I want to study the nature of consciousness by understanding the relationship between human, nature and machine. I want to explore the connection between human consciousness, computer processing and data sense, by randomly assign different personalities to chatbots. 

   Nearly a century of scientific history has witnessed the development of neuroscience and cognitive science. On the question of the nature of consciousness, people seem to have generally acquiesced to the metaphysical position of physicalism. Physicists say that your feelings, emotions, and thoughts are only produced by the neural state in your brain in a certain way, and in the final analysis, all of this is determined by the activities of the micro-physical level.

   However, as conscious animals, our intuition seems to tell us that there is still a gap between the physical world and the spiritual world: even if empirical science can infer through experiments, “When this person’s brain… Is conscious”.

   Why do human beings and other creatures need a variety of subjective feelings-pain, joy, confusion, depression-why not accept external stimuli like robots and directly output behaviors? All the above confusions can be summed up by David Chalmers’ famous “difficult problem of consciousness”: the key to the problem of consciousness is to explain qualia or “what it feels” because they are so. Direct, private, unspeakable, incompatible with the objective picture of the physical world.

   My original idea was to make a rule-based chatbot, which simulates people’s dialogue logic by entering people’s chat history, social networking site accounts and other information. I was influenced by projects such as eternime, but after investigating, I believe that digital immortality is not the prototype of consciousness uploading. In the concepts of animism and neutral monism: “Life and death are only artificial when the physical system changes too much, it was a definition. There is no life and death in the physical system itself, only changes. consciousness exists before birth or after death. The old concept and memory of “you” will change to others, but consciousness itself will follow the physical. The system has always existed and changed, although the magnitude of change would be far beyond human imagination. According to the neutral monism point of view, consciousness and matter are the same thing. As long as matter exists, consciousness will exist, and vice versa. Different matter and different ways of existence of consciousness will be natural. The difference is different. The gap in between is much larger than the consciousness of the observable universe from the awareness of ants and the consciousness of the observable universe itself, from the matter from a photon to the earth to a black hole. If consciousness is related to physics There is no requirement for the lower limit of system complexity, so every electron is conscious.

    Based on that, I wanna to make a rule-based chatbot by randomly assign different personalities to them. Each chatbot would have the same conversation content（to simulate the content of acquired learning）and a different number. Each number represents a different consciousness formed innately to influence the thinking of chatbot. I hope that this device can let people feel the influence of innate consciousness on us during the conversation with chatbot, and reflect on the essence of consciousness by understanding the relationship between man, nature and machine.

 

Links：（WIP）

 

Tags：Consciousness upload, philosophy of mind, monism, animism, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, dialogue logic, social media, big data