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No. 5449
Anonymous
15th June 2022
Wednesday 3:08 am
5449
>>5448
>Possibly, but it would probably be more effective to strap GoPros to toddlers and feed the algorithm millions of hours of recorded footage. Unlike humans, machine learning algorithms can be trained in parallel.
That's a very interesting point.
Although, while I might be a layman at programming, I'm a scienceman at science, and I feel compelled to point out that to properly test the hypothesis you're probably going to want to keep everything as consistent with "real" childhood learning as possible. The variable you're isolating should be the substitution of a toddler's smooth unformed brain with a blank AI; you never know what other factors might have an effect on the outcome, so you have to eliminate as many of them as reasonably possible. The ones we can't eliminate are biological- The effects of hormones, genetics, gender, and so on, because our robot wouldn't have any of those, and we couldn't rule out that those could be vital to the nature of sentience/sapience.
Sociologists and psychologists are terrible at this and that's why a great deal of their studies are as good as worthless. But ignoring that for the sake of argument, if our experiment here concludes there's some plausibility to it, then you can start using different approaches like that and comparing the restults. If we wanted to go full mad Nazi scientist with no regard to ethics we could even answer once and for all what parts of our being are truly nature, and which are nurture, using the robot brains as a null hypothesis for not having a physical, biological body compared to real life kids raised under the same conditions.
Of course without an understanding of what consciousness really is it's impossible for us to actually guague if what we're observing is a consciousness, or merely something that perfectly mimics a consciousness. That's where the philosopher's approach becomes a bit more meaningful to the question I suppose, because we have no other way to draw the line. I find a lot of philosophers are too sentimental about humanity itself, viewing our species with a kind of exceptionalism to all other life- I think I'd almost be willing to say that anything closeley enough resembling sentience may as well be sentience. We can never know what it's internal perception of reality is, indeed we can never know what another human's internal perceptions of reality is, yet we never question one another on wether we're sentient or not.
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