Someone who is NOT self aware, would find difficult to understand what the hell some people are talking about.
Finally we have a test for p-zombies. :D
To prove that I am not a p-zombie—self-awareness is having a model of myself, as opposed to just having a model of the environment. Not having self-awareness would be like watching a movie, thinking only about the things on the screen.
Of course an organism needs to interact with the world, but this interaction does not have to include a self-model. Simple movements need only reflexes. Walking in some direction could be modelled as moving the environment. Properties of self, such as hunger, could be modelled as global properties. Relations with other objects or organisms can be modelled as properties of those objects or organisms. (“Hunger exists. There is an apple. Closer. Closer. Closer. Eating. Apple is good. No hunger.”)
Having a model of myself is useful for getting information about myself. For example I could watch animals walking on ice; under large animals the ice breaks, under small animals the ice does not break. If I can model myself as an animal of given weight, I can predict whether the ice will break under me.
When I model myself as a human, I can use my knowledge about other people to gain knowledge about me. By watching what other people do and what happens then, I can predict what is good and bad to do, without trying first.
My thoughts and emotion can be modelled as external facts, until I notice that other people don’t share them. By analogy I can deduce that others have ones too; an incorrect analogy will make me also believe in thoughts and emotions of stones, trees, clouds etc.
Now back to the dog’s self-awareness… Since we don’t need the self-awareness all the time, it would be better to ask if a dog can be self-aware, and under what circumstances. It would be even better to taboo the word, and ask instead what kinds of models does dog have of themselves, and how can we experimentally prove it. (A model should allow knowing some things without trying them.)
I think self-awareness is not a “yes or no” question; it seems possible to model one’s own weight without modelling other aspects. Maybe after modelling enough partial aspects a pattern appears, and one starts to think what else could they model about oneself. But it does not mean that one automatically discovers everything. An attention must focus on the aspect; for example when people learn dancing, they become aware of some aspects of themselves they were not aware before. This means that self-awareness can be increased for a human… and possibly also for a dog. Even if dogs usually don’t develop some kinds of self-models, they could be able to develop them in some circumstances.
There are probably some kinds of self-awareness that humans don’t possess, but other intelligences could—for example being aware of one’s own algorithm. Some insights can be gained by meditation, by training social skills or rationality; insights about body can be gained by learning medicine, physical therapy, etc. What we usually call self-awareness is a baseline level of self-modelling that an average human in usual conditions is be able to develop. It could be interesting to analyze possible aspects of self-modelling and make a map of self-awareness.
The thing is that there’s nothing complicated or mysterious what so ever about having a self model. If I were to write autopilot, I would include flight simulator inside, to test the autopilot’s outputs and ensure that they don’t kill the passenger (me) *. I could go fancy and include the autopilot in simulation itself, as to ensure that autopilot does not put airplane into situation when autopilot can’t evade a collision.
Presto, a self-aware airplane, which is about as smart as a brain damaged fruit fly. It’s even aware of the autopilot inside the airplane.
If I were to write the chess AI, the chess AI is recursive and it tries a move and then ‘thinks’: what would it do in the next situation? Using the self as a self model.
Speaking of dogs, the boston dynamics BigDog robot, from what i know, includes model of it’s own physics. It is about as smart as a severely brain damaged cockroach.
So you end up with a lot of non-living things being self aware. Constantly self aware, whereas a case can be made that humans aren’t constantly self aware. The non-living things that are dumber than a cockroach being self aware.
edit: one could shift goalposts and require that the animal be capable of developing a self model; well, you can teach dog to balance on a rope, and balancing on a rope pretty much requires some form of model of body’s physics. You can also make a pretty stupid (dumber than cockroach) AI in a robot that would make a self model, not only of robot body but of the AI itself.
[ I never worked writing autopilots and from what I gather autopilots don’t generally include this on runtime but are tested on a simulator during development. I value my survival and don’t have grossly inflated view of my coding abilities, so I’d add that simulator, and make a real loud alarm to wake the pilot if anything goes wrong. An example of me using self model to improve my survival. From what I can see other programmers that I know, many in beginning have inflated view of their coding abilities which keeps biting them in the backside all day long, until they get it, perhaps becoming more self aware ].
So you end up with a lot of non-living things being self aware.
