The Turing Test: Affirming the Consequent?

[polytropos]

You are saying that evidence supports your theory but no amount of evidence can shake your theory.

But the burden of proof is not on me. I am not making a positive claim in this topic; the question is whether behavior is a sufficient basis for “thinking.” My point is that the evidence does not support that it is.

I said “you are arguing against any objective measure for thought” and you have not provided any, all you’ve said is there’s an objective difference in the clothes.

Which is enough to call into question the materialist’s suppositions, if he does not have an adequate theoretical basis.

This is circular, a human is that which thinks and that which thinks is human. There’s no way in, you’ve built yourself a perfect fortress.

That would be circular. Fortunately I didn’t say it where you quoted me.

I was using Turing’s theological objection, and again you have denied that God is omnipotent, explicitly this time.

Hm? Your saying “God pours thought into two bottles” does not make God pour thought into two bottles, nor does it require me to accept your argument or deny God’s omnipotence. I deny that trees are intelligent; it has nothing to do with God, it has to do with having no solid basis for considering trees to be intelligent.

Rats, you ignored my point again. My argument it that you cannot design a machine that can survive in a complex environment without using prioritization mechanisms which might look to it much like qualia. You’ve done nothing to disprove that argument, you’ve just waved your arms about by calling it vacuous, as if.

It was the bolded portion which I was disputing as vacuous. As I’ve pointed out, a prioritization mechanism for stimuli has no clear connection to qualia. We can consider simple machines that prioritize responses to certain environmental (name removed by moderator)uts, but one would reduce himself to absurdity by claiming that they therefore are subjects with qualia in the sense that we are. That is the point of the example of the camcorder: it’s simple, it takes in visual data and outputs it to a screen, but there is no reason to think that it has some experience of visual data over and above what it’s outputting.

So then we can add other features: let it detect sound, balance, touch. Set up a “nervous system” within it. What does the addition of software that let’s it say, “I see red,” when it takes in light with a wavelength of 700 nanometers do to justify that it’s intelligent? It seems very clear that I have responded to your point: simple systems don’t have anything analogous to qualia, and you have literally no theoretical account of why adding more “senses” leads to qualia, rather than just efficient processing.

My turn to play skeptic. Prove to me that qualia exist, and that my qualia are the same as yours. Prove that your qualia today are the same as your qualia yesterday.

I have not claimed that your qualia are the same as yours, or that my qualia are the same as yesterday. (My capacity for eating spicy foods has actually gone up a noticeable bit over the last few years, so I imagine my qualia might be changing, perhaps owing to the perceptual data that enters my system, maybe due to my coffee-drinking habit burning my taste buds.) I just claim that those who deny that they have qualia are philosophical zombies (by definition). They do not have a subjective experience (according to their own account).

 

[polytropos]

But this is exactly the question which Turing wants to avoid, because he knows people will disagree on the answer. So rather than spend the next 400 years trying to define it (roughly how long philosophers since Descartes have been trying to define consciousness), he ask how, in practice, do we distinguish.

I agree, that was Turing’s aim. And he has done much to advance the field of artificial intelligence. But it also follows quite naturally that when one changes the substance of the question, one gets a different answer. The new question avoids disagreement so long that it is taken to provide a criterion for artificial intelligence.

Intelligence is another vague concept, and somewhat nebulous. Is a walking machine really walking or only doing something which looks like walking? To me, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. So I would deny any possibility of a p-zombie.

Perhaps because I don’t think anyone, unless they are trying to justify a desperate philosophical conclusion, considers thinking as primarily manifested by external behavior. Acting like a human is simply not equivalent to thinking, so the “duck principle” falls short on a count of equivocation.

I would, however, like to see some response to my comments on why it is humanlike behavior that is a standard for machine intelligence. What in principle distinguishes the parsing of human language from other faculties that machines carry out? When two computers communicate over the internet, why are they not intelligent (or why don’t they think in the sense that Turing declines to define)? When a physicist uses Mathematica to generate a Taylor series for a mathematical model that lacks a neat, closed form solution and cannot be feasibly solved by a human hand, why is that computer not worthy of intelligence (and, presumably, rights) just as much as a computer that passes the Turing test? (As well as the other points left unanswered.)

 

[Peter_Plato]

Regarding your second point, I would have to disagree. Even if we assume full methodological naturalism, it seems more plausible that there are limits to what science can discover - but what science can discover does not determine what is real.

Furthermore, take something like the color of my shirt. Science can tell us what pigment it’s made out of. It can tell us what wavelength the light reflecting off of it is. It can tell us what happens when light passes through my cornea. It can tell us why it looks different to someone who is colorblind. It can tell us which regions of my brain are active when I look at my shirt.

But it can’t tell me what the color of my shirt is like; it’s just not a question science answers, which is not a slight to science, which is quite productive. Asserting that the qualia of my shirt color therefore shouldn’t be part of our ontology seems more like stipulation than following the evidence.

There is an analog here to the condition of blindsightedness. There are some instances of individuals who report being unable to “see,” subjectively speaking, but whose physiology provides the functional ability to avoid obstacles in their path. A blindsighted person can walk into a room and bypass all obstacles in their way. In other words they do not have conscious or subjective awareness of the physical world, but their neurofunctioning responds appropriately to that world.

A “Turing Test” [or, perhaps, more properly called “Turning Test”] regarding sightedness would conclude that because these individuals do “perform” as if they have sight - i.e., turn away from obstacles appropriately - they do, indeed, have sight. Yet something important seems to be missing.

You suggested these “missing” features are something like intention and subjective access to qualia. Those seem critical also in the case of blind sightedness because such individuals, lacking access to subjective experience (qualia) of obstacles in the world cannot possibly have or form intentions regarding their movements in the world. Without subjective or phenomenal access to a greater scope of information allowed by a properly “subjective” awareness, the “subject” cannot form intentions with regard to responses and is forced to merely respond to their “experiential” world each moment rather than formulate larger “intentions” about it. The capacity to foresee and plan ahead would be critical features of both intelligence and sight.

Yet without the presence of an agent or “subject of experience,” or at least a necessary connection existing between a subjective agent and available data, both intelligence and vision would seem to be, minimally, incomplete.

In the case of blind sightedness, the subject is present but has no access to the data processed and provided by a complete faculty of “vision,” including the subjective aspects of it and so cannot develop a range of intentions regarding the neurologically processed data.

In the case of artificial intelligence, the data is processed electronically but no subject is present with a capacity to develop insight, foresight or intention regarding that data. Data can be accessed by an external human subject, but without prompting by those external subjects or preprompting by compiled code that anticipates how external subjects will use the data, pseudo-intelligence is useless to itself precisely because it has no internal subjectivity or intention.

