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What is consciousness? Can a computer be conscious? Is your pet cat or dog conscious?

I came to this question as part of writing a book about setting intentions. As a researcher and linguist, I planned to use current, scientific research to lend credibility to the concept of setting and accomplishing personal, family, and community intentions.

This approach, however, led me to a roadblock. I ran right smack into motionless, dogmatic materialism. If the materialist conception of the world is correct, then humans have no free will, therefore intentionality, as I intended to mean in my book, could not be possible. We are nothing but a bundle of neurons, according to the fated materialist view, and each and every thought, act, or emotion is predetermined.

Physicist Daniel Levy asserts that “whatever free will might be, it is a phenomenon of mind, and phenomena of mind must, in my physicalist conviction, be understood in relation to phenomena of the brain.” In his book Neural Holism and Free Will Levy asks: “Shouldn’t this make us despair — this realization that we are automatons with no powers of deliberation, no choices, relentlessly driven to perform mechanically, like a robot or computer? Not in the least. Under the proposed description, our responses (optimally) reflect all of our beliefs and desires, as represented in our neural states.”

I don’t know about you, but his explanation doesn’t make me feel all that great. And how does consciousness fit in?

According to neuroscientist Francis Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis we simply need to locate the area of the brain that controls what we think of as free will to unlock the secrets hidden there in the tissue. Author Stephen Pinker is confident we’ve already located this special spot. Free will, according to Pinker in How the Mind Works, is probably located in the pre-frontal cortex.

If the physical human brain creates consciousness from its algorithmic workings then artificial intelligence — robots with computer brains — could become conscious according to some materialists. Many are working hard and with conviction to find the “singularity” — the tipping point of computation that they believe creates consciousness. The exact amount of computation necessary to flip the switch is unknown. (Do you think they will succeed?)

In any case, I was stymied in my writing. No free will? Just a pile of firing neurons? Conscious computers? I suddenly desired to research current philosophy and other non-materialistic scientific theories and determine for myself: Can people set and achieve intentions (outside of the Materialist box) or are we wired and fated from birth?

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*wC0kmq48q7hz5Vp6)
Photo by 8machine _ on Unsplash

I felt the need to look beyond simply what “made sense” to a brain that I know is very human, fallible, and misperceiving. After all, I’d just read The Invisible Gorilla by Chabris and Simons, and Denial: Self Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origin of the Human Mind by Varki and Brower and so I was educated (and experienced) in illusion and delusion.

Illusion: “A thing that is or is likely to be wrongly perceived or interpreted by the senses: the illusion makes parallel lines seem to diverge by placing them on a zigzag-striped background” — from the Oxford Dictionary online.

Delusion: “An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder” — from the Oxford Dictionary online.

Based on these definitions, I may be both illuded and deluded — but mine is not the only misperceiving brain. We all misperceive the world around us. For example, stand 30 meters, or about 98 feet away from your friend and ask them to clap their hands together. Nothing strange happens. But just one step farther away and things go awry and you no longer see and hear the clap at the same time. The 80-millisecond rule, as it is called, skews our perception, and sight and sound are no longer synchronized. It’s like watching that bad, late-night movie, or poorly edited YouTube video where the voice lags behind the lips forming the words.

Although about three-quarters of scientists in the early 21st century say they are materialists, that doesn’t mean the dogma of materialism is correct. Not that long ago, doctors used blood letting as a routine health treatment, and “cured” syphilis with mercury. The history of science is full of foibles and mistaken beliefs. Astrophysicist Mario Livio points out five big boo-boos in his book Brilliant Blunders. Among the blunders: Darwin’s theory of “blended genes” that lost to Mendel’s laws of inheritance (Mendel’s thinking was derided and dismissed at the time); Lord Kelvin’s relatively young estimate of the age of the earth lost to more accurate radiometric dating that puts the earth at about 4.5 billion years; and Hoyle’s steady-state model of a constant universe lost to the Big Bang theory and an expanding universe. Evolution is a reality, including the evolution of scientific thinking and the practices that come from it. (Would you care to try the radium cure?!)

As a linguist studying in the late 20th century, I was excited with our attempts to understand and apply artificial intelligence. We believed decades ago that we were on the verge of thinking, dancing robots. Yet R2D2 was a no-show; all attempts to create conscious computers over the previous 60 years have failed (hell, we can’t even get a self-driving car!) Physicist David Deutsch in an essay in Aeon magazine said that artificial general intelligence has gotten no closer to its goal than when it began. According to Nobel Prize winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind, we will never create conscious computers.

