Obviously self-awareness is simply a variant of awareness.
That seems reasonable.
Awareness is an internal image (or map) of the environment.
Maybe, but that description doesn’t ring true, at least not at first.
Humans are self-aware - which means that we can differentiate “ourselves” from the “environment”.
I like that definition, and it helps eliminate one of the difficulties of defining self-awareness that I noticed earlier. Computers can have thermostats that take their own temperature and adjust their fan accordingly. That seems to be a way of monitoring and responding to their own activity, which I think may be a form of unintelligent self-awareness. But your definition seems to make that example invalid, because the computer doesn’t distinguish whose temperature it is taking. You could move its thermostat to an ice tray and it would print out what that temperature was, thus showing its inability to distinguish itself from its environment. Or maybe I’m missing something.
The other example I gave, of a computer monitoring its own memory usage, still seems to fall under your definition of self-awareness, unless that monitoring is really more similar to the thermostat example than I’m aware of. If a computer monitors its own memory usage as distinct from other computers it is connected to, but can read data from, that seems to be a way for it to distinguish itself from its environment, right? Or am I missing something?
Now, how do we know that some “arbitrary being” is self-aware? We cannot “poke” into his head, and observe the thought processes - at least now, and in the foreseeable future.
We can do that with computers, I think. In fact, I think that’s pretty common.
So we have to use an indirect approach, namely the Turing test. As long as the “other party” responds in a manner which insinuates or indicates self-awareness, we must accept that he/she/it is self-aware.
I don’t think you have to actually be self-aware to pass the Turing test, do you? I ask because I don’t see how the Turing test would prove a machine was self-aware if a “dumb machine” could pass it. If it’s not an infallible test, I don’t think anyone
must accept it.
Now one may object that this means nothing, since the “other party” merely emulates or simulates the verbal capacity of a human being. This kind of objection is nonsense. We grant each other the ability to be self-aware precisely on the same grounds.
I don’t think that’s true, at least not in my case. I think other people are self-aware for reasons that are different than the Turing test. In the Turing test, if I understand it correctly, you talk through a medium and try to guess if your correspondent is a machine or a person. But in everyday life, I think my reason for supposing that other people are self-aware is more practical: I think that anything is self-aware if it can feel itself, see itself, smell itself, lick itself, and/or hear itself, and respond to what its senses tell it. People can do that. Therefore, they are self-aware, at least by my somewhat simple definition.
Perhaps the more important thing is to justify the assumption that people must be intelligent. I think intelligence is spiritual, and therefore there are spiritual reasons for my assumption that people are intelligent, though I certainly think practical experience plays a role: intelligent beings can have a conversation with you, laugh at a joke with you, have an idea with you, and worship with you.
I think a computer could conceivably identify a joke and play a laugh track, and it could identify your words and play a sentence back that makes sense in context. I don’t think a computer can have ideas or worship, but an android could make itself look like it was worshiping.
I’ve lost my train of thought. Hopefully soon I’ll get it back. But I definitely don’t think the only way to know that other people are intelligent is by using the Turing test.
You remember the phrase from Forrest Gump: “stupid is as stupid does”?
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