- I don't know if I am explaining this right and, well, I probably sound an immense fool right, so please take my two pence, stupid pun right (?), with about the same disregard one gives, stupid reference FTW (?), a fly on the wall, your complete and utter attention armed with a newspaper, of logic, and an insatiable drive to deliver a smackdown. Oh God, I sound like a trite, intertextual, pompous a-hole, don't I? Well, anyway, right from the floodgates, sentience is intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness; the former two are easy to determine, the remainder is not, if not impossible, but the possibility is determinable, and very easily so. I argue not that consciousness must be ascertained and have a confluence of criterion backing it up, alternatively I scrutinize the structures whose capacities may create that ineffable human quality and what those structures need to be realities.
- As is obvious, there are other certain factors that are pretty much distinguishably humans. One, humans have the ability for creativity; two, humans have emotions. Creativity and emotions are great and they enrichen most aspects of our lives, but they do not constitute part nor whole of the consciousness equation; the aforesaid other qualities are just adding to the baseline of sentience, furthering, the range and abilities of consciousness, but, for example, we bestow sentient rights to complete vegetables of people and retarded, per psychiatric terminology, and lesser entities, when either can, sometimes do, lack either of these qualities, or be 'there' in an animal manifestation, i.e., anger, love, or something alike, (there are others, but the point is articulated none-the-less) and, h*ll, might be devoid of consciousness and mere shells of the very possibility of sentience. Once again, the power of possibility is triumphant in the scheme of things. Plus, the appearance of emotion is getting there in structural equivalents of the head, and creativity is like a meta-program that supervises all sub-programs and allowing certain things to loop and others not depending upon the efficacy of such loops in accomplishing their teleology and artistic creativity, I argue, could be accomplished via analyzing the artifice and products derived thereby and then developing a sort of topical randomizer and mixer that, as the name intimates, creates a mélange of styles and techniques and themes and subject matters and realizes the pictorial and/or linguistic and/or auditory potential of the vision, if you will, and then another program, a meta-meta-program, could revitalize these mixings by drawing upon indices of knowledge and concocting various different and maybe successful, reality and culture are complicated constructs, variations in the aforementioned mélanges; now I likely underestimate the complexity of artistic creation, though I do my fair-share, and thus fail hard, but, if history be any indicator, the future bears a superabundance of things-impossible becoming things-possible. Besides, cutting all the artistic speculation, if self-awareness was under the penumbra of doubt this meta-programming is equivalent to what we call self-awareness, the ability to make adaptations to our environment in whatever sense of the word you construe it as being.
- So, anywho, if a artificial being thinks it experiences sensations and thinks thoughts and has experiences and meets the requisite 10^23 calc./sec. of computational power, or less, though this may BS, because of the increased efficiency of silicon-based circuits juxtaposed with neuronic pathways, to mimic the human brain via analog, then what compels us to question this? What if these hunks of metal, silicon, programming, prostheses, and myriad other apparatuses and materials are attaining sentience? They are indubitably smart, albeit also in non-human complexly logically holy-f*ck worthy ways, and are in all likelihood self-aware due to the necessity of such in any communicative- and/or locomotive- oriented human-machine symbiosis, and who knows? They just might transcend those two petty barriers and have attained sentience, and to treat a sentient being, different mostly by medium, would constitute a flagrant abrogation of not only an individual's rights, but of an entire race's ability to pursue their life, their liberty, their happiness.
IIN to wonder if machines will ever be given rights?
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1.
- I don't know if I am explaining this right and, well, I probably sound an immense fool right, so please take my two pence, stupid pun right (?), with about the same disregard one gives, stupid reference FTW (?), a fly on the wall, your complete and utter attention armed with a newspaper, of logic, and an insatiable drive to deliver a smackdown. Oh God, I sound like a trite, intertextual, pompous a-hole, don't I? Well, anyway, right from the floodgates, sentience is intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness; the former two are easy to determine, the remainder is not, if not impossible, but the possibility is determinable, and very easily so. I argue not that consciousness must be ascertained and have a confluence of criterion backing it up, alternatively I scrutinize the structures whose capacities may create that ineffable human quality and what those structures need to be realities.
- As is obvious, there are other certain factors that are pretty much distinguishably humans. One, humans have the ability for creativity; two, humans have emotions. Creativity and emotions are great and they enrichen most aspects of our lives, but they do not constitute part nor whole of the consciousness equation; the aforesaid other qualities are just adding to the baseline of sentience, furthering, the range and abilities of consciousness, but, for example, we bestow sentient rights to complete vegetables of people and retarded, per psychiatric terminology, and lesser entities, when either can, sometimes do, lack either of these qualities, or be 'there' in an animal manifestation, i.e., anger, love, or something alike, (there are others, but the point is articulated none-the-less) and, h*ll, might be devoid of consciousness and mere shells of the very possibility of sentience. Once again, the power of possibility is triumphant in the scheme of things. Plus, the appearance of emotion is getting there in structural equivalents of the head, and creativity is like a meta-program that supervises all sub-programs and allowing certain things to loop and others not depending upon the efficacy of such loops in accomplishing their teleology and artistic creativity, I argue, could be accomplished via analyzing the artifice and products derived thereby and then developing a sort of topical randomizer and mixer that, as the name intimates, creates a mélange of styles and techniques and themes and subject matters and realizes the pictorial and/or linguistic and/or auditory potential of the vision, if you will, and then another program, a meta-meta-program, could revitalize these mixings by drawing upon indices of knowledge and concocting various different and maybe successful, reality and culture are complicated constructs, variations in the aforementioned mélanges; now I likely underestimate the complexity of artistic creation, though I do my fair-share, and thus fail hard, but, if history be any indicator, the future bears a superabundance of things-impossible becoming things-possible. Besides, cutting all the artistic speculation, if self-awareness was under the penumbra of doubt this meta-programming is equivalent to what we call self-awareness, the ability to make adaptations to our environment in whatever sense of the word you construe it as being.
- So, anywho, if a artificial being thinks it experiences sensations and thinks thoughts and has experiences and meets the requisite 10^23 calc./sec. of computational power, or less, though this may BS, because of the increased efficiency of silicon-based circuits juxtaposed with neuronic pathways, to mimic the human brain via analog, then what compels us to question this? What if these hunks of metal, silicon, programming, prostheses, and myriad other apparatuses and materials are attaining sentience? They are indubitably smart, albeit also in non-human complexly logically holy-f*ck worthy ways, and are in all likelihood self-aware due to the necessity of such in any communicative- and/or locomotive- oriented human-machine symbiosis, and who knows? They just might transcend those two petty barriers and have attained sentience, and to treat a sentient being, different mostly by medium, would constitute a flagrant abrogation of not only an individual's rights, but of an entire race's ability to pursue their life, their liberty, their happiness.