Lit Humans v. Droids: What's the difference?

Dreams
Dreaming States
Drives (hunger, thirst, procreation, sleep)

Do those matter to you guys for consciousness? Animals have drives. Robots power off or enter sleep mode.

From earlier:

Human beings and mammals never turn off. We have drives. Sleep is one of the drives. The analogy of a computer shutting down (off position) to a human dying is not accurate.

Our waking conscious states of mind (throughout the daylight hours) are interspersed with sleep. The sleep is controlled by drives.

With a computer or robot, a human being is required to shut them down or their manufactured parts get overworked. This is part of makes them a tool.

On the subject of animal dreams, if you've ever had a pet dog, cat, or rabbit, they have lucid dreaming states where they are completely asleep yet moving and interacting in their sleep. These states are empirical in that we can observe them sleeping and control their diet. Because the empirical observation is measurable, we can draw interpretations. But our interpretations will always be limited in that they are interpretations of a human being.

You guys might as well be inside of the Star Wars universe (in-universe) as you make your arguments for android sentience. I am here on earth. This is what I see. (out-universe)

 

Do droids dream of electronic banthas?

 

C3PO shuts himself down repeatedly on his own to recharge, likewise with R2. This is like human sleep to recharge us.

Death for droids and humans is the same. If shut down and reactivated that would be more like an induced coma, same exists for humans that cannot return on their own from it usually. Like when put into one before surgery.

Droids too dream, scifi elaborated on this a lot. As you said yourself, a recharge mode is no permanent shutdown, so some subroutines are still operating and processing data, akin to human sleepmode.

Regarding drives, drives are a biological function to preserve the organism and keep it running/working. Procreation, feeding, sleeping, etc. all serve that function. A droid is a lifeform of different makeup than fleshlings... so they have different needs to fulfill the same function. Recharging batteries is one of them, feeding is replaced with maintenance which some droids in part do themselves and in part outsource (like humans do with needing doctors etc.). Procreation also is needed due to human lifespans being limited by bodies expiration dates depending on how good you treated said body. Droids made from much longer lasting materials have no need for procreation but can anyway create either a copy of themselves or jointly with others create a mashup droid and programming. But given droids longlivety, the need for relations of that extent and creating any kind of offspring is very rare if nonexistant.

No matter if in or out of universe and on earth, even in the real world your arguments make zero sense to reality as I see it sorry

 

No

 

Likewise to your in-universe arguments and meandering points.

 

Wait so what exactly are we debating? Whether AI can be or is sentient in Star Wars? In sci-fi in general? Or in real-life?

Seems to me like the answers are: maybe, yes, and who knows?

 

Great question!

Maybe the person who started this thread can answer that question.

@Outsourced Hovering Jabba Umbrella

 

Here's the OP. That's all I got for ya.

 

Thank you for responding, @Outsourced

Yes, I can agree this was a continuing discussion. Hopefully it bordered on civil, at least a little bit.

I'm exhausted with this topic just like you are exhausted with me saying "Thank the...blah blah blah."

Let's agree to disagree and call it quits. I am similarly exhausted with other people's lines of attack on this topic. And I'm sure you all are with mine, as you all have expressed.

At the start, I said I was done. Now I'm really done! done, done, done.

You all can continue on without me. This is as far as I go. I cannot make it up this hill. Please leave me here to rest.

 

Yeah agree to disagree seems best, but I want to thank you nevertheless. It was an interesting discussion and your points gave me interesting thoughts.

 

Droids go to silicon heaven, humans don't.

 

After listening to many Star Wars audiobooks (especially the Star Wars Story novelizations), I can confirm that many droids are conscious—including the Millennium Falcon.

 

Yet another final word from me since this thread just came back from the abyss,

I had a conversation with a group of people last night about robots and consciousness. We ended up discussing how all biological organisms have individuality. All organisms have a life cycle and have a single parent or group of parents. Such is the beauty of life.