Wouldn’t you rather have a conscious pet than a conscious computer, anyway? Most of us don’t fear our pets taking over the world!

But this raises another questions — is your pet conscious? Try this test. Put your cat or dog in front of a mirror every day for a month (place it near their bed or food dish) and let them get used to seeing themselves. Next, put a red dot on their forehead when they are asleep. After they wake up, observe how they react the next time they are in front of the mirror. Do they notice the red dot and try to remove it? Some researchers believe that trying to get the dot off is a sign of self awareness, and self awareness equals consciousness.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/0*z-NbQntBPktpODgv)
Photo by Karina Vorozheeva on Unsplash

This test, the positive mirror test has had some interesting results. There are many animal species who noticed the weird dot researchers put on their heads and tried to remove it: humans (one and one half to two years and older), bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, dolphins, elephants, orcas, magpies, and anecdotally, dogs and cats.

Whether or not your pet is conscious, researcher Rupert Sheldrake has clearly demonstrated a telepathic connection between pets and their owners. Dogs know when their owners are coming home, even when those owners return at an unexpected time by unusual transportation. Cats know when their owners are going to take them to the vet. Vets are aware of this and often won’t make appointments for cats! You can join in his fun pet experiment and explore the telepathic link between you and your pet.

Rupert Sheldrake has also created experiments that demonstrate we can affect things by looking at them. He’s shown that people know when they are being stared at. (You knew this already, didn’t you?)

Sheldrake theorizes that we are able to tell when people stare at us, even at a long distance through binoculars, because social animals coordinate together not only by communicating messages but also instantaneously — as one — due to what he terms the morphic field.

He sees the knowing you’re being stared at phenomena as one example of how our minds extend beyond our brains. Your mind is reaching out beyond your body. By merely looking at things your mind is touching them. He suggests that our minds are field-like and spread out beyond our bodies kind of like how magnetic fields spread out beyond magnets.

Sheldrake is not a Materialist. He argues that if it is true that your consciousness is a product of brain function, then it follows that it is all in your head! If the materialist view is true, then there must be a little, virtual replica of the real world inside your head. Instead, Sheldrake believes that when you see something the object is where it appears to be because reality is a process that involves your consciousness.

Until recently the term “consciousness” was practically a dirty word in academic circles because it comes a bit too close to the non-materialist concept of “soul” or “spirit.” But the study of consciousness has come out of the closet in a big way and there are now many theories of consciousness. Some of these theories are pretty wild and crazy, but what’s crazier than the fact that we’re conscious of being conscious without a commonly held definition of what it means to be conscious?

Time will tell if materialism will be validated or debunked; though many believe it has already been invalidated by quantum mechanics as demonstrated in the double-slit experiment. The Double-slit experiment shows that matter reduces to quantum waves or potentiality; it establishes a foundation of possibility and the requirement of participation which support the likelihood of free will.

As for me and my book about setting intentions, I’m going to have to keep searching for the “truth” about free will, but in general, I reject materialism because it asserts — without evidence — that we have none. (How might the application of Law change if we, as a society, acknowledged and acted as though people have no free will? Think about it.)

My intuition says materialism is just wrong, and others — well-known and respected scientists — although in a minority, agree that consciousness is not merely a product of matter reducible to matter. I’ll introduce some of these respected thinkers and their theories in future missives, and consider further what is consciousness and why it matters — or if it is matter.

By：Maureen Carroll
Link：https://medium.com/@carroll_94827/what-is-consciousness-748c41ac8f99


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Mankind is quite conservative, and very wary of new technologies. This conservatism is evolutionary justified. Over hundreds of millions of years, the development of new opportunities was slow, our ancestors had hundreds of thousands of years for psychological adaptation. Now a lot of fears are connected with neural networks. But in order to understand this question, one must first understand the difference between organic life and mechanisms.

Our life is based on water-soluble substances. All reactions in biological systems can proceed at relatively low temperatures. And a relatively small amount of energy is spent on supporting life processes. If we look at the systems of the simplest cells, then we can see pumps, electric motors, electric generators and many other structural elements that are arranged very perfectly. And at the level of cells and at the level of the body, you can find structural elements that have analogues in our technologies. For example, a bacterial flagellum and an eye. So biological life is also based on nano-mechanisms optimized by long-term evolution. It can be assumed that more advanced technologies of the future will make it possible to create the same microscopic mechanisms from structural materials familiar to us, but there will still be a fundamental difference. This difference is the energy required to bring materials into circulation and reuse. Material circulation processes in biological systems occur at low temperatures and are highly energy efficient. The melting point of plastics starts at a few hundred degrees Celsius, while most metals melt at temperatures in excess of a thousand degrees. At low temperatures, it is easy to manipulate molecules and ions to build biological systems, but at high temperatures, the manipulation will be much more complex and much more energy-intensive. Also in the process of functioning — a cyclist by eating an apple will be able to get energy to travel many kilometers, but from the same apple it is impossible to extract such an amount of energy to feed the engine to overcome the same distance.