In this sense, self-awareness is easy, the question is awareness of what exactly, and how it is used.
Awareness of one’s body position is less interesting, it can be only used for movement. For a biological social species awareness of one’s behavior and mind probably leads to improved algorithms—perhaps is it necessary for some kind of learning.
I am not sure what benefits would self-awareness bring to a machine… and maybe it depends on its construction and algorithm. For example when a machine has task to compute something, a non-self-aware machine would just compute it, but a self-aware machine might realize that with more memory and faster CPU it could do the calculations better.
Yea. Well, here you enter realm of general intelligence—the general intelligence would just look at the world, see itself, and figure things out including the presence of self and such.
I’m not convinced that it’s how it usually works for h. sapiens. I don’t believe that we are self aware as function of general intelligence, there’s why: we tend to have serious discussion of things like a philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is a failure to recognize the physical item that is self as self. I seriously think we’re just hardcoded self aware—we perceive some of our thought processes in similar way to how we perceive external world. This confuses the hell out of people, to the point that they fail to recognize themselves in a physical system (hence p-zombies).
Some details about how exactly it works for homo sapiens could be found in works of Vygotsky and Piaget—they did some cool experiments about what kind of reasoning is human child generally able at what age. Some models need time and experience to develop, though maybe we have some hardware support that makes it click faster. For example at some age children start to understand the conservation of momentum (when an interesting object disappears behind a barrier, they no longer look at the point where it disappeared, but at the opposite side of the barrier, where it should appear). At some age children start to understand that their knowledge is different from other people’s knowledge (a child is shown some structure from both sides, another person only from one side, and a child has to say which parts of structure did the other person see). So our models develop gradually.
Modelling thinking is difficult, because we cannot directly observe the thoughts of others, and the act of observing interferes with what is being observed. There are techniques that help. It is difficult to recognize oneself as a physical system, when one doesn’t know how exactly does the system work. If I wouldn’t have any information about how brain works, what reason would I have to believe that my mind is a fuction of my brain? My muscles are moving and I can see their shapes under my skin, but I never observe a brain in action. In a similar way, by observing a robot you would understand the wheels and motors, but not the software and the non-moving parts of hardware; even if you were that robot.
Finally we have a test for p-zombies. :D
To prove that I am not a p-zombie—self-awareness is having a model of myself, as opposed to just having a model of the environment. Not having self-awareness would be like watching a movie, thinking only about the things on the screen.
Of course an organism needs to interact with the world, but this interaction does not have to include a self-model. Simple movements need only reflexes. Walking in some direction could be modelled as moving the environment. Properties of self, such as hunger, could be modelled as global properties. Relations with other objects or organisms can be modelled as properties of those objects or organisms. (“Hunger exists. There is an apple. Closer. Closer. Closer. Eating. Apple is good. No hunger.”)
Having a model of myself is useful for getting information about myself. For example I could watch animals walking on ice; under large animals the ice breaks, under small animals the ice does not break. If I can model myself as an animal of given weight, I can predict whether the ice will break under me.
When I model myself as a human, I can use my knowledge about other people to gain knowledge about me. By watching what other people do and what happens then, I can predict what is good and bad to do, without trying first.
My thoughts and emotion can be modelled as external facts, until I notice that other people don’t share them. By analogy I can deduce that others have ones too; an incorrect analogy will make me also believe in thoughts and emotions of stones, trees, clouds etc.
Now back to the dog’s self-awareness… Since we don’t need the self-awareness all the time, it would be better to ask if a dog can be self-aware, and under what circumstances. It would be even better to taboo the word, and ask instead what kinds of models does dog have of themselves, and how can we experimentally prove it. (A model should allow knowing some things without trying them.)
I think self-awareness is not a “yes or no” question; it seems possible to model one’s own weight without modelling other aspects. Maybe after modelling enough partial aspects a pattern appears, and one starts to think what else could they model about oneself. But it does not mean that one automatically discovers everything. An attention must focus on the aspect; for example when people learn dancing, they become aware of some aspects of themselves they were not aware before. This means that self-awareness can be increased for a human… and possibly also for a dog. Even if dogs usually don’t develop some kinds of self-models, they could be able to develop them in some circumstances.
