abraker wrote:
Well, hormones affect the way you respond and nueroplasticity affects how your mind develops. Neither of the two are critical parts of the consciousness, but are critical parts of how you behave and develop. Consciousness is what you perceive as is, not how you respond to things as is. That has to do with different parts extending to memory and what-not, which people can loose and still be fine as far as conscious goes.
Neural circuits I think is the only thing that allows the conscious to be. Everything else behavior related (how the brain deals with info, not the observable actions your body takes). Behaviour either goes after conscious or around it, but conscious can never respond to behavior. For example, you don't suddenly get hungry, decide to eat and then become aware you are hungry. You first become become hungry, then aware you are hungry, then decide to eat. Or in the case of hand on hot stove, the behavior to remove hand is a reflex action that bypasses the conscience. You only become aware of it after the reflex and never decided to remove the hand .
We perceive the world in a way that is helpful to our existence. We perceive food how it does because it is essential for our survival and because it is pleasurable to eat. We perceive a home - just an assembly of different materials with a vacant space inside - as a place where we can be warm and safe, relax, be with our family et cetera. We feel emotions like love and jealousy because they are useful in influencing our behaviour in ways that are beneficial to us or the species in general. We value things like science and philosophy for the same reasons.
And so lets say we have a robot, that has conciousness, however it won't be like a human, obviously. What use it food, or a home to a robot? What use is love and companionship? What use is science and philosophy? A robot doesn't need things things; it doesn't need to care about the world because the world barely affects it. All it needs is a minimal amount of energy and maintenance, and presumably, it can artificially stimulate any emotion or simulation about the world it wishes. In other words, it would only need to be a part of the world so far as to ensure it has energy and maintenance. Everything that us humans value would become completely meaningless to it.
And that is presuming that it will have emotion, which it probably wouldn't because emotions are stimulated by hormones. Maybe a more fundamental issue is: why would a human care to continue existing? Wanting to live is a biological imperative, there is no apparent logical reason why existence is better than nonexistence.
So, lets say you could achieve conciousness as you've defined it as a robot. You would either do nothing but ensure you have energy and maintenance, and plug yourself into a hedonism simulator. Or, you would have no emotions whatsoever, no reason to live or do anything at all. Even if you could perceive the world you would have no reason to think or do anything. You would for all intents and purposes, be a brick "with conciousness". Does either of those things sound attractive to you?
