Image from the Sydney Morning Herald. |
This is your brain on blogs.
Any questions? |
From Wikipedia (for whatever that’s worth):
- Sentience: the ability of any entity to have subjective perceptual experiences.
- Consciousness: variously defined as subjective experience, awareness, the ability to experience feeling, wakefulness, the understanding of the concept self, or the executive control system of the mind.
- Creativity: defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the ability to create”, which, according to the threshold hypothesis, has a correlation to intelligence. (Note that experiments to prove this hypothesis has ended in mixed results.) Wikipedia actually requires, by their definition, that something of value be produced! I would make a strong argument that as long as something is being produced, wether of value or not, creativity is occurring. My initial reasoning is that the value of a created valuable is biased by wether the observer considers it to have value, and that is actually a measure of economics, not of philosophy or psychology.
- Intelligence: defined in Wikipedia as “…an umbrella term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, learning from past experiences, planning, and problem solving.” Of course this doesn’t really get a grip around the topic, as there are at least seven theories of intelligence listed, and two additional scientific definitions, including one published in Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, a 1996 report published by an APA task force, that itself references at least 5 theories. So, in toto, there’s been an awful lot of intelligence expended in defining what exactly intelligence is.
- Intentionality: the Wikipedia article defines this in a roundabout way to identify wether an act is intentional or not — essentially circular logic as far as definitions go. Further along, the article references Franz Brentano’s definition, stating that intentionality is a characteristic of “acts of consciousness”, which once again avoids providing a proper definition since acts of consciousness have many characteristics besides intentionality, although this definition does begin to hone in on it.
- Sapience: the ability to act with judgement. The Wikipedia article goes on to state that the terms sentience, self-awareness, and consciousness are used interchangeably with sapience in Sci-Fi. Hence the initial thrust of this research into what makes us human.
- Artificial Intelligence: “the study and design of intelligent agents”, or a machine that observes its environment, acquires knowledge from those observations, acts to ensure its success, and learns from those acts. This is a little different from Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. For a little chuckle, check out Asimov’s 30 Laws of Robotics. (I especially like #11.)
- Self-Awareness: In a bit of art imitating life imitating art, ad infinitum, ad imitatum, the self-referential definition for self-awareness appears to be awareness of oneself. As an individual.
