》…cuttlefish also passed a version of the marshmallow test. Scientists showed that common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) can refrain from eating a meal of crab meat in the morning once they have learnt dinner will be something they like much better – shrimp.
Source:
https://www.sciencealert.com/cuttlefish-can-pass-a-cognitive-test-designed-for-children
First, ethicists worry that it would be wrong to force AIs to serve us if they can suffer and feel a range of emotions. Second, consciousness could make AIs volatile or unpredictable, raising safety concerns (or conversely, it could increase an AI’s empathy; based on its own subjective experiences, it might recognize consciousness in us and treat us with compassion).
Third, machine consciousness could impact the viability of brain-implant technologies, like those to be developed by Elon Musk’s new company, Neuralink. If AI cannot be conscious, then the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness could not be replaced with chips without causing a loss of consciousness. And, in a similar vein, a person couldn’t upload their brain to a computer to avoid death because that upload wouldn’t be a conscious being.
…
Based on this essential characteristic of consciousness, we propose a test for machine consciousness, the AI Consciousness Test (ACT), which looks at whether the synthetic minds we create have an experience-based understanding of the way it feels, from the inside, to be conscious.
… nearly every adult can quickly and readily grasp concepts based on this quality of felt consciousness … Thus, the ACT would challenge an AI with a series of increasingly demanding natural language interactions to see how quickly and readily it can grasp and use concepts and scenarios based on the internal experiences we associate with consciousness.
One woman is entirely insensitive to physical pain and has no palpable negative emotions.
Joanne Cameron experiences suffering mostly as “an abstract thing.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
The following is a list of types of suffering organized according to their uncertainty.
1. Suffering well reported.
In this case, the suffering being is typically an adult human who survives to the negative experience and can describe it.
2. Suffering difficult to survey.
It is the case of suffering in non-human animals, very young humans, humans in oppressive situations, humans with some cognitive impairment, and humans who do not survive the experience of suffering, or for any other reason they cannot communicate it.
In 2013, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took the logical next step by creating an algorithm that could recognize pain’s distinctive patterns; today, it can pick out brains in pain with more than ninety-five-per-cent accuracy. When the algorithm is asked to sort activation maps by apparent intensity, its ranking matches participants’ subjective pain ratings. By analyzing neural activity, it can tell not just whether someone is in pain but also how intense the experience is. “What’s remarkable is that basic pain signals seem to look pretty much the same across a wide variety of people,” Wager said. “But, within that, different brain systems are more, or less, significant, depending on the individual.”
Among the brain’s many pain-producing patterns, however, there is only one region that is consistently active at a high level: the dorsal posterior region of the insula. Using a new imaging technique, Tracey and one of her postdoctoral fellows, Andrew Segerdahl, recently discovered that the intensity of a prolonged painful experience corresponds precisely with variations in the blood flow to this particular area of the brain. In other words, activity in this area provides, at last, a biological benchmark for agony. Tracey described the insula, an elongated ridge nestled deep within the Sylvian fissure, with affection. “It’s just this lovely island of cortex hidden in the middle, deep in your brain,” she said. “And it’s got all these amazing different functions. When you say, ‘Actually, I feel a bit cold, I need to put a sweater on,’ what’s driving you to do that? Probably this bit.”
In this short piece, Manu Herrán sumarizes two sets of proposals to address the problem of sentience, three mechanisms to show if an individual feels (the resemblance, the best possible explanation and Phenomenal Puzzles) and two ways to check if a theory of sentience is correct or not.
“It is common to ask: how can sentience (the ability to feel) be demonstrated? The question has several interpretations and nuances. On the one hand, whoever asks this question may be pointing out the difficulty of making predictions and obtaining evidence; In short, the difficulty of using the scientific method in the matter of sentience. But, as this article explains, there are many things we can do to address the issue of sentience in the most scientific way possible.
The question can also refer to a specific individual: how to know if an individual feels or not ?; Or it can refer to theories about sentience: what is the correct theory? How can we prove it?”
Andrés Gómez Emilsson from Qualia Research Institute has proposed a method (or method framework) to determine if an individual feels: A Solution to the Problem of Other Minds Using Mindmelding and Phenomenal Puzzles. (Video) .