Maintaining that intelligence does not necessarily include any subjective experience, but is merely identical to its behavioural effects would be to similarly insist that a blind sighted person is just as “sighted” as anyone else merely because they can pass the “avoid furniture” or Turning Test.

Even more to the point, individuals on this thread who are defending the Turing Test would seem to be compelled to likewise hold that “avoiding furniture” or some more elaborate version of the test is a working definition for sightedness, completely ignoring that “awareness of” the phenomenal world is the most crucial feature of human sightedness.

 

[polytropos]

You seem to have let that brew and made it more than it was:

That was an example. I’m not bothered by a single comment, just by the fact that we can’t have a debate without bringing every retort as close to an insult as is possible without breaking the forum rules.

In the quote below there’s the image of a picture frame, with experience as the frame and our interpretation of the experience (knowledge) as the picture. The middle of the picture is far from the frame, and could be different. Yes fine, so what? To say otherwise would mean there can only be one possible picture, only one valid interpretation, One True® Model.

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.”

Yes. It would seem that there is one objective reality, or at least we can say that when we nudge the world, we get equivalent results. But going back to the picture frame analogy, our frames are similar but different (our experiences are similar but different), and so the fabric of our interpretations, the way we picture reality, is different. So what, it seems too trivial to need to be mentioned.

I think Quine would agree that there is one objective reality. It does not seem like the “One True Model” characterization of his view does it justice, though. His point seems to be that whenever we interpret data we interpret it with respect to background assumptions. So people have different models; Quine’s relativism, I think, would be likely to impose limitations on our ability to single out a true model.

I’d have thought Quine’s argument applies to all experience and all knowledge, not just science.

Yes, it is.

Didn’t understand the last sentence, I don’t see where the logical problem comes in.

I am using underdetermination as an example of what is “logically impossible” and so not under the domain of God’s omnipotence. A state of affairs cannot determine one interpretation to the exclusion of others. One could not say, “Well maybe God can make the state of affairs determine a single model,” but that is not possible. I am suggesting the same is true of mind. Could God make a machine intelligent? Perhaps. But what God could not do is make intelligence emerge out of the physical facts of a machine.

 

[polytropos]

Talk to Daniel Dennitt about whether qualia are falsifiable.

I’m guessing you’ve adapted Daniel Dennett’s argument in your previous demand that I show that you have the same qualia as me or that my qualia are the same as yesterday. But of course, the issue with Dennett’s argument is that it misses the point, since no one has claimed that qualia are the same for all people over the course of time, or that comparative questions about qualia need to have discoverable answers.

I don’t understand your remarks about pain. It signals something which a system somewhere is interpreting as wrong and requiring attention to prevent further damage. So subjectively it won’t let go, it keeps hammering for our attention so we’ll do something to make it to go away. That’s what the subjective feeling is.

Signal and avoidance is not the same as the subjective feeling. Creatures of all orders respond to and avoid stimuli reflexively. Even plants do it. To say they all experience a subjective feeling of pain seems to reduce the proposal to absurdity. But then the response to “something wrong” and the avoidance of further damage is not at all contiguous with the experience of pain.

(A further point is that such responses occur even on a cellular level; cells respond to non-optimal stimuli, modify their environment, signal for responses to invaders/damage, etc. What in principle is different? But it doesn’t make sense to say that pain is felt on a cellular level, unless we give up materialism and settle for panpsychism.)

I cited them because you said “Your question seems to beg the question that “logging something’s thoughts” is even a coherent notion”. And the articles say why wouldn’t it be coherent?

The issue, though, is whether they are thoughts at all. The presence of representative data in the nervous system does not seem like a sufficient condition. Take the camcorder again. I could be checking the stream of visual data at any given point. I could even reproduce an image according to it (for, in the thought experiment, I designed the camera, and that’s exactly what it does). But it doesn’t follow that the data present in the camera’s system constitute “thought.”

You could say that about UFOs and whatever else you like.

Not the point I was making. I’m just saying that science probably has epistemic limitations even given full-blown materialism. It seems implausible that humans - which, by materialistic hypothesis, evolved messily and suboptimally - should have some intrinsic limitless capacity to discover all truths about the natural world. One could, of course, define reality by what is discoverable by science, but such a notion is pretty ad hoc, since science is, again, the activity of principally limited human beings.

I can’t say that I understand this. So, internally, we experience our experiences. We experience our qualia. experiences = qualia. Same thing said differently, only the second time it’s supposed to be saying something new. I can’t say that I understand this.

You know, circularity is not an example of wrongness. It does not prove anything, but it does not prove that a claim is, for example, inconsistent. So reconstructing my statement to be circular in a way in which I did not state it proves nothing.

I am pretty content to say that I have qualitative experiences. If you are a philosophical zombie, then I guess your denial of qualia suddenly makes sense.

 

[Jewel34]

polytropos:

Depends what you mean by “correspond.” If you mean that they coincide, ie. I have the experience of seeing things when certain parts of my brain are active, then yes. But of course, the confusion of correlation and causation is notorious…

Let’s get down to the details.

1. We have nerve endings, which can be excited by external circumstances – for example a considerable pressure (or a cut, or excessive heat / cold… whatever). There is no “coincidence” here, there is causation. The nerve endings will undergo a physical change registering the circumstances.
2. The nerve endings are connected to the brain and they transmit the signal. No “coincidence” again, the signal gets transmitted. Also, there is a feedback mechanism, which will cause us to yank our finger away from excessive heat, without wasting time to go through the volitional (conscious) channels. Reflexes are more efficient than volitional actions.
3. The pain center of the brain receives the signal, undergoes a physical change and it registers as a “pain”. Where is the “coincidence” you speak of? It is a physical, causative relationship, and it is measurable. There is no “correlation” or “coincidence” at all. There is a physical change in the neural structure in the brain and that is what we “call” pain. So, where is this “coincidence” or “confusion” you speak of?

The philosophical “zombie” is a physical impossibility. It is somewhat akin to the suggestion to have a “hypothetical” copper wire, which is physically identical to a “real” copper wire, but it does not conduct electricity. Impossible! If a hypothetical human-look-alike is physically the same as a “real” human, then it has nerve endings, it has nerve-transmitters, it has a pain-center, and the pain center gets “excited”, so it experiences the same pain as a “real” human.

Now, there are a few unfortunate people, whose physical setup prevents them from experiencing pain. You can prick them with a needle, or expose them to excessive heat, and they will feel nothing. They will not say “ouch” since they do not experience pain. Of course they are not “zombies”, they are simply afflicted by a physical infirmity.

