Re: What language will be used to write the first self aware program?

On 2006-03-30 09:57:42 -0500, "Tayssir John Gabbour" <tayss_temp2@xxxxxxxxx> said:

Aren't there many programs which take their own existence into account?

But merely statically taking its own existence into account isn't really what we mean by self awareness.

I'll extend the example I used with Pascal's quine. If we alter this quine, the quine can't know it's been altered and will blithely execute incorrectly. If we were to, by analogy, genetically modify a human being so that his offspring were chimpanzees instead of humans (assuming fo the moment that this were possible) she would recognize that these children were not as they should be.

Awareness entails adaptive responsiveness to one's environment. Self awareness additionally entails adaptive responsiveness to one's self as another element in one's environment.

Various creatures are variously aware. For example, given two otherwise identical targets that differed only in their reflection of near ultraviolet radiation, you and I would not be able to distinguish between them. A honey bee would. Bees are aware of the near ultraviolet spectrum and we are not.

People are aware of their capacity to reproduce themselves. Quines are not.

In human beings awareness also entails qualia. We cannot say if this is true of other creatures or not.

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