Reach out to a computer science professor, bio-ethics professional, psychologist, neuro-scientist, technology attorney, pastor, or religious community leader and see what they tell you.

And this hill is too steep for me....my mechanical limbs are frozen and filled with sand. Only my head is visible above the ground, sorry.

Ouch, is that G-Level Canon or Disney-canon? (yikes)

 

That was canon under Legends, and still is under Disney. Goes back to Lucas original ideas given the Falcon is run by 3 bickering droid brains. One of them Disney identified as L3 from Solo Movie.

Likewise Legends had Luke's X-Wing gain sentience or not sentience and rather a "personality" and argue with R2 due to too many rotations together!

 

In the Lucas era, the novelizations were canon.

The opinions of these so-called experts are irrelevant, because nobody knows. However, a philosopher could at least have a decent argument on the nature of consciousness, rather than just recite the dogma they've been taught. Not that any of those professors can't have philosophically inclined perspectives.

Life is beautiful, but not necessarily the definition of consciousness.

I'm not really trying to argue with you, just making the objective argument that nobody knows what causes consciousness. Life doesn't necessarily cause it, though that's a leading theory in certain sciences. To make a philosophical argument, maybe it's the other way around: consciousness causes life, the universe, everything in it.

From this perspective, consciousness is the creator deity and vital force of existence. Life and material objects are temporal forms which consciousness 'creates'. Life is still beautiful, but it is only a novelty being animated by a deeper source.

So, yeah, robots probably aren't conscious. But that doesn't mean they couldn't one day be imbued with the necessary components.

 

They were just correcting you using the wrong word in your original post. You used Sole, which is word the bottom of the human foot or a type of fish and is a homonym for soul, which is a incorpoetal essence of a living being in many religous belief systems

 

They'll tell you a complex issue that no one knows the answer to.

 

They may say consciousness is too difficult to define. We can't debate something if we can't reach a definition on what we are trying to debate. So, I kind of, sort of agree with you. Some people have built up their own definition of consciousness.

But, the smaller more definable question was whether robots can have gender? After that question, Do Androids have gender? Do droids in SW have gender? Or is it more simple to say that gender is programmed into the software and built into the hardware.
The most simple explanation is the best explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

The people who work in the fields I mentioned are paid to teach and instruct. You can't do that without thinking the problem through. Yes, they normally stay within the confines of their field. Is that dogma or is that professional training?

Name the components that create consciousness. See, we can't name them. The sum is greater than its parts. We human beings are frail beings with our biological limitations. There is no reason for us to give our biological limitations to robots. Nature has intended them to be tools. They have no will other than what we give them. We need advanced tools to solve deep, complicated problems. However, we need to be in control of our tools.

 

Just as life may be an emergent property of chemistry, so consciousness may be an emergent property of neural nets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

The theory is that a sufficiently complex Artificial Neural Network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network

will start exhibiting properties like human consciousness.

 

Great question on gender Tython!

While it makes most sense to assume gender is programmed into them like we in real life already give cellphone AIs gendered voices, the wider question is, do droids need gender?

Obviously they do not need it in the reproductive sense. So as a one gender / genderless society, droids only adopt gender behavior and speach either by programming or by adapting/learning to fit into their humanoid surroundings and into genderbased societies. They may use gender in that regard for communicative reasons more than practical ones.

Where it gets complicated is the psychology of gender and if a selfconscious droid identifies with a gender even if it has no reproductive use for the droid! Is this identification a leftover of programmed or learned gender? Most likely.

Droids emmulate and copy humans and humanoids all the time, be it with real emotions or fake ones if programmed to act as if having emotions. Is a selfconscious droid thus sticking to these concepts for it views itself as if it were a human in a metal body, like humans believe to be gods/luminous beings incarnated into a fleshbody, or...
does a droid selfidentify and view itself as a droid with all its advantages and disadvantages. It has senses far beyond humanoids senses, it can adapt and modify itself if needed and, depending who or what the "ghost in the machine" is, even transfer itself from one droid body to another or copy itself.