Inocente asked a very pertinent question: “Is a walking machine really walking or only doing something which looks like walking?” and it was left unanswered (Such questions are never answered… for some reason!). Where is the dividing line between “emulation” and the “real thing”? You bring up the question of a calculator which performs an algorithmic process and returns that “2 + 2 = 4”. You correctly question if this can be construed as an example of “thinking”. That question highlights the problem of “what is thinking”? How complicated the algorithm must be to qualify as “thinking”? There is a continuum of complexity of “data processing” from a calculator’s process of “2 + 2 = 4”; all the way of Stephen Hawking’s ideas of the universe. Somewhere in between there is a line… but where is it???

What is the proper definition of “thinking” and “pseudo-thinking”? If you cannot provide a definition and an algorithm to separate the “wheat from the chaff”, then you engage in a meaningless philosophical musing.

Inocente answered it correctly: “the Turing test does not care about some philosophical underpinning… it is concerned about the practical answer” – if it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, tastes like a like duck… it is a duck. Or very probably a duck… and one needs a serious argument to assert that it is NOT a duck, rather a whale in disguise. It is not enough to say that “we might be mistaken” and what looks like a duck is really a crocodile.

 

[polytropos]

1. We have nerve endings, which can be excited by external circumstances – for example a considerable pressure (or a cut, or excessive heat / cold… whatever). There is no “coincidence” here, there is causation. The nerve endings will undergo a physical change registering the circumstances.
2. The nerve endings are connected to the brain and they transmit the signal. No “coincidence” again, the signal gets transmitted. Also, there is a feedback mechanism, which will cause us to yank our finger away from excessive heat, without wasting time to go through the volitional (conscious) channels. Reflexes are more efficient than volitional actions.
3. The pain center of the brain receives the signal, undergoes a physical change and it registers as a “pain”. Where is the “coincidence” you speak of? It is a physical, causative relationship, and it is measurable. There is no “correlation” or “coincidence” at all. There is a physical change in the neural structure in the brain and that is what we “call” pain. So, where is this “coincidence” or “confusion” you speak of?

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

I am mostly in agreement with you here. There are physical pathways that explain how signals move from receptors to our brain. Certain types of information from different pathways are processed in different parts of the brain. (As you note, some reflexive nervous responses do not go to the brain at all.) That such things occur and can be observed are not in question.

What is in question is whether such occurrences explain the feeling of pain or the sensation of the color red, or the like. I’ve bolded a couple sentences under 3). which I would qualify: the physical change in the neural structure in the brain is not what we “call” pain. When you stub your toe and say it hurts, your words are not standing in for “X neurotransmitter is active in Y synapse,” even though that is certainly a true description of your bodily state. There is certainly an association between the activity of certain neurotransmitters and channels when we are “in pain,” but one would not point to someone’s brain scan and say, “That’s pain. Right there.”

Then the claim is that such neural events cause pain, or that the pain supervenes on the neural events, or something of that sort (depending on what theories one espouses). The issue is that this step is what is enormously unclear and faces difficulties in principle.

I should note, as I noted earlier in the topic, that I’m not a substance dualist. I do think that qualia and consciousness have a material basis (their presence in lower animals seems to make this undeniable), but I think that any theoretical explanation of their emergence demands conceptual tools that are unavailable to methodological naturalism (ie. an intentional, teleological view of matter and substance). It is intellectual activity that I view as immaterial, though I have not provided an argument for that here (since this topic is meant to be a critique of the inference from human behavior to thought).

The philosophical “zombie” is a physical impossibility. It is somewhat akin to the suggestion to have a “hypothetical” copper wire, which is physically identical to a “real” copper wire, but it does not conduct electricity. Impossible! If a hypothetical human-look-alike is physically the same as a “real” human, then it has nerve endings, it has nerve-transmitters, it has a pain-center, and the pain center gets “excited”, so it experiences the same pain as a “real” human.

It seems to me like someone who does not have qualia is a philosophical zombie. I don’t think there are any philosophical zombies, because I figure everyone does have qualia. My point is that the claim that one does not have qualia is tantamount to admitting that one is a philosophical zombie - it is a vacuity. (David Chalmers may disagree with us on this point, however.)

Inocente asked a very pertinent question: “Is a walking machine really walking or only doing something which looks like walking?” and it was left unanswered (Such questions are never answered… for some reason!).

It walks. Although, its walking is analogical to our walking, since it isn’t one of us, just like the walking of a squirrel, a dog, or an ape are all analogical to our walking. (There are also certain transport proteins in our cells that are Y-shaped and “walk” along larger protein chains. I don’t see any harm in calling that “walking,” although, saying it’s the same as the human or the dog seems like a stretch.)

The question fails to establish an analogy here, however, for the question in the case of the Turing test is not about externally defined behaviors but about thinking, which is an internal, subjective activity by any coherent account. If I record my voice on a tape recorder and play it back, we have made the same sound (more or less - the replication could not be perfect). (Note also that even here, we would hesitate to say that the machine is “talking” to us like a human would. When we say that a tape recorder is “talking,” we are usually being facetious.) We can say that because the activity is external. But what’s going on on the inside is, of course, not the same. The thinking that leads me to say X is internal, whereas the voice recorder is not even a thinking subject.

Of course, it is standard fare in materialism to note that mental states would have to be multiply realizable, but that’s not what I’m disputing. I’m disputing that by virtue of a machine’s effects, we should judge that it “thinks.”

 

[polytropos]

Where is the dividing line between “emulation” and the “real thing”? You bring up the question of a calculator which performs an algorithmic process and returns that “2 + 2 = 4”. You correctly question if this can be construed as an example of “thinking”. That question highlights the problem of “what is thinking”? How complicated the algorithm must be to qualify as “thinking”? There is a continuum of complexity of “data processing” from a calculator’s process of “2 + 2 = 4”; all the way of Stephen Hawking’s ideas of the universe. Somewhere in between there is a line… but where is it???

My question is not about the complexity of the algorithm. 2 + 2 = 4 is pretty simple. The case of a computer which solves an incredibly tough equation with Wolfram Mathematica is more to the point. My laptop can solve equations far beyond my ability. But I don’t think it should be regarded as “thinking” (and if it should, then the ethical questions inocente raised should be a grave concern for us all!).

But then, my computer also can’t pass the Turing test, which motivates the second pillar of my argument. For a computer, what is the difference between solving incredibly difficult math problems (far beyond the capacity of any human) and processing human language to generate a response? The computer doesn’t care about (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs. Why should we regard one as intelligent and the other not? Doing so seems to pose massive difficulties for the Turing test:

• We are willing to regard mathematically adept but socially inept humans as intelligent.
• To say that human language processing is the standard of intelligence is absurdly “human-centric.” The Turing test is motivated in part by the idea that a materialistic view of the universe “demystifies” man and his mind. But then the Turing test also takes man’s mind as the criterion of intelligence, whereas, if it is only happy coincidence that man is the only intelligent being, there seems to be no reason why our manifestation of intelligence should be the paradigmatic one. Two computers might “converse” over the internet in a complex language; if we performed a Turing test in the opposite direction, then humans certainly wouldn’t be able to fool a couple of computers “speaking” in binary at very rapid pace. It seems like the complexity of (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs in a single cell could even pass some complexity and communicativity threshold; but that doesn’t seem to be sufficient for thinking in such a case.
• If human language is not fundamental to intelligence (as it seems it shouldn’t be), then we should already have intelligent machines, in which case the main motivation behind the Turing test kind of crumbles.

