Consciousness implies sentience, but sentience does not imply consciousness. Have you read what implies mean before making such meaningless and baseless assertions?
It [The consciousness] has been defined [in psychology] as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
And it's a scientific consensus, confirmed by over 2500 studies, that animals are conscious, namely the Cambridge declaration of consciousness.
Thanks for agreeing with me that sentience doesn't imply consciousness. Took you a while. In any case, your definition intentionally misses "self-awareness", because you know most animals don't have self-awareness. With that skewed definition, lets see if a recursive neural network is conscious.
- sentience (The ability to feel or perceive subjetively): Clearly. Primitive artificial neurons were called Perceptrons for a reason. Their working is subjective, and dependent on the experience of the system. What's true for RNN1.m may not be true for RNN2.m. Just like in real brain tissue
- awareness (the ability to directly know and perceive): From the previous definition, a sentient being is clearly aware as well.
- subjectivity (it that possesses conscious experiences, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires): The subjectivity of neural networks is well known. Given that RNNs are aware of their own state (but could hardly be considered self-aware), are aware of their input vectors, and their knowdlege is training-dependent, they are subjective
- the ability to experience or to feel:I'm noticing a trend here, to be honest. Are you sure you didn't mix these up? Is it possible for something aware not to have the ability to experience? Same with subjective beings, and specially sentient beings. In any case, I just dont feel like repeating myself.
- wakefulness: I can't find a non organic-centric definition of this word. Even worse, wikipedia's definition requires the being on evaluation to be CONSCIOUS to be considered wakeful. Recursive definitions ain't so great. In any case, not all beings have a sleeping state. Seems to be superfluous, really, or perhaps maliciously placed to avoid anything non-animal to be considered conscious.
- having a sense of selfhood: Yup, they literally take themselves as an input. They couldn't have a more through sense of themselves
- the executive control system of the mind: Sure.
So either you ask PETA to raid my department everytime I format my hard drive, or you could consider that definition to be Greek philosophy levels of undefined useless word salad. I suggest the second, but I have to admit interest on that.
That's not true, since movement is unconsciously wired.
You can't walk if you aren't conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SleepwalkingIn any case, here's artificial animaloid movement.
It's a well-known thing that scientists are able to make a robotic leg that works in a way analogous to the legs of tetrapods, but aren't able to make a machine that controls them. That's the most widely known example of Moravec's paradox.
It's a well known thing that natural selection is able to make a glandulae that works in a way analogous to batteries, but isn't able to make neurones directly control a power plant, you see how ridiculous that argument is? The reason machines and biological systems are separate is because machines use systems biology is not specialized in, and viceversa. Not even that, we CAN control neural tissue.
" class="bbc_link" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Neurons aren't magical items with properties that violate the laws of physics, they are processors. We understand how they work, we have for decades. The issue we don't have augmentations and the like is because of simple complexity, just as how we knew how the moon orbited in the 19th century, but had to wait to the 1959 to get there. Nature is incredibly optimized. It has had millions and millions of years to perfect itself to points only now we understand. 60 years ago, perceptrons were the size of a room. Now Google Translate packs Deep Learning neural networks into a battery powered device, gazillions of times more powerful than a MADALINE unit. The AI winter is dead. Summer is coming. And its gonna be great (for me).
The chinese room thought experiment proves that, empirically, intelligence is not special. A mouse can be trained to be the Chinese for that experiment. Does that mean the Mouse is intelligent? Or that it isnt? External experiments of capability are useless for intelligence testing. Nowadays, intelligence is defined mostly in terms of both capabilities, and learning process. In that sense, Artificial Neural Networks are a primitive form of "true" artificial intelligence. If you don't like the idea that a machine can become intelligent without aide, you can always enter the world of Symbolic intelligence. I warn you, though. Abandon all sanity thou who shalt study it.
I have no bright idea what you are talking about. Alan Turing supposed that a Turing-complete machine that's able to pass the Turing test, namely being able to behave as if it were conscious for a few minutes by following a set of rules, can be considered conscious. The Chinese room thought experiment proves that the Turing test is total nonsense.