This brings us right to the next point: What is a droid consciousness? And is it really not tied to the droidbody, can shed it and move into others? Then the consciousness would be transfereable and more like programming that became conscious and alive, regardless of what body it takes. Be it a droid shell, a cyborg fleshbody, or if sufficiently complex and compatible a fully flesh body? If humans can entech themselves into technology fully... how about the other way around, a droid gaining a human body transfering his consciousness fully over via reverse entechment? Now that is a great droid revolution I do want to see! Screams Matrix and Mr Smith, doesn't it?

 

They'd say that we can't define consciousness at the moment, and therefore you can't draw the conclusions that you are reaching yet with such surety It is an open question at the moment.

That's not the simplest answer, it's just the one which you like. Occam's razor is definitely not applicable here.

 

The question of whether robots have gender is a more simple question than the question of whether they have consciousness.

We cannot define our own consciousness. Are we similar enough to robots to assume they will one day have that intangible thing we call consciousness? Can consciousness only be a property of biological entities? I'm saying humans and robots are too dissimilar. Robots are not biological entities. Biological entities have the property of ontogeny. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontogeny

Can we design new types of biological life using the existing DNA structures here on earth. And would it have a proper life cycle from birth to death that would give rise to something similar to consciousness (even though we can't define it)? That is another question.

I would introduce the idea of neutral gender to that.

Do droids need to identify with a gender? Can they have neutral gender? If we put droid models together in a colony to simulate a small tribe, would some adopt gender roles? Or could the droids coexist in a colony with strictly neutral gender?

Observations of the droid behavior in the colony might be different depending on the observer. Since male and female is a dichotomy, we need the concept of neutral gender where a droid does not need to identify with either male or female. Someone creating research data on droid behavior in a colony would not be able to code them strictly as MALE or FEMALE. That would be misleading and skew the results.

That is a revolution I do not want to see. How much can the human body brain be modified? Can we integrate a computer with an Intel processor, RAM, and storage into a human brain so the brain actually can read the information, bring the translated bits and bytes into conscious awareness, and keep up with the computations of the computer? I don't see us humans anywhere remotely close to that. (Writing that process forced me say "conscious awareness.")

I studied the research of a professor who wrote book chapters on emergentism.

I studied those as well.

 

Yeah, you can do that without thinking the problem through. Is there a difference between dogma and training?

That's your assumption. There are various scientific approaches to solving the problem of consciousness. My favorite is orchestrated objective reduction, which hypothesizes that small structures called microtubules, which exist inside all living cells, correspond to varying wavelengths on the quantum level. They disassociate under anesthetic, implying a link to (un)consciousness.

In other words...


There are many questions as to any theory's veracity, but the difference is whether you're willing to ask them, or just assert that you have the answers.

 

You asked whether there is a difference between dogma and training? I believe there is. Training offers an approach to a subject. Each of the professions I mentioned offers a different approach. We need multiple professions to answer the same question because every profession has its frameworks and paradigms.

Let's venture to say that only these "microtubules" are responsible for consciousness. Do the microtubules need the rest of the biological organism to produce observable changes during varying states of consciousness? Can we take the microtubles and implant them in a robot to simulate consciousness? The sum is still greater than its parts. Biological tissue changes over the ontogeny of an individual.

Robots are not unique individuals. Nor do robots have ontogeny.

Midichlorians are fantasy. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make by yelling out midichlorians with that animated graphic. Can you provide an earth (real world) correlate to midichlorians? You jumped from bringing in microtubules to yelling out midichlorians.

My posts have been full of questions. Earlier, in a different thread, you posted to me that I assume too much. I responded that you assume too little. Science is about simplifying questions so they can be tested. No one is claiming they have the answers.