First Robot able to Show Emotion & develop bonds (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, August 12, 2010, 03:37 (5217 days ago) @ dhw

A robot can learn from the environment, register emotions, form relationships, and be given an individualized set of responses. I asked Matt what light this shed on consciousness and identity, and whether he thought there was any limit to the range of mental activities such robots might eventually achieve.
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> Many thanks, Matt, for your reply. You think that the mechanism for consciousness lies "not in the mechanics of the brain (neurons, synapses, etc.) but in their collective ability to process information. (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.)" This is probably the nub of the matter, and links up with both remaining elements of my question. If (a huge "if") a robot could produce all the mental activities ... emotional, intellectual, imaginative, behavioural ... of a human, that would in my view prove that there is no such thing as a "soul", the case for which depends on the neurons, synapses etc. being the receivers and not the producers of consciousness. 
> -I guess I might disagree; to me Phineas Gage pretty much destroyed any hope of a soul in my book. One could perhaps argue that the damage to the brain "only disallowed the man's soul from interfacing properly with the body," but to me that seems no different than the discussion of "body thetans." (Google, if you don't know...)-> If consciousness is the product of our materials, then presumably so too is identity, as what you call "an emergent property of the whole". By "identity", though, I don't just mean what makes you you and me me, but the mechanism that governs the way each of us uses the neurons ... the individual self that both controls and is controlled by the body. You sort of answered my question about the limits when you envisaged a possible scenario in which machines might emulate humans by innovating ideas and developing a sense of self. Even if in the "simplified world of machine intelligence", the "combination of computational and emotional intelligence" has not yet been attempted, it seems to me that Nao is very much a step in that direction. The logical progression would indeed be for machines eventually to become fully sentient, and that would prove that identity is not only dictated by materials, but ceases to exist when they cease to function. (The alternative would be to believe that machines have souls, which I for one would find hard to swallow!) 
> -I guess on part of this I should clarify: the emotional machine discussed in the guardian article is essentially built to learn emotions; they didn't bother to teach it other things that 1yr olds might learn such as language skills, nor does it have the innate capacity for intuitive physics. It's a one-trick pony. A truer test will be to integrate this piece with say, the piece MIT physicists made last year that was able to deduce mathematical laws of physics by simply observing phenomenon. (Newton's basic laws of motion.) The human mind seems to be an inference machine; it's what it does best, and it can do it with anything (with varying degrees of accuracy.) -> Of course, this hypothetical scenario would not settle the chance v. design debate, since the robots have been designed, but it would have an enormous impact on the God issue. Without a "soul", there can be no afterlife, and we would be in the same situation as our robots: functioning while the power is on, and thrown on the scrapheap when our various parts are no longer repairable. The existence of a god in a psychic dimension beyond the material world would then become virtually irrelevant to us, except for those who believe that such a being is actively interested in our earthly lives. 
> -No... design advocates would simply take the invention as proof that something as complex as human intelligence could only arise by intervention on behalf of an intelligent entity. Atheists would take it as proof that -> With regard to machines being treated as sentient beings, the ethical ramifications are vast. Robot rights are inseparable from robot responsibilities, -Is it really? What's the responsibility of a human--or a dog? If robots become somehow sentient, to me rights would trump even their designed purpose. ->but is it possible to separate the programme from the programmer? (Current theologians may ponder the same question, and in any case we have never really established the parameters of human responsibility, given the impact of heredity and environment on our identity.) As I said, it's all a huge "if", and perhaps it will remain indefinitely in the realm of science fiction. I'm just trying to clarify the implications, but who knows ... the science and technology of robotics may yet provide the biggest philosophical revolution of them all.-It's what Ray Kurzweil spends his life studying.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"