Oh for fucks sake. That's not what the Chinese room proves. As I said, you can train a mouse to be the Chinese. Or a human. Or a machine. It does not matter. What the Chinese room proves is that the solipsism problem is undecidable, in other words, there is no single test, thought, experiment, observation, logical analisys, coin tossing, or any other method to ascertain intelligence. This applies TO EVERYONE. I can only trully know that I AM intelligent. For all that I know, you may all just be programmed robots. The fundamental breakthrough of the Chinese Room is that IT DOESNT MATTER. A machine cannot be proven to be intelligent just as I can't prove you are. The brain is a processor, and it performs computations. A Turing Complete machine CAN emulate the brain. The brain is a restricted turing machine (just as real computers). There is no evidence that the brain is a hypercomputer, before you go to that, and if it were, we could break the laws of physics. I am sorry that this hurts your narrative, but a bunch of stones performing rule 110 is able to do the same computations the brain does, given enough time and stones.
Animals act as energy converters, in that they take energy we cannot use, transforming it into energy we can use.
Most of those animals are fed with soy and grains. Why couldn't we use them ourselves?
Where do you live that soy is wasted on cows? Just give 'em hay. On the grain issue, they are fed grain waste, like the exterior of the grain, or simply grains humans don't like eating, like oats and barley (but they do like drinking it!). Have you ever been to a farm before?
I know that without fertilization, the entire surface of the earth could support 1 billion people.
Who is against fertilization? First of all, natural fertilizers can, and mostly are today, be made from plants. Secondly, synthetic fertilizers are much less damaging to the environment than animal agriculture is.
It was an example of how much impact these energy conversion systems have. Fertilizer, after all, is just converting non-usable biomass into food for plants. Its just the same as animal feedstock, but I don't have the data on how much human sustainabiliy depends on animal energy conversion, so I put forward a similar example I know the data on, plant energy conversion.
Too bad, I can prove it to you.
How does the permeability of the cell walls changing with pressure prove that a plant is sentient?!
How does the firing of pain receptors in muscle tissue with overpressure prove an animal is sentient?!
Plants have processor systems.
And that processor system is…
Plants don't have central neural systems, but they DO have processing and recepting systems, not unlike insects, for example. In Mimosa Pudica's example, potassium and calcium ion channels act as pressure sensors, creating action potentials transmited throughout the plant, similar to how neurons work.
They may also have memory:
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/science-mimosa-plants-memory-01695.htmlHell, they can even be drugged.
That's certainly not the way you determine whether something is sentient. If it were, the studies of the plant sentience wouldn't be considered pseudoscience by the scientific community.
Plant intelligence*. You keep confusing the words.
Well, since you only gave me an abstract, I can just guess why.
You can buy the paper yourself. Or you could pirate it, but you will understand why I don't link that here. Search engines will help you with that.
Which type of drug was used? They say "There is a close similarity in the effects of drugs on the sensitivity to mechanical stimulation in the sensitive plant Mimosa and the protozoan Spirostomum", not that those same drugs affect sentient beings (humans, mice…) in the similar manner.
Protozoans are sentient.
And there is nothing about the perception there!
Because perception is an epistemological term, and not a scientific one. Read the paper, I'm sure you'll understand then.
What do you mean? The adaptation provides protection to the plant from water, excesive sunlight, etc. Is this
what you mean? I'm not a biologist, I'm simply quoting the expert's opinion.
I meant, the adaptation of the perception, that is, that the perceived intensity of a stimulant is (slightly) decreasing with time, which is one of the basic properties of the perception.
Yep, as I even linked to you, its clear it is even remembered. Ion channels saturate over time, that's how neurons learn in a really small nutshell.
A comatose human isn't able to do that, yet it's sentient, on your definition.
No, it's not sentient.
Yes it is. It responds to stimuli.
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/neurologic-disorders/coma-and-impaired-consciousness/vegetative-state-and-minimally-conscious-stateSentient is defined as having the power of perception by the senses. Being able to recognize and locate things around themselves is one of the basic properties of the perception. In fact, that's even how perception is defined on Wikipedia (understanding of the environment).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception
Understanding of the enviroment, and locating things around are two different things. Plants clearly show understanding of the enviroment, as do artificial neural networks. They even show Constancy, Grouping, and contrasting. In fact, one of the reasons ANNs were developed was to do grouping work (called in more pure fields "clustering").