticated irritability, and which could interface with sensory devices like microphones, then we could have an entirely new and refreshing conversation about digital electronic systems, emergence, and sentience. But as long as the conversation is stuck in the rut of stored program computers, there doesn't seem to be much to say about emergence, let alone sentience. And the law of accelerating returns doesn't help because it just gives us faster hardware for computer programs, which are still non-physically bounded, non-irritable symbolic systems.
It would be reasonable to state that computers will never be sentient. But it not be reasonable to state that electronic systems will never be sentient. However, these would need to be entirely different kinds of electronic systems than what we now refer to as computers.
Obligatory haiku about computers and sentience:
Physical input
represented by numbers
An empty cosmos
Maybe it would be more appropriate for me to express it as a Fib:
Bits
and
numbers:
Emptiness
perpetually
in need of a user context.