As a result, it turns out that the fundamental difference is in the concentration of energy. Biological systems require little energy to build and rebuild, and are highly energy efficient to operate. But the same energy deficit leads to the fact that the speed of movement of biological organisms is relatively low. While mechanisms require a huge amount of energy to create and rebuild, they also consume a lot of energy in the process of functioning. But on the other hand, consuming a huge amount of energy, they can develop huge speeds of movement.

For robots, even the most technologically advanced, all this will also be true. And this will also be true for the brain of a robot. So far, there are not even hints of technologies that will be fundamentally different from existing ones. So humanity and artificial intelligence will occupy different ecological niches. We are more comfortable on cool planets in the circumstellar habitable zone. Intelligent robots will aim closer to the star where the concentration of energy is much higher.

One important conclusion follows from this — if humanity retains intelligence and has a desire to survive, then in such comfortable conditions as on Earth or Mars, biologically designed mechanisms should be used first of all. In addition, it is very environmentally friendly. On our comfortable planet, non-biological mechanisms are really in demand quite a bit. Mainly in the field of transmission and accumulation of information, in the field of rapid movements, as well as in the field of energy generation and high concentrations. With the development of all the possibilities of genetic engineering, we can make our life even more comfortable than it is now, and with minimal damage to the environment. If we refuse to move quickly around our planet, then practically everything necessary for life on our planet can be organized only on the basis of biological mechanisms. Even the main main fear of the present time — neural networks can be implemented not on the basis of silicon processors, but on the basis of biological neurons and synapses. Genetic engineering can also greatly improve our own computational abilities. The processor, compared to the parts of our brain, is quite primitive, but it has specialized blocks for certain calculations. The parts of our brain are designed for everyday computing. The capabilities of the brain can be expanded by adding specialized departments, for example, an analogue of a mathematical co-processor or a department of a neural interface, for example, to control complex mechanisms.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:786/format:webp/1*gLmW8mZoglMaucVhbQSz3A.png)
This image was generated by Playground AI

Another conclusion is that biological and non-biological mechanisms compete weakly. They will be successful in different ecological niches, so it will not be a struggle, but rather a symbiosis. But this is in the event that artificial evolution is launched intelligently. But with a reasonable approach, non-biological mechanisms are indispensable in such dangerous environments as space. They just need mechanisms that are resistant to high temperatures and hard radiation. And besides, long interstellar flights require spaceships that can self-repair. Self-healing spaceships can be done with the help of bots, but spaceships that will have the properties of a living organism will be much more advanced.

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:786/format:webp/1*PlcgAFe4tfFvLtwA0SuYeQ.png)

At the same time, we must already understand that we will be able to maintain our ecological niche, but the niche of non-biological creatures is much wider. Perhaps the future belongs to cybernetic life, when both organic and structural materials will be used in one organism. But perhaps they will be effective on the border of ecological niches or in special conditions.

So the future is in cooperation, not in enmity. And everything necessary for this must be done now.

By：Simon Litt
Link：https://simon-litt.medium.com/biological-life-vs-machinery-9aff0f8ec169


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“Idon’t like AI,” my mom yells from afar before we say hello. I’ve called to ask my parents about robots and a stickier subject — robot caregiving for later life. My mom is suspicious about allowing cold technology to take over warm, everyday tasks — convenience be damned. My dad is more optimistic, but he’s still a bit skeptical of how well a society that’s had its share of slip-ups will safely integrate robots.

Perched in their condo on the South Carolina coast, with many retiree neighbors, they have an up-close view of end-of-life uncertainties.

Artificial intelligence has brought robots a step nearer to the public consciousness as we question the myriad uses of machines that can deliver our food, drive our cars, and maybe even do our jobs.

“It’s gone from being a topic among technologists, to computer scientists, to being a topic among everyone,” says robot designer Carla Diana, the author of My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human. As people consider how data they generate feeds artificial intelligence algorithms, interest in the technology has snowballed.

