I copied this excerpt from the Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book "The Ego Tunnel", which was for me mind opening
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Ex Machina
eng_fadi77 — 9 years ago(December 10, 2016 01:22 PM)
I copied this excerpt from the Neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book "The Ego Tunnel", which was for me mind opening in thinking about Consciousness, AI and the notion of the "self". This part is an imaginary conversation between the first Postbiotic Philosopher, basically an AI machine that uses some biological parts, and a real human philosopher. The themes of this conversation were at least mentioned in the movie but obviously never explored enough on a scientific or philosophic basis. I know it's a bit long but I promise you it's worth reading if you're into these subjects.
"First Postbiotic Philosopher: Many centuries ago, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a particularly confused human philosopher by the name of Thomas Metzinger. He claimed there was a demanding but much more interesting criterion for the existence of mental properties in a strong sense than the then-classic Turing Test for intelligence. This member of your biological species thought a good test for the existence of both intelligence and artificial consciousness would be what I call the Metzinger Test. Actually his test is much too demanding, because the criterion is a bit too strongbut I can pass it nevertheless.
The Metzinger Test for consciousness in nonbiological systems demands that a system not only claim to possess phenomenal experience and a genuine inward perspective but also comprehend and accept the theoretical problem of subjectivity, and that it demonstrate this by participating in a discussion on artificial consciousness. It has to put forward arguments of its own and convincingly defend its own theory of consciousness. This is exactly what I will do now.
Human Being: You are not a real philosopher at all! You may be intelligent, but you are only weakly conscious, because you dont have a real biological body, as for example I do.
First Postbiotic Philosopher: I am a better philosopher than you, with your pathetic primate brain, could ever be. But, more seriously, I fully respect you and your animal form of experience, though I also deplore you because of the severe limitations on your mental space of possibilities. Fortunately, I am free of all the implicit racism, chauvinism, and speciesism that characterize your nature. I would first remind you that another biological philosopherHilary Putnampointed out long ago that one cannot deny civil rights or the status of a person to an information-processing system on grounds of hardware properties alone. He might just as well have intimated that women have no souls or that blacks are not real human beingscarbon-based chauvinism is an untenable position. I would never say to you that you are not a real philosopher simply because you are imprisoned in that terrible monkey body. Let us at least argue in a fair and rational way.
Human Being: Can anybody be truly fair who is not alive? Only my kind of consciousness is genuine consciousness, because only my kind of consciousness originated in a real evolutionary process. My reality is a lived reality!
First Postbiotic Philosopher: I, too, have an evolutionary origin. I certainly satisfy your condition of being a historically optimized and adaptive system, but I do so in a completely differentnamely, a postbioticway. I possess conscious experience in a sense that is conceptually stronger and theoretically much more interesting, because my kind of phenomenal experience evolved from a second order evolutionary process, which automatically integrated the human form of intelligence, intentionality, and conscious experience. Children are often smarter than their parents. Second order processes of optimization are always better than first-order processes of optimization.
Human Being: But you dont have any real emotions; you dont feel anything. You have no existential concern.
First Postbiotic Philosopher: Please accept my apologies, but I must draw your attention to the fact that your primate emotions reflect only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species of mortals on this planet. This makes you appear less conscious from a purely rational, theoretical point of view. The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity. Your animal emotions in all their cruelty, rigidity, and historical contingency make you less flexible than I am. Furthermoreas my own existence demonstratesit is not necessary for conscious experience and high-level intelligence to be associated with ineradicable egotism, the ability to suffer, or the existential fear of ones individual death, all of which originate in the sense of self. I can, of course, emulate all sorts of animal feelings if I so desire. But we developed better and more effective computational strategies for what, long ago, you sometimes called the philosophical ideal of selfknowledge. This allowed us to overcome the difficulties of individual suffering and the