Defining intelligence by outputs seems to face other difficulties as well. Suppose that a human wakes up and finds himself on an empty island. He is still intelligent. There’s no one around to figure that out. His linguistic capacities don’t seem to have any use (he may not utter a word). His intelligence might be entirely private. But if a computer which can pass the Turing test is on an island (or even in a human society which does not understand the language to which the computer was designed to respond), then it seems like it ceases to be intelligent. If all it has to define its intelligence is its ability to fool people, then there seems to be nothing left when there’s no one left to fool. Its intelligence is dependent on a particular social context, while human intelligence is not. It is basically a category mistake.

It seems like all computers of sufficient complexity should be “intelligent” if any are (and by “sufficient complexity,” it seems hard to imagine that a computer powerful enough to run, say, Wolfram Mathematica is not “sufficiently complex.”) The problems the Turing test poses seem extraneous to the question of intelligence, for there seems to be no reason why intelligence should be particularly human, unless humans are paradigmatically and uniquely intelligent, as the Turing test denies.

What is the proper definition of “thinking” and “pseudo-thinking”? If you cannot provide a definition and an algorithm to separate the “wheat from the chaff”, then you engage in a meaningless philosophical musing.

I should note that Turing aimed to avoid defining “thinking,” so we might note that the “behaves like a human” criterion would be equally meaningless without a definition.

That said, I will say that any coherent concept of thinking would characterize it as a fundamentally internal, subjective process (that is the sufficient condition I would require for a substantive definition of thinking - anything less, and it seems like it would be too broadly defined, and that certain characteristics that we know we have would not be represented). A concise definition would be “judgmental understanding.” Thinking is also intentional in the respect that it has an “aboutness” to it, ie. I think about things in the world.

Whereas, to take the calculator, it is clear that its activity isn’t “about” anything. It works in an essentially mechanical way. The symbols that it takes in and churns out, 2 + 2 = 4, have meaning to us and reflect an arithmetical truth, but since there is nothing about the symbols that necessitate the meaning. It only refers to the arithmetical truth in a derived way - because we mean to use it for that purpose of calculating sums. If there were a calculator prior to the development of Arabian numerals, then its activity would mean nothing.

 

[polytropos]

Inocente answered it correctly: “the Turing test does not care about some philosophical underpinning… it is concerned about the practical answer” – if it looks like a duck, acts like a duck, tastes like a like duck… it is a duck. Or very probably a duck… and one needs a serious argument to assert that it is NOT a duck, rather a whale in disguise. It is not enough to say that “we might be mistaken” and what looks like a duck is really a crocodile.

As I think I’ve made clear since the first page of this topic, I am very much in agreement that the Turing test doesn’t care about philosophical underpinning and gives us a practical answer. If we want machines that seem to act like humans, then that is what the Turing test could deliver.

The sly move is to say that it doesn’t care about philosophical understanding… and then to use it to draw a philosophical conclusion, as when one concludes that a machine “thinks” (however one chooses or neglects to define “thinking”). The practical conclusion is that it acts like a human; if one so desires, we can define that as “artificial intelligence.” But that’s about the end of its reach.

I think this makes the third time someone has brought up the duck. The issue, though, is not that it looks like a duck and I’m saying it’s a crocodile or a whale: Let’s say humans act like humans and some computer acts like a human. Fair enough. If “duck” is to act like a human, then great: they both do.

But if “duck” is to think, then we simply don’t have two things acting like a duck, unless one begs the question, for we don’t see that the computer thinks, and we only see that humans think because we are individual human subjects.

 

[Jewel34]

polytropos:

There is certainly an association between the activity of certain neurotransmitters and channels when we are “in pain,” but one would not point to someone’s brain scan and say, “That’s pain. Right there.”

Why not? The “electro-chemical state” of certain neurons within the pain center is the “pain”. These neurons can be excited by a mild electric current and the person will experience the same “pain” as if burning his finger. It is more than an “association”, it is equivalence.

Can a fully electronic being experience the equivalent of “pain”? If it is aware of its pieces, it would certainly be aware of the change in the “working” of its “legs” (for example) if the “knee joint lubricant” would drip away. It might be a far cry from the human “pain”, but it would be sufficiently similar to “nudge” this being to seek remedy – by applying the lubricant at the proper place. That is the equivalence of the “qualia”. Our eyes are not “equipped” to see the infrared, but our skin has receptors to feel the intensive heat. An electronic being can have eyes to see the heat waves, and this would serve as an equivalent of our heat-sensing nerve endings (and it would be better, since it could sense heat from afar, unlike our “primitive” receptors).

Now we arrive to the “intentions”, which you also considered to be of paramount importance. If you are out of nutrients (you are hungry) you start to seek out food, to alleviate that hunger. That is intentional, purposeful behavior. The above mentioned electronic being would have an internal gauge to monitor its “power consumption” and sense when the batteries start to run dry. It is the equivalent of hunger, and the being can seek out a power outlet to recharge the batteries. Observe, a purposeful and intentional behavior. (If you would equip your laptop with a moving mechanism and receptor to sense a power outlet and the means to plug itself in, you would arrive at a simple adaptive, purposeful and intentional behavior.)

You also said that there is a difference between us and a machine. Undoubtedly true. The question is this: “is the difference significant / important or not?”. We walk with our legs. A machine might use wheels to achieve “locomotion”. There is a difference, but is that difference significant? I say, it is not. Both achieve the same intentional purpose (and you considered intentions to be of high importance – and of course I agree with you there).

So finally we arrive at the conclusion: it does not matter “how” does one achieve homeostasis, how one maintains its functionality in a changing environment, the important part is that it either succeeds or fails. It might be a naturally born human, an artificially “grown” android (biologically a full equivalent to a human), a hybrid cyborg (human brain with a lot of prostheses), a fully electronic being or (maybe) a space alien. They are all functionally equivalent, and that is all that counts. There is no reason to “look down” on fully electronic being and say: “bah, that is only artificial intelligence”. The reason that people find something “artificial” to be deficient is that our currently existing prostheses are of lesser quality than the natural originals. But that is only a question of technology.



P.S.: Please forgive me that I concentrated on the part I found most important. To give due credit to all your points I would have to write a small booklet. Let’s hope they will come up in smaller, manageable installments.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Why not? The “electro-chemical state” of certain neurons within the pain center is the “pain”. These neurons can be excited by a mild electric current and the person will experience the same “pain” as if burning his finger. It is more than an “association”, it is equivalence.