I asked ChatGPT — what else? — what it would take to make robots palatable as caregivers. ChatGPT identified itself as a type of robot, but noted its limited caretaking capacity. It recommended instead human-like robots “so that they can establish a sense of trust and familiarity with the elderly people they are caring for.”

Many experts disagree.

Humanoid robots are generally difficult to design because of our myriad expectations for human behavior. When a robot has a mechanical appearance, like the box-on-wheels food delivery bots tested on college campuses, user demands are low. While we expect these machines to perform simple tasks accurately, we accept that their abilities are limited, says Eileen Roesler, a psychologist at the Technical University of Berlin. Their appearance makes this obvious.

An expert in human-robot interactions, Roesler points to an experiment in which a robot was designed with expressive eyes meant to establish the “trust and familiarity” ChatGPT parroted. It backfired.

> “If you get an eyebrow in the wrong place, you can so easily communicate something that’s not intended.”

Those friendly eyes were “perceived more as sunny, nice, even kind of a toy,” she says. This can make even a highly precise machine seem unreliable and untrustworthy.

When a robot has a human appearance, we expect it to behave like a human, Roesler says. That means moving aside to make room for strangers in an elevator or directing its eyes toward a mess while cleaning it up. Creating robots that can respond to a myriad of these situations just as a human would be an insurmountable challenge for designers.

## Finding affection in the uncanny valley
According to the uncanny valley hypothesis, a robot becomes more acceptable as it becomes more human-like. But at a certain point, a robot that is uncannily similar to a human, yet just slightly “not right,” arouses our suspicion, makes the robot seem creepy, and causes people to reject it. Even though we know the robot is not a human, our brains paint it with human expectations.

“Abstraction is our best resource” for avoiding these problems, Diana says. She once designed a robot whose expressive eyebrows had to be removed. It was too complicated to program natural eyebrow movements, and unexpected eyebrow movements unnerved users. “If you get an eyebrow in the wrong place, you can so easily communicate something that’s not intended,” Diana says. Getting these details right on humanoid robots, she adds, is a game of diminishing returns.

In some cases, a robot needs to mimic human behavior to complete its task. A robot barreling down a hallway in a straight line might be effective, but it won’t convert skeptics. So robots delivering medications through busy hospital hallways, Roesler says, should be programmed to move predictably around others and avoid collisions, just as people do. Particularly when robots will encounter strangers, such as delivery bots or housecleaners that might pass your neighbors on the sidewalk, it pays to incorporate a few human touches.

My parents, who are regulars at a few local eateries, find automated food delivery easier to fathom than homecare. “What if they’re delivering your pizza?” my dad quizzes my mom, who’s been skeptical so far.

“OK, now, food,” my mom says. “I’m willing to go with food.”

![image](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/0*hjRTN1WmGVq5uLoz.jpg)
Paro, a robot seal which was developed in Japan and is sometimes used in psychological therapy. (Jaap Arriens / Alamy)

## Adjusting attitudes toward technology
As for whether or not older adults would find robot caregivers acceptable, “that would likely depend on a variety of factors, including cultural attitudes toward technology, personal beliefs about the role of caregivers, and individual experiences with robots and other forms of technology,” ChatGPT responds.

I’m imagining the perks of a robot maid when Dad wonders aloud how much mobility you retain by doing your own chores, and whether it’s worth it to get some sort of robot maid. He’s right — preventing age-related muscle loss can boost both mobility and longevity.

“No machine can get it as clean as a human can,” my mom says. “Don’t ask me about a Roomba.”

Samuel Olatunji supervises human-robot interaction pilot projects as a robotics researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with people who are encountering robot helpers for the first time. He’s not surprised that people like my parents are skeptical. “Movies, novels, and the media generally portray robots as perfect, as ready to take over the world,” he says. “When people get to experience the robots, in reality, the robots are not there.” Even a task like lifting a person and turning them in bed is still under development as scientists untangle our nuanced expectations for how robots behave. But robots can feed people, fetch items, and do chores like laundry. In other words, they are useful, but far from the independent-thinking caregivers that have inspired fearsome — if unrealistic — cinematic storylines. Maybe that’s a good thing.

> Even experts find it hard to predict what robot behaviors people might like.

Like other researchers, Olatunji is adamant that robots are assistants that will free up staff in assisted living facilities to engage in more complex tasks with residents, not replace deeply needed face time. If a robot could dole out pills or help us put on our shoes, medical teams would have more time to engage in treatment plans, emotional health needs, or other complex topics and tasks.

