But why? Is there something else that gives us this acute feeling of having some independence from our environment? Does that mean it too is conscious? Most of us would feel not. But then Marvin the robot can have the same awareness if it walks around my office and remembers its past. Why? Perhaps this perception simply arises from a memory of past occasions where I was in a different location in my office relative to the bookcase. For example, right now I feel quite strongly that I am independent of the books on my bookshelf. What is consciousness? In my opinion, it describes a visceral belief that, although we interact with the rest of the universe, we nevertheless retain some inherent independence from the world around us.
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Making sense of these three human qualities - understanding, free will, consciousness - involves appealing to counterfactual worlds.Īnd of course, we all feel we are conscious beings. Like the Aha! moment, we seem to be missing something. If that is all there is to our cognitive awareness of counterfactual worlds, then could a computer with sufficient memory of its past actions also have the feeling of free will? It doesn’t seem so – memory is not all it takes to have a sense of free will. But from where do they originate? Perhaps I have a memory of occasions where I didn’t rush my swing and didn’t hit the ball out of bounds. We just wouldn’t be human if we didn’t have such thoughts. If only I hadn’t rushed my golf swing, I wouldn’t have hit the ball out of bounds. If only I had answered the interview question differently, I would now have my dream job. Even for those of us who believe that the laws of physics are ultimately deterministic, and hence that it makes no sense to say that we could actually have done otherwise, it’s simply impossible to avoid thinking about counterfactual worlds from time to time. Most of us feel rather viscerally that whatever we do, we could have done otherwise. Lack of understanding is not the only thing we think separates us from computers. SUGGESTED READING Chaos theory eliminates quantum uncertainty By Tim Palmer Chatbots don’t have Aha! moments, but we do.
Understanding is a kind of Aha! moment, when you see why the proof works, and why it wouldn’t work if a minor element in it was different (for example the proof in the footnotes doesn’t work if any number but 1 is added when creating the number Q). But the computer doesn’t understand the proof.
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Additional software in the computer can check that each of the steps in Euclid’s proof is valid and hence can confirm that the proof is a good one. Of course, the chatbot has got all this information from the internet. Ask the chatbot to describe Euclid’s proof and it will answer correctly. Ask the chatbot “How do we know?” and it will reply that there are many ways to show this, the original going back to the mathematician Euclid of ancient Greece. Perhaps our brains are able to ponder how things could have been because in essence they are quantum computers, accessing information from alternative worlds, argues Tim Palmer.Īsk a chatbot “How many prime numbers are there?" and it will surely tell you that there are an infinite number. The existence of alternative worlds where things happen differently, however, is not just an exercise in imagination – it’s a key prediction of quantum mechanics. When it comes to making sense of these qualities in humans, our ability for counterfactual thinking is key. With the rapid development of chatbots and other AI systems, questions about whether they will ever gain true understanding, become conscious, or even develop a feeling agency have become more pressing.
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