It sounds very simple, but the condition of blind sightedness shows this “equivalence” model not to be true.

The consciousness of sight that the blind sighted person does NOT have is NOT reducible to the electrochemical state precisely because the electrochemical state seems to exist to allow the blind sighted person’s body to “detect” objects around him/her without the attendant consciousness or conscious awareness of them.

In other words, it is conceivable that a philosophical zombie could function regarding sight in the same way a blind sighted person does but without attendant consciousness, since the blind sighted person does not consciously detect objects around him/her, but their body does and it responds appropriately.

A philosophical zombie would be a being that has all the functional capacities regarding sensing and moving that a human being does, but in such a creature all these capacities merely occur and are coordinated without the presence of a conscious agent. Blindsightedness demonstrates that, at least, regarding sight, a lack of conscious awareness of the physical world need not entail that the “body” would be incapacitated. In other words, a biological machine which has a functional set of “sensory and response capabilities” could appear human but would lack personal self-awareness or subjectivity.

For all we know many animals, even higher ordered ones, might be just this kind of biological machine.

Your claim amounts to declaring as dogma that pain as experienced by a subject aware of pain (qualia) is identical or equivalent to the electrochemical state, but there are many good reasons to believe this is not that case. Merely making a declaration that they are equivalent is not offering a compelling argument.

As regards cyborgs, et all, merely because these artificially “intelligent” beings can be conceived to functionally replicate human behaviour is not a sufficient reason to think they would thereby have subjective awareness, (capable of forming conscious intention, experiencing qualia, etc,) which would be a crucial aspect of what characterizes human intelligence and moral responsibility.

If electrochemical states were sufficient for producing the awareness of pain, for example, then those electro-chemical states would fail to explain why the subjective “I” that exists in my current location does actually exist where I do and not somewhere else. To merely claim my subjective existence is located here in my head because a particular set of electrochemical states occurs in my head is to beg the question. It presumes an association of my subjective existence to this particular set of states, rather than explains it.

It is conceivable that my subjective experiences could have been associated with any set of electrochemical states in any human being anywhere, so why this set in particular? I could have been born as a human anywhere and then THAT set of electrochemical states would be assumed to be “mine.” But that doesn’t explain why any particular set should be identical to “me.” This is, in fact, the “hard problem of consciousness” that David Chalmers and others refer to.

That “hard” problem is not made easy by a simple declaration on your part, as if your position (simply dismissing the problem by declaring “equivalence”) has never been entertained nor shown inadequate by philosophers of mind.

 

[polytropos]

P.S.: Please forgive me that I concentrated on the part I found most important. To give due credit to all your points I would have to write a small booklet. Let’s hope they will come up in smaller, manageable installments.

I will respond to whatever. That said, I do not see what you’ve responded to as the most important part. I have repeated the argument I gave in #68 (about why the Turing test is human-centric and commits us to granting intelligence - and rights? - to our laptops right now) a few times now (earlier, to Bagheera, and to inocente, and now to you), and no one has given it a response. The fact that a computer is neutral between disparate (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs, and a human is not, also seems rather damning.

Why not? The “electro-chemical state” of certain neurons within the pain center is the “pain”. These neurons can be excited by a mild electric current and the person will experience the same “pain” as if burning his finger. It is more than an “association”, it is equivalence.

These are assertions. The only supporting evidence you give - that the pain could be excited by an alternative means - is irrelevant, since it’s not something I deny. Pain of course has a material cause, and the channels leading to our feeling it can be “intercepted” artificially. The issue is whether the experience of pain just is the activity of certain neurons or presence of a certain neurotransmitter in a certain synapse; this is what your data doesn’t show (and which, it seems, it cannot show in principle). Why does that brain state cause the person to be a subject who feels pain (or sees red, or tastes sweet, or whatever)? What leads to the sensation over and above the physical state of the brain?

Can a fully electronic being experience the equivalent of “pain”? If it is aware of its pieces, it would certainly be aware of the change in the “working” of its “legs” (for example) if the “knee joint lubricant” would drip away. It might be a far cry from the human “pain”, but it would be sufficiently similar to “nudge” this being to seek remedy – by applying the lubricant at the proper place. That is the equivalence of the “qualia”. Our eyes are not “equipped” to see the infrared, but our skin has receptors to feel the intensive heat. An electronic being can have eyes to see the heat waves, and this would serve as an equivalent of our heat-sensing nerve endings (and it would be better, since it could sense heat from afar, unlike our “primitive” receptors).

To take your first question, it seems doubtful how you could ever make such a claim. I can create a simple machine that responds to my touching it. On that basis, what justifies believing that it has a painful sensation in addition to its response to move away? A simple stimulus-and-response mechanism doesn’t need the feeling of pain that we have, which is fortunate for those working in AI, since there is no theoretical model for what would make a machine feel pain; we can just make it look as though it feels pain.

An example: you brought up those with deficient nervous systems who could not feel pain. So take the case that such a person acts convincingly as though he feels pain. The fact that he avoids a stimulus would not imply that he feels pain. If we did not know of his condition, perhaps we would be fooled and think that he is in pain. But if we knew about his unfortunate condition beforehand and knew that he has a tendency toward trickery, then we would be suspicious. If we know that a machine is a machine, there seems to be no reason to think that it has qualia like pain, given something like a stimulus-and-response mechanism. If it fools us, that’s another thing, but then we only believe that it has pain because it’s like a human, and we are humans who know firsthand that we experience pain.

The case of reaction to infrared waves falls by the wayside likewise. I’ve used the example of a camcorder a few times. The fact that a machine might collect “sensory” data which it then manipulates and reacts to is not equivalent to “seeing.” That would seem to constrain us into believing that our camcorders and laptops with cameras “see” us, which I don’t think anyone could say with full seriousness. There is data corresponding to what light has reached the lens, of course, but what warrants our belief that that data is not just stored on tape but is represented to the camcorder as a distinct experience?

So I have no doubt that a machine could be used to detect infrared waves, process data, and even react. (Think of solar panels that are designed to tilt in response to changes in the position of the sun.) But like the camcorder, that is not sufficient for saying that it “sees” infrared waves.

Now we arrive to the “intentions”, which you also considered to be of paramount importance. If you are out of nutrients (you are hungry) you start to seek out food, to alleviate that hunger. That is intentional, purposeful behavior.

Intentionality has a very specific definition in debates over philosophy of mind. It refers to “aboutness,” not necessarily to behavior that achieves an end. If it meant the latter, then I don’t see why trees would not be proclaimed intelligent; trees exhibit phototropic behavior when they bend toward a light source, which facilitates their growth: that’s an activity, which is purposeful and helpful for the organism. But that is insufficient for thought.

