Arda Sever
@Saccha
15 okur puanı
Ekim 2019 tarihinde katıldı
Many business corporations also recognize animals as sentient beings, though paradoxically, this often exposes the animals to rather unpleasant laboratory tests. For example, pharmaceutical companies routinely use rats as experimental subjects in the development of antidepressants. According to one widely used protocol, you take a hundred of rats and place each rat inside a glass tube filled with water. The rats struggle again and again to climb out of the tubes, without success. After fifteen minutes most give up and stop moving. They just float in the tube, aphatetic to their surroundings.
You now take another hundred rats, throw them in, but fish them out of the tube after fourteen minutes, just before they are about to despair. You dry them, feed them, give them a little res and throw them back in. The second time, most rats struggle for twenty minutes before calling quits. Why the extra six minutes? Because the memory of past success triggers the release of some biochemical in the brain that gives the rats hope and delays the advent of despair. If we could only isolate this biochemical, we might use it as antidepressant for humans. But numerous chemicals float a rat's brain at any given moment. How can we pinpoint the right one?
For this you take more group of rats, who have never participated in the test before. You inject each group with particular chemical, which you suspect to be the hoped-for antidepressant. You throw the rats into the river. If rats injected with chemical A struggle for only fifteen minutes before becoming depressed, you can cross out A on your list. If rats injected with chemical B go on thrashing for twenty minutes, you can tell the CEO and the shareholders that you might have just hit the jackpot.
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On July 7 2012 leading experts in neurobiology and the cognitive sciences gathered at the University of Cambridge, and signed the Cambridge Decleration of Consciousness, which says that 'Convergent evidence indicated that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviours.
Everything a human does - including reporting on allegedly conscious states - might in theory be the work of non-conscious algorithms.
The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age. Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration. Two year later he committed suicide. The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain; can you pass for a straight man? Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you really were - it mattered only what others thought about you. According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay man in the 1950s. It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not. It will matter only what people think about it.
Consider, for example, the following Freudian argument; 'Armies harness the sex drive to fuel military aggression. The army recruits young man just when their sexual drive is at its peak. The army limits the soldiers' opportunities of actually having sex and releasing all that pressure, which consequently accumulates inside them. The army then redirects this pent-up pressure and allows it to be released in the form of military aggression'. This is exactly how steam engine works. You trap boiling steam inside a closed container. The steam builds up more and more pressure, until suddenly you open a valve, and release the pressure in a predetermined direction, harnessing it to propel a train or a loom. Not only armies, but in all fields of activity, we often complain about the pressure building up inside us, and we fear that unless we 'let off some steam', we might explode.