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Artificial behavior, or intelligence?

Artificial behavior is an area of research that seems to have been missed, or skipped over, on the path that companies like Google are taking to develop artificial intelligence. They have also jumped straight to working on human intelligence. Why not start smaller first? What about a cat or dog, or an insect?

An insect may not seem very intelligent, and companies are probably not interested because they can't make much use of an artificial insect intelligence, but simple insects are quite complex. It is also quite probable that they have a consciousness, the thing that makes them "alive". Though we don't know what consciousness is, it is thought to arise naturally as a result of the complexity of the brain.

The interesting thing is that, if this is so (and it likely is), then there is no difference between a "live" human and an artificial human, a computer program that mimics the human brain. They are the same thing. We can say the same, then, of something like an insect or a fish. An insect's level of brain and behavioral complexity leads it to have an insect's level of consciousness. That is not as much as a human, but we still say that an insect is a living creature.

My interest is in this idea. That any level of computational complexity, resulting in the subsequent behavioral complexity of an organism, is a living creature to the extent of its complexity. This follows naturally from humans down the hierarchy of life forms of less and less complexity, down further to computer programs of less complexity.

If a computer program can be developed with the complexity of an insect, then that program is an insect. An actual, living creature, although with some modifications. For instance, it would not breathe oxygen, but that would not be a requirement to qualify for life. It could simply be made to breathe oxygen if the program dictated that without physical machinery continuously supplying oxygen that the program terminate or otherwise adversely alter its state such that we would say that oxygen is a requirement for proper function.

I have said all of this so that I can say that I have seen what I believe is the behavior of a living, artificial organism. It "appeared" in a behavioral complexity simulation that I am working on. The program can best be said to be a sort of water bug. It swims and lives in water, but it has to breathe oxygen (in other words, surface outside of the water briefly to breathe, or it will die). It has to eat and is able to reproduce, among other things.

All of this behavior was explicitly programmed in, but I noticed that the bug would behave in ways I didn't expect, and couldn't figure out why. The problem (I wouldn't call it that now) is that so many behaviors interact together that it becomes too complex to predict all the ways the program will behave. As I've added in more behavior, the complexity has increased. Watching the bug and interacting with it has convinced me completely that, in some sense, it is alive.

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