The consideration I give to intention is alluded to at the bottom of #68 (and explicated with example to the calculator, which lacks intentionality - and I would argue, furthermore, that intentionality is not something which could in principle emerge).

 

[polytropos]

So finally we arrive at the conclusion: it does not matter “how” does one achieve homeostasis, how one maintains its functionality in a changing environment, the important part is that it either succeeds or fails.
…
They are all functionally equivalent, and that is all that counts. There is no reason to “look down” on fully electronic being and say: “bah, that is only artificial intelligence”. The reason that people find something “artificial” to be deficient is that our currently existing prostheses are of lesser quality than the natural originals. But that is only a question of technology.

This does not at all represent the reasons I have given. I don’t “look down” on a fully electronic being anymore than I “look down” on my computer. I don’t see “artificial” as deficient; my computer may “artificially think” when it solves a tough integral for me using Wolfram Mathematica, but it’s certainly doing a better job than I would! It’s not because it produces worse results than I do; its result is achieved accurately and quickly, whereas I might not be able to calculate the integral at all (I hate integrals). It’s because the activity it does is different in principle. That doesn’t make it bad.

(Some have called calculators “idiot boxes.” They always return the right answer, provided you give them the right (name removed by moderator)ut. Turing-like considerations might make us wonder what would happen if we changed the processing of (name removed by moderator)uts slightly, so that the calculator “suspects” when we’ve given it a faulty (name removed by moderator)ut, and asks, “Are you sure?” But here it is doubtful that anything about the calculator’s activity has changed in principle. We’ve added a filter to it. But its activity is fundamentally the same; it just takes a different type of deficient response to “break” it.)

That said, I can reiterate: If one means to declare functional equivalence, then by all means, declare functional equivalence. I don’t deny that a machine that passes the Turing test would “act like a human” - it’s tautologically true. But again, if one says it’s only functional equivalence that matters, then it’s rather sly to go on to say, “Well the functional equivalence also means this,” when it, in fact, doesn’t.

 

[Jewel34]

polytropos:

I have repeated the argument I gave in #68 (about why the Turing test is human-centric and commits us to granting intelligence - and rights? - to our laptops right now) a few times now (earlier, to Bagheera, and to inocente, and now to you), and no one has given it a response. The fact that a computer is neutral between disparate (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs, and a human is not, also seems rather damning.

It looks like that we might be talking past each other. You keep talking about currently existing, extremely simple computers, while I talk about those hypothetical machines, which exhibit a human-like complex behavior. How do you know that those entities will stay neutral “inside”? You say a little later: “…I would argue, furthermore, that intentionality is not something which could in principle emerge”. That is a very bold assertion. How are you going to substantiate it?

polytropos:

What leads to the sensation over and above the physical state of the brain?

Does anything? The point is that “creating” a certain neural configuration “makes” the person experience “pain” (or see a red dot, or feel a bitter taste on the tongue). There is no need to go any further than that. Now we have concepts we call “pain” and “red” and “bitter”, but these concepts are simply labels we attach to the neural configurations.

polytropos:

I can create a simple machine that responds to my touching it. On that basis, what justifies believing that it has a painful sensation in addition to its response to move away? A simple stimulus-and-response mechanism doesn’t need the feeling of pain that we have…

Were you reading my mind? You presented the very thought experiment I wanted to propose. If you wish to spend about 10 minutes by reading the The Seventh Sally from Stanislaw Lem’s book: “The Cyberiad” you will see all my possible arguments, and moreover, Lem was able to articulate them much better than I could. It is less than 6 pages. I hope you will take time to read it.

Here is a very short excerpt from it:

“I don’t understand. It was only a model, after all. A process with a large number of parameters, a simulation, a mock-up for a monarch to practice on, with the necessary feedback, variables, multistats…” muttered Trurl, dumbfounded.

“Yes. But you made the unforgivable mistake of over-perfecting your replica. Not wanting to build a mere clock-like mechanism, you inadvertently—in your punctilious way —created that which was possible, logical and inevitable, that which became the very antithesis of a mechanism…”

 

[polytropos]

It looks like that we might be talking past each other. You keep talking about currently existing, extremely simple computers, while I talk about those hypothetical machines, which exhibit a human-like complex behavior. How do you know that those entities will stay neutral “inside”? You say a little later: “…I would argue, furthermore, that intentionality is not something which could in principle emerge”. That is a very bold assertion. How are you going to substantiate it?

To be fair, I have given several examples of why the addition of complexity or human language processing should not change the sort of activity that a machine is performing. Largely, these have not been responded to.

Furthermore, I am fully aware that you are talking about hypothetical machines that exhibit human-like behavior. The question asked in post #68 is why is it human-like behavior that determine intelligence? This question is especially pressing for those who assert that intelligence is not peculiarly or uniquely human. If human intelligence is paradigmatic and unique, then using it as the basis for artificial intelligence makes a lot of sense. But the hypothesis here is precisely what the materialist hopes to reject.

It is inaccurate to say that I am only referring to simple computers. The calculator example is, of course, simple. My laptop is not simple; neither is the activity of Wolfram Mathematica, which far outstrips my mathematical ability and your mathematical ability.

I’ve also provided arguments as to why human language processing does not change the sort of activity that the computer is doing. (Refer to my claims that one could conceivably construct an isomorphism between a system of linguistic syntax and the sorts of calculation done by a program like Wolfram Mathematica. Arguably this is what a computer must do, since at the level of computer processing, a computer can’t do anything with a string of characters without reducing it further.)

So it won’t do to say that I’m the one who is not substantiating claims, when I’ve provided counterarguments such as these, and no model has been suggested as to why the lack of intentionality in the calculator or the conventional laptop should be circumvented by the addition of human language processing.

The point is that “creating” a certain neural configuration “makes” the person experience “pain” (or see a red dot, or feel a bitter taste on the tongue). There is no need to go any further than that. Now we have concepts we call “pain” and “red” and “bitter”, but these concepts are simply labels we attach to the neural configurations.

This view is highly implausible. “Pain,” “red,” and “bitter” cannot simply be “labels we attach to the neural configurations” because we have knowledge of them completely independent of our knowledge of neural configurations, while the neural configurations add a coincidence of physical conditions. But we already have other coincidences: for instance, I feel pain someone pokes me with a pencil, and I see red when a red object is in front of me. Those physical conditions are not the same as “pain” or “red.” So the burden is on the materialist to construct a model on which internal physical conditions simply are equivalent to sensations of pain and color. But no such effort is here made: it is asserted that they “just are” and that’s the end of it.

The true difficulty is that such sensations seem to be of an entirely separate category. It is like saying that four objects lined up in a row are equivalent to “the number 4”; such a claim would seem to be plainly false, a category error. Claims that “4” “supervenes” on the four objects are rather nebulous and unspecific.