There are probably some kinds of self-awareness that humans don’t possess, but other intelligences could—for example being aware of one’s own algorithm. Some insights can be gained by meditation, by training social skills or rationality; insights about body can be gained by learning medicine, physical therapy, etc. What we usually call self-awareness is a baseline level of self-modelling that an average human in usual conditions is be able to develop. It could be interesting to analyze possible aspects of self-modelling and make a map of self-awareness.
That’s one good definition.
The thing is that there’s nothing complicated or mysterious what so ever about having a self model. If I were to write autopilot, I would include flight simulator inside, to test the autopilot’s outputs and ensure that they don’t kill the passenger (me) *. I could go fancy and include the autopilot in simulation itself, as to ensure that autopilot does not put airplane into situation when autopilot can’t evade a collision.
Presto, a self-aware airplane, which is about as smart as a brain damaged fruit fly. It’s even aware of the autopilot inside the airplane.
If I were to write the chess AI, the chess AI is recursive and it tries a move and then ‘thinks’: what would it do in the next situation? Using the self as a self model.
Speaking of dogs, the boston dynamics BigDog robot, from what i know, includes model of it’s own physics. It is about as smart as a severely brain damaged cockroach.
So you end up with a lot of non-living things being self aware. Constantly self aware, whereas a case can be made that humans aren’t constantly self aware. The non-living things that are dumber than a cockroach being self aware.
edit: one could shift goalposts and require that the animal be capable of developing a self model; well, you can teach dog to balance on a rope, and balancing on a rope pretty much requires some form of model of body’s physics. You can also make a pretty stupid (dumber than cockroach) AI in a robot that would make a self model, not only of robot body but of the AI itself.
[ I never worked writing autopilots and from what I gather autopilots don’t generally include this on runtime but are tested on a simulator during development. I value my survival and don’t have grossly inflated view of my coding abilities, so I’d add that simulator, and make a real loud alarm to wake the pilot if anything goes wrong. An example of me using self model to improve my survival. From what I can see other programmers that I know, many in beginning have inflated view of their coding abilities which keeps biting them in the backside all day long, until they get it, perhaps becoming more self aware ].
In this sense, self-awareness is easy, the question is awareness of what exactly, and how it is used.
Awareness of one’s body position is less interesting, it can be only used for movement. For a biological social species awareness of one’s behavior and mind probably leads to improved algorithms—perhaps is it necessary for some kind of learning.
I am not sure what benefits would self-awareness bring to a machine… and maybe it depends on its construction and algorithm. For example when a machine has task to compute something, a non-self-aware machine would just compute it, but a self-aware machine might realize that with more memory and faster CPU it could do the calculations better.
Yea. Well, here you enter realm of general intelligence—the general intelligence would just look at the world, see itself, and figure things out including the presence of self and such.
I’m not convinced that it’s how it usually works for h. sapiens. I don’t believe that we are self aware as function of general intelligence, there’s why: we tend to have serious discussion of things like a philosophical zombie. The philosophical zombie is a failure to recognize the physical item that is self as self. I seriously think we’re just hardcoded self aware—we perceive some of our thought processes in similar way to how we perceive external world. This confuses the hell out of people, to the point that they fail to recognize themselves in a physical system (hence p-zombies).
Some details about how exactly it works for homo sapiens could be found in works of Vygotsky and Piaget—they did some cool experiments about what kind of reasoning is human child generally able at what age. Some models need time and experience to develop, though maybe we have some hardware support that makes it click faster. For example at some age children start to understand the conservation of momentum (when an interesting object disappears behind a barrier, they no longer look at the point where it disappeared, but at the opposite side of the barrier, where it should appear). At some age children start to understand that their knowledge is different from other people’s knowledge (a child is shown some structure from both sides, another person only from one side, and a child has to say which parts of structure did the other person see). So our models develop gradually.
Modelling thinking is difficult, because we cannot directly observe the thoughts of others, and the act of observing interferes with what is being observed. There are techniques that help. It is difficult to recognize oneself as a physical system, when one doesn’t know how exactly does the system work. If I wouldn’t have any information about how brain works, what reason would I have to believe that my mind is a fuction of my brain? My muscles are moving and I can see their shapes under my skin, but I never observe a brain in action. In a similar way, by observing a robot you would understand the wheels and motors, but not the software and the non-moving parts of hardware; even if you were that robot.