Inverness Moon wrote...
Shandepared wrote...
Who says I'm playing Devil's Advocate?
I'm still waiting to hear about your Nobel Prize, you know, since you've done what no one else has been able to do and created an artificial intelligence. You've also completely deciphered the secrets of the brain, granting you the authority to tell me whether or not a machine can be alive, proving conclusively that a mind is not the particular result of an organic brain.
The idea that an organic brain is not a requirement of consciousness is a product of common sense and nothing worthy of a Nobel Prize. I can think of no reason for why it would be impossible to create a program that behaves as an organic brain does. Of course to do that you need to understand how the brain works first, which we don't.
Even then, I don't need real world examples to speculate in the science fiction universe of Mass Effect.
But anyhow, feel free to tell me why we could not simulate an organic brain on a computer if we knew how it worked.
Shand can't, and for the most part what he's arguing about doesn't make sense. Something can be "alive" and also not be conscious. Organics that fall into this category include bacteria, plants and, depending on your religious/political affiliations unborn babies. Furthermore, he uses the term "mind" - there are so many definitions for a "mind" that he can pick and choose what to ignore/put down as he pleases. There is no attempt to be more specific/he makes no effort to define his position.
As for "the brain," the brain is nothing but a word that humans use to describe the largest collection (or collections, in some cases) of neurons in an organism. Take a frog's brain and a human brain - something clearly can have "a brain" yet not have "a mind" (in Shand's words), so there must be something else to make a "mind" (in Shand's words). Therefore, logically it seems that this biological argument against the Geth is inadequate - having a brain is not necessary nor sufficient for possessing "a mind."
At best, something must be organic AND must have this other factor to have "a mind"; at worst, neurons have nothing to do with having "a mind" or not.
Where was that said? I think that is untrue. While the geth would have less reason to lie because of their lack of emotion, claiming that they are unable to seems quite ridiculous. Case in point, the geth extranet behavioral experiment that Legion tells you about.
Legion said it. The Geth extranet behavioural experiment is an interesting point you bring up, but depending on how you see it, it can be seen/not be seen as lying. When I first came across that convo, it seemed more like the Geth were studying organic behaviour, and thus performing an experiment - technically, they could simply be altering a variable in the experimental conditions to see how organics react. They didn't "lie" to anyone, just planted false information on the extranet (which is completely different from Legion, a platform designed to interact directly with organics, lying to Shepherd's face).
Furthermore, from personal experience, I honestly cannot see how a computer program can "lie" given how logical computer language is. Specifically, I mean to have a program produce a fake output KNOWING that it is fake - without being deliberately programmed in in the first place. And given the Geth ancestry, unless the Quarians programmed some of the Geth VI to lie to them (why would the Quarians want the Geth to lie to them?), the Geth would not have this kind of program in their network UNLESS they evolved it. Of course, this also implies the evolution of their sense of self-awareness/preservation, cost vs. payoff...basically, they would have to have evolved a sense of advanced Game Theory in order to lie convincingly to an organic.
Which, ironically, would imply their sentience.
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