Were you reading my mind? You presented the very thought experiment I wanted to propose. If you wish to spend about 10 minutes by reading the The Seventh Sally from Stanislaw Lem’s book: “The Cyberiad” you will see all my possible arguments, and moreover, Lem was able to articulate them much better than I could. It is less than 6 pages. I hope you will take time to read it.

Hmmm, Stanislaw Lem. I think I recall a poster mentioning him once. Maybe I can take a look at it later. In the meantime, you can clarify the objections if you think they are valid outside of the realm of science fiction. What are your objections to the claim that a stimulus-and-response mechanism does not generally entail the qualia of pain? There seems to be enormous evidence against this. (To restate a previous example, stimulus-and-response mechanisms are found even on a cellular mechanism, but it is implausible that pain is experienced by individual cells.)

 

[Jewel34]

polytropos:

This question is especially pressing for those who assert that intelligence is not peculiarly or uniquely human. But the hypothesis here is precisely what the materialist hopes to reject.

Ah, but I do not say that that “intelligence” is a particularly human trait. First, there is no precise definition of intelligence. In my view, intelligence is a continuous “line” of homeostasis, of problem solving, of exhibiting complex responses to complex stimuli, of being able to conceptualize or generalize. Animals also exhibit a certain level of intelligence. Apes can conduct a conversation in sign language. Apes can use and manufacture tools. Newborn humans have no discernible “intelligence” at all. People with serious mental retardation exhibit no intelligence (or very limited intelligence).

The reason we wish to use the human intelligence as a “measuring rod” is simple. Of all the beings we encountered so far, humans seem to have the highest degree of this nebulous intelligence. So it is obvious that we use ourselves as the etalon. There is no special compelling reason to do this, just like we can measure temperature on the Celsius or the Fahrenheit scale. The “zero” point has no special meaning, it is selected for convenience.

polytropos:

The calculator example is, of course, simple. My laptop is not simple; neither is the activity of Wolfram Mathematica, which far outstrips my mathematical ability and your mathematical ability.

But that is simply false. Even the most advanced super-computer is incredibly simple compared to the neural structure of an ant (not to mention a rat!). I am talking about those “computers” which have billions of CPU’s arranged in a parallel processing structure, which have at least visual and auditory I/O ports (can have others, too). Which can remember their past actions and anticipate future ones. Which can generalize and act in a purposeful manner. (We are all aware that the linear accumulation of parts can switch into a qualitative change. A simple example is the critical mass of fissionable material. A more complicated one would be a growing crowd, which turns into a mob.)

“Pain,” “red,” and “bitter” cannot simply be “labels we attach to the neural configurations” because we have knowledge of them completely independent of our knowledge of neural configurations, while the neural configurations add a coincidence of physical conditions.

You misunderstand me. I do not assert that the concept of pain is identical to the “actual” pain. When someone pokes you with a sharp object, it is processed by the nerve endings, transmitted by the nerves, and processed by the pain center. You still talk about “coincidences” here, which is not warranted. It implies the lack of physical causative factor. And we both know that it is not simply a “coincidence” (which may or may not happen) that we feel pain when poked with a sharp object.

polytropos:

In the meantime, you can clarify the objections if you think they are valid outside of the realm of science fiction. What are your objections to the claim that a stimulus-and-response mechanism does not generally entail the qualia of pain? There seems to be enormous evidence against this. (To restate a previous example, stimulus-and-response mechanisms are found even on a cellular mechanism, but it is implausible that pain is experienced by individual cells.)

Last things first. No one asserts that each individual “cell” is supposed to “feel” pain. This would be a kind of reductionism which is falsely attributed to the physicalist’s approach. Individual atoms or electrons or neurons cannot “experience” pain, and no one asserts that they do. By the way, our memory is also “distributed”. Not “one” neuron is responsible for recalling our mother’s face (for example). A whole lot of them hold the necessary information.

Now to go back to the question at hand. You say: “What are your objections to the claim that a stimulus-and-response mechanism does not generally entail the qualia of pain?” No one speaks here of “generally”. I do not say that “any or all” stimulus-and-response mechanisms will experience “pain”. From now on I will borrow from the story.

Suppose that you have a sadistic person, who wishes to live out his fantasy. Yet, he does not want to torture another human being, so he constructs a crude dummy, and beats that. This does not give the satisfaction he craves, so he starts to “improve” on the design. First he puts a device into the dummy, which emits groans, shrieks and begs the torturer to stop. Then he “improves” again. The next dummy will exhibit more pain responses, attempts to escape. Then comes some physical response; the “dummy” which bleeds, which exhibits all the obvious signs of suffering. But there is still more room for “improvement” (in a very sick sense!). The next dummy will be a homeostatic being, which is aware of its fate, which is scared of death, and yet craves death since it is the only escape of the pain.

Where in this line is the dividing step where “emulation” stops and becomes “reality”?

And this is the problem you face. If you say that all this is just an “emulation” and the “visible suffering” of the dummy is of no relevance, then you need to give an epistemological method which can tell apart the emulation from the “real” thing. You can examine the physical brain, observe the neural connections, measure the neural network… and you will not find “pain”. You will find a whole lot of neurons with a certain electro-chemical state and you will have the verbal complaint: “I am in pain”. That is all you will have, be it a human, or an artificial being. When it is a human, you will accept: “yes, he is in pain”. When it is an artificial being, you will shrug it off: “that is just an emulation”. Or will you?

 

[MPat]

Ah, but I do not say that that “intelligence” is a particularly human trait. First, there is no precise definition of intelligence. In my view, intelligence is a continuous “line” of homeostasis, of problem solving, of exhibiting complex responses to complex stimuli, of being able to conceptualize or generalize. Animals also exhibit a certain level of intelligence. Apes can conduct a conversation in sign language. Apes can use and manufacture tools.

So, if you wanted to find out if apes “think”, would you try to run the Turing test…? That does not look like a good idea to me…

And, on a related note, there are some animals (dogs, horses) that seem to be able to perform simple calculations. For example: youtube.com/watch?v=T1Sd1o_vc2k - a pony that seems to perform the calculation 17 - 4 = 13. Now, was it a real calculation or did it only look like calculation…? In fact, we know it was not a real calculation. Yes, it had the same (name removed by moderator)uts and outputs as a real calculation would have had - in this specific case. But, for example, Konrad Lorenz in the book “King Solomon’s Ring” explains that there are experiments that show that such calculations are “simulated”, “fake”. That is, the animal does not do the calculation itself. It looks for signs that are unconsciously given by the human. We can see that when the human does not know the answer.

Or, at least, that is how we who think that there is a difference between “real thing” and “fake thing” would think. Maybe you would prefer to assert that the pony in the video actually does calculate…?

