Robot Rights

“As long as humans or animals are still tortured on this earth, we have bigger problems to tackle than the ethical situation of robots!” said one of the many outraged comments under this German newspaper article I recently read. I can’t say that I am not quite sympathetic with this view, but Kate Darling’s idea of why we should think about robot rights now is motivated in an interestingly different way.

“We should give robots similar rights to animals – they should for example not be allowed to be tortured” says Darling, who is an IP Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in Intellectual Property and Law & Economics.

I think a lot of people stopped reading after this statement – so if you were about to, too, just bear with me for a little longer.

Physics x Consciousness

For long, scientists have held the belief that material entities, stars, planets, rocks,atoms, quarks are fundamentally different from the rather intangible aspects of our existence like, ideas, thoughts and consciousness. However, recent developments in theoretical physics, most notably Grand Unified Theory, String theory and quantum mechanics have brought those seemingly hippy ideas of 'oneness' into the realm of scientific inquiry. Since 1864, when Maxwell published a paper explaining the electromagnetic field which outlines the dynamic inter-relation between electricity and magnetism, which were then thought of as completely separate phenomenon, physicists have worked on trying to unify all observable phenomenon into a grand unified theory, or as it's popularly known, the 'Theory of everything'. While we are still far from developing that theory, work on it has sparked a number of questions which may very well hold the answer '42'.

Meditate on this I will

My last post on binaural beats got me thinking of something we touched upon when discussing the electroencephalograph (EEG) machine and methods last semester. The lecturer showed us slides of EEG readings from patients in various states and I remember being startled at one example where it was shown that an alert mind is in a beta frequency of 13 – 30 Hz but that some people who are awake can lower themselves into a theta frequency of only 4 – 8 Hz. This is a lower frequency of brain activity than that shown in daydreaming. The only instances where lower frequencies are recorded in the delta category of 1 – 3 Hz are when people are unconscious or in a deep sleep. The image below the break puts this in context.

Invasion of the Toxoplasmoids

They are among us. They look just like us, but they are not just like us. They are hosts to the Invaders, beings who lodge themselves inside human brains, controlling behaviour for their own primordial ends. The elderly lady beside you on the bus who smells faintly of cat-pee and mothballs – she could be one of Them. The student behind you, snuffling loudly and popping another Panadol from the packet – is he one? The orange girl nattering into her mobile with one hand, plucking fine white hairs out of her scarf with the other – is it her? Indeed, given the statistics, the chances are that at least one member of the CogSci class is host to behaviour-modifying t.gondii oocysts. Even you, gentle reader, could be one of Them.

Binaural beats

When I was reading about the Mozart effect in RLV Poehls earlier blog post I was reminded of a few pieces I had previously read on the effects of listening to Binaural beats. Binaural beats are a type of musical frequency which, when listened to through headphones send a different signal through each ear into your brain. These frequencies can be tailored to many different states but the desired result is to suggest a particular state to your brain. So for example a frequency of x hertz suggests to your brain that it is time to go to sleep. Many people use binaural beats as a lullaby in this way with many playlists on YouTube for this purpose and even several mobile phone apps on IPhone and Android.

Retroperception: Problems for Enactivism?

Yes, it’s consciousness again. Or rather, perceptual experience. This time, some musings about what the newly-minted cognitivist phenomenon of retroperception (see this Mindhacks post for a summary) might mean for enactivist theories of perceptual experience.

Before we begin, let us take note of a critique levelled against cognitivism by the enactivist Thompson (2007) - that the representationalist, information processing account has replaced the mind/body problem with a new mind/mind problem. This is to say, how and why does hidden cognitive processing, which goes on ‘in the dark’, yield conscious experience, and how can we take seriously a body of thought which so often seems to end up pushing our experience of the world towards an epiphenomenal status? Contrary to representationalist accounts, enactivism denies that human beings experience an ‘external’ world indirectly via some kind of 'internally constructed' model and suggests instead that, through our sensorimotor systems, we have a form of direct access that constitutes the ‘bringing forth’ of a subjective, experiential world. Therefore, like enactivism's forerunner phenomenology, the description of our experiential world could be seen as enactivism’s prime concern. This must include explaining the perceptual quirks that have been comprehensively documented by cognitive psychologists. In their influential 2001 article, Noe and O’Reagan do a good job of explaining various peculiar facets of visual experience within their own theoretical framework. 

What does Intelligence give us?

Does increased intelligence result in more “mind”? Aside from being contentious, the point I am trying to illustrate and question here is whether people who are smarter qualify as human minds more than those of lower intelligence.  Would you be a different person if you were more intelligent? Would you have the same opinions and personality traits? It goes without saying that an increase in IQ does cause a change in brain morphology as does simply getting older.  However could this trait be a scalable measure of our ability to experience and to have qualia?

I was reading an article recently which postulated what life might be like if everyone were twice as intelligent. For this purpose we shall take that to mean scoring twice as high on an IQ test. One of the resulting benefits they discussed might be a greater appreciation for art, science, music etc.  This seems to hint explicitly that appreciation is linked to understanding.  Intelligence by that fact must equate to more than just computing ability.