Olatunji helps people acclimate to robots in pilot projects. He first shows people the space where they’ll meet the robot, then asks them to watch videos of the robot functioning properly. Next, research subjects observe a robot interacting with someone from a distance. Researchers assess whether the person seems willing to trust the machine before introducing the robot in person.

## Fears, both real and imagined
“Did we not learn from this virus, COVID, how messed up people got from being shut away from their loved ones?” Mom says. She’s worried that home visits from a robot will stand in for needed human interaction.

“One of the biggest fears, especially in social human-robot interaction is that people like caregivers are not supported by robots, but are erased by the robotic counterpart, which is perfectly mirroring their own role,” Roesler says. Given the current technical restrictions of robots, “this is not really a realistic scenario.”

“People kind of underestimate how much psychology there is that goes into human-robot interaction,” says roboticist Alexis Block, UCLA postdoc and soon-to-be assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Even experts, she says, find it hard to predict what robot behaviors people might like.

## A social boost, not a human substitute
Social robots designed to hug us or interact have been available for years. Ever-popular Paro, a robotic harp seal pup first available in 2003, is now on its eighth iteration and available in Japan, Australia, the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The stuffed robot nuzzles your hand and coos when petted. It can discern a smack, and can learn to avoid behaviors that provoke negative responses. Scientists say Paro is popular precisely because we’re not all that familiar with harp seal behavior. No one seems to mind that Paro sucks an oversized pacifier, which might seem strange in a more familiar cat or dog.

Paro’s 20 years of successful adoption, despite a $6,000 price tag, shows how impactful robots can be for people with dementia, Alzheimer’s, and even autism. Paro can simulate the benefits of animal therapy, and it is technically a biofeedback device. It can also simply be used as a companion.

Paro’s inventor, Takanori Shibata, says marketing can boost sales of robots and, seemingly, their acceptability, in the short term. But meeting expectations is key. “If the robots cannot satisfy the users, the sales will not continue long-term,” Shibata says. Still, a 2021 study of 55 hospitalized older adults with dementia or delirium found that 95 percent happily accepted the friendly seal.

When robots designed to offer social interaction start looking human, the reactions vary widely. A video of HuggieBot (below), a robot designed to provide positive, social touch through realistic hugs, shows a slightly human-like robot that offers hugs and provokes comments ranging from “aw, sweet” to “this is our sad future.”

https://youtu.be/nhq2Ps2wsUs

“If they’re pushing back, we know that the person immediately wants to be released from a hug,” says Block, a roboticist who invented the HuggieBot as a grad student. Huggers also like the robot’s soft covering, slight warmth, and responsiveness. If a user pulls back against the robot’s arms or stops squeezing, it quickly releases them.

Surprisingly, Block says, people prefer semi-spontaneous rubs, pats, and squeezes during a hug with her robot. In early tests, she tried having HuggieBot roughly replicate the hug it received. “[People] didn’t like that. They said it didn’t feel natural,” Block says. She had imagined that spontaneous gestures would be frightening: “I’ve thought people would think the robot was malfunctioning,” she says. She was wrong. “People said that it made them feel like the robot cared about them,” she says with a smile.

> Our demands for robots will be as unique as our individual health.

And in some care facilities, robots have already been well-received. In a Minnesota nursing home, Monarch Healthcare Management staffers incorporated semi-humanoid robots, including Pepper, for residents with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as CBS Evening News reported last fall. The programmable robots told jokes, showed residents photos from their childhood, and could even recognize some changes in vital signs.

“I expect within the next five years we will see more robots being used to support everyday activities of older adults, either in their individual homes or in life plan community settings,” says Wendy Rogers, an expert in human-robot interaction and technology acceptance at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an advisor to Hello Robot, a startup developing a complex robotic arm. She says our demands for robots will be as unique as our individual health and that robots could support anything from bathing and eating to medication management, grocery shopping, and transportation, to social engagement, as in the case of Paro. “Robots are being developed to support all of these activities,” she says.

Back in South Carolina, our conversation winds down, turning silly and speculative. My mom wonders if a robot might steal her jewelry. What if it’s programmed by a bad person? Do robots corrode and rust? “They should try their robots out here because saltwater ruins everything,” my dad says. And of course, they remind me, “Do your own dishes!”

An affordable robot for that can’t come soon enough.

By：proto.life
Link：https://medium.proto.life/can-we-learn-to-embrace-robotic-caregivers-231dbbd8291e

Can We Learn to Embrace Robotic Caregivers?

An aging population and elder care shortages means we may not have a choice.