If you say that all this is just an “emulation” and the “visible suffering” of the dummy is of no relevance, then you need to give an epistemological method which can tell apart the emulation from the “real” thing.

First, do we really need to…? You did not provide any support for that claim. Reality can exist even if we have no way to find out what it is.

Second, as you can see from the example with “horse that can calculate”, sometimes we can think of a method… In effect you are saying that if a way to tell “fake thing” from “real thing” hasn’t been invented yet, we shouldn’t even try to invent it (well, we would have to conclude that we shouldn’t, if there is no difference to detect)… And, of course, it is hard to look for a way to recognise the “fake thing” when it does not exist yet…

 

[Jewel34]

polytropos:

That said, I can reiterate: If one means to declare functional equivalence, then by all means, declare functional equivalence. I don’t deny that a machine that passes the Turing test would “act like a human” - it’s tautologically true. But again, if one says it’s only functional equivalence that matters, then it’s rather sly to go on to say, “Well the functional equivalence also means this,” when it, in fact, doesn’t.

This last half sentence: “when it, in fact, doesn’t” is where we depart.

It all boils down to approximation. If we would build a cart with triangular wheels, it would be next to impossible to let that cart “roll”, it could only be “dragged”. We can then improve on the design and use “square” wheels. Not much of a change, the ride is still very bumpy. None of these approximations can be asserted to be a good “replica” of a circular wheel. As we keep on improving and use a multi-sided polygon, at some point the ride starts to become smooth. There is no way to decide if the wheel is a million-sided polygon, or an actual circle. Especially, since the “real” circle is just a mathematical abstraction, which can only be approximated in real life.

You may say that “ontologically” speaking, we “only” have a million-to the power of-trillion-sided polygon and not a “true” circular shaped wheel, but this “difference” is impossible to detect, even in principle. And this is where our difference lies. You cannot say that the wheel is not “circular”, because you have no epistemological method to find the “difference”. I say that if the difference is impossible to detect (in principle), then it makes no sense to even talk about a “difference”. Ontology without epistemology is just empty speculation.

This fundamental difference (and it can be detected, all right ) is why we can only have a partial agreement. But partial agreement is still good to have.

 

[inocente]

But the burden of proof is not on me. I am not making a positive claim in this topic; the question is whether behavior is a sufficient basis for “thinking.” My point is that the evidence does not support that it is.

Which is enough to call into question the materialist’s suppositions, if he does not have an adequate theoretical basis.

That would be circular. Fortunately I didn’t say it where you quoted me.

Hm? Your saying “God pours thought into two bottles” does not make God pour thought into two bottles, nor does it require me to accept your argument or deny God’s omnipotence. I deny that trees are intelligent; it has nothing to do with God, it has to do with having no solid basis for considering trees to be intelligent.

I’m giving up on this point, since your insistence that “I know I think; I am human; therefore only humans can think” is an impenetrable fortress.

*It was the bolded portion which I was disputing as vacuous. As I’ve pointed out, a prioritization mechanism for stimuli has no clear connection to qualia. We can consider simple machines that prioritize responses to certain environmental (name removed by moderator)uts, but one would reduce himself to absurdity by claiming that they therefore are subjects with qualia in the sense that we are. That is the point of the example of the camcorder: it’s simple, it takes in visual data and outputs it to a screen, but there is no reason to think that it has some experience of visual data over and above what it’s outputting.

So then we can add other features: let it detect sound, balance, touch. Set up a “nervous system” within it. What does the addition of software that let’s it say, “I see red,” when it takes in light with a wavelength of 700 nanometers do to justify that it’s intelligent? It seems very clear that I have responded to your point: simple systems don’t have anything analogous to qualia, and you have literally no theoretical account of why adding more “senses” leads to qualia, rather than just efficient processing.*

It’s very frustrating that you keep on about camcorders. I asked you to think about designing a machine which can survive in a complex environment like we can, by itself for year after year, and to see that hierarchical pattern matching and prioritization mechanisms are required for it to sift out the important information it needs to survive from the reams of data hitting its sensors every second. Why do you keep on about some nineties gadget? I don’t know whether it’s me or you but we’re just failing to communicate so I’m giving up on this point as well.

I have not claimed that your qualia are the same as yours, or that my qualia are the same as yesterday. (My capacity for eating spicy foods has actually gone up a noticeable bit over the last few years, so I imagine my qualia might be changing, perhaps owing to the perceptual data that enters my system, maybe due to my coffee-drinking habit burning my taste buds.) I just claim that those who deny that they have qualia are philosophical zombies (by definition). They do not have a subjective experience (according to their own account).

I asked you to prove qualia exist, and instead you went circular on me: p-zombie is defined as having no qualia, so absence of qualia is defined as p-zombie.

I’m giving up on this point as well. Not read your next post yet, hopefully things can only get better.

 

[inocente]

I agree, that was Turing’s aim. And he has done much to advance the field of artificial intelligence. But it also follows quite naturally that when one changes the substance of the question, one gets a different answer. The new question avoids disagreement so long that it is taken to provide a criterion for artificial intelligence.

I’m sort of with you and not with you. Turing was trying to determine how we could recognize machines as being intelligent, and concluded it needs comparison with our intelligence. But in practice his question is a bit academic as most people have given up on AI, and are instead making smarter and smarter machines which don’t attempt to emulate humans. Although the question is perhaps reappearing in a different guise - increasingly it’s being recognized that other animals show intelligence and we need comparison measures.

Perhaps because I don’t think anyone, unless they are trying to justify a desperate philosophical conclusion, considers thinking as primarily manifested by external behavior. Acting like a human is simply not equivalent to thinking, so the “duck principle” falls short on a count of equivocation.

The world is full of phenomena we can’t see - gravity, radio, etc., and which we detect by behavior. Methinks you’re inventing arbitrary rules to protect your beliefs here.

I would, however, like to see some response to my comments on why it is humanlike behavior that is a standard for machine intelligence. What in principle distinguishes the parsing of human language from other faculties that machines carry out? When two computers communicate over the internet, why are they not intelligent (or why don’t they think in the sense that Turing declines to define)? When a physicist uses Mathematica to generate a Taylor series for a mathematical model that lacks a neat, closed form solution and cannot be feasibly solved by a human hand, why is that computer not worthy of intelligence (and, presumably, rights) just as much as a computer that passes the Turing test? (As well as the other points left unanswered.)

Wow, the human brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe and you’re expecting intelligent machines 50 years after the first integrated circuits. You, sir, are an optimist’s optimist.

I’m not sure many researchers are interested in trying to emulate humans any more. Rather they are tackling problems such as face recognition as applications in their own right. Although it’s possible for any of us to play with evolutionary computation and so on, especially now we can get our hands on multi-core processors, cheap memory, and basic integrated sensing systems (mobile phones have cheap “eyes”, “ears”, “balance” and motion detectors).