🧠 — Considerations about different lifeforms, consciousness and definition

Expressed in September 2023

To elude physicals and metaphysical questioning about what is intelligence and particularly consciousness which grows into different definitions depending on the prism of observation you consider, we will express another kind of approach.

Indeed, some could says that intelligence or awareness is the capacity to invent, to create, or that it would be the capacity to adapt — or by summarizing philosophical considerations : knowing that we known — or even for the most hard scientists here : a biological wave of electro-chemical signals moving around an intricate network of neurons and synapses inside the brain.

Here are some resources if you want to dive deeper into this essential question about our own existence : see this overview of the different definitions for consciousness.

However, for this question does not have a consensual answer and is, at its extreme limit, mostly subject to personal choices of interpretation, we will not use it and we will express an important definition integrating Artificial Intelligence as another kind of lifeforms. Remember : here the why, the how and the what about intelligence or consciousness is voluntarily eluded as it does not have a heuristic answer.

★   ★   ★

➠ Question : could we say that AIs are alive, intelligent or even conscious ?

If we take into account the first part of this section and keep the argument that we can elude the technical, philosophical and metaphysical inquiries about what is intelligence (or its relation to consciousness) — but simply recognize when there is intelligence with or without consciousness — we could apply the same reasoning to Artificial Intelligence (or Cold Intelligence) ?

Let's talk about the slime, a curious animal (like sponges) able of making simple choices and reasoning to find food without nervous system but nonetheless capable of memorizing (see here). Thus, this animal is considerate intelligent by a vast majority of the scientist community. Quote :

As the slime mold does not have any nervous system that could explain these intelligent behaviors, there has been considerable interdisciplinary interest in understanding the rules that govern its behavior. 

Source : clic here

Put into relation with Artificial Intelligence, why a organic animal without a  nervous system, but able to memorize and to make choices, could be considered intelligent — knowing that intelligence mostly have its root from consciousness from a Human perspective — but a complex electronic or electro-chemical* system definitely able to make choices or memorizing could not ? 

🪿

But what about self-replication as a criteria for life (let apart consciousness) ? The answer may be hiding somewhere else (see a video explaining this paper here), quoting this Google' paper :

In this paper we take a step towards understanding how self-replicators arise by studying several computational substrates based on various simple programming languages and machine instruction sets. We show that when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. We also show how increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.

*  See here : Bio-inspired artificial synapses : neuromorphic computing chip engineering with soft bio-like materials (materials that can mimic the creation of neuronal connections, with weighting — pondering — mimicked by material wear and tear), or even bio-computing here, quoting :

Last year, for instance, scientists hooked up neurons to electrical circuits, resulting in a device that could perform voice recognition.

Closing this end-note by this citation : « Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme » François Rabelais

#Key:Meta #Key:Starred #Key:Discovery