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

On Fri, 30 Mar 2006, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:

Mikko Heikelä wrote:
On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:

Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
We humans on the other hand can know if we are inside the Matrix ;^).

How? I would have taken this remark as a joke, but Tayssir below and
Pascal B. elsewhere seem to take it at face value.

Probably because Tayssir was being absurd and just kinda riffing. ;) I
mean, I thought that sentence was intended as a joke, but the preceding
one seemed kinda serious, and I wanted to treat it as a serious example
in order to bring out the feeling that my notion of self-awareness
seems to not be as strong as various philosophers'.

Ok, I'm relieved. I thought I had perhaps missed the existence of a rigorous refutation of solipsism and brain-in-a-vat scenarios.

Beside the notion of self-awareness, I think carefully inspecting the notion of knowing is also needed in this kind of philosophical discussion. E.g. if one formulates a notion of knowledge for which it is true that we know we are not brains in vats, it might turn out that also the animals that we consider conscious would know the same thing in the same sense.

-Mikko
.