On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think you are radically overestimating the size of the book and the
> importance of the size to the experiment. ELIZA was about 20Kb.
>
TO HELL WITH ELIZA!!!! That prehistoric program is NOT intelligent! What is
the point of a though experiment that gives stupid useless answers to
questions?
>If it's a thousand times better than ELIZA, then you've got a 20 Mb
rule book.
For heavens sake, if a 20 Mb look-up table was sufficient we would have
had AI decades ago.
Since you can't do so let me make the best case for the Chinese Room from
your point of view and the most difficult case to defend from mine. Let's
say you're right and the size of the lookup table is not important so we
won't worry that it's larger than the observable universe, and let's say
time is not a issue either so we won't worry that it operates a billion
trillion times slower than our mind, and let's say the Chinese Room doesn't
do ELIZA style bullshit but can engage in a brilliant and interesting (if
you are very very very patient) conversation with you in Chinese or any
other language about anything. And lets have the little man not only be
ignorant of Chinese but be retarded and thus not understand anything in any
language, he can only look at input symbols and then look at the huge
lookup table till he finds similar squiggles and the appropriate response
to those squiggles which he then outputs. The man has no idea what's going
on, he just looks at input squiggles and matches them up with output
squiggles, but from outside the room it's very different.
You ask the room to produce a quantum theory of gravity and it does so, you
ask it to output a new poem that a considerable fraction of the human race
would consider to be very beautiful and it does so, you ask it to output a
original fantasy children's novel that will be more popular than Harry
Potter and it does so. The room certainly behaves intelligently but the man
was not conscious of any of the answers produced, as I've said the man
doesn't have a clue what's going on, so does this disprove my assertion
that intelligent behavior implies consciousness?
No it does not, or at least it probably does not, this is why. That
reference book that contains everything that can be said about anything
that can be asked in a finite time would be large, "astronomical" would be
far far too weak a word to describe it, but it would not be infinitely
large so it remains a legitimate thought experiment. However that
astounding lookup table came from somewhere, whoever or whatever made it
had to be very intelligent indeed and also I believe conscious, and so the
brilliance of the actions of the Chinese Room does indeed imply
consciousness.
You may say that even if I'm right about that then a computer doing smart
things would just imply the consciousness of the people who made the
computer. But here is where the analogy breaks down, real computers don't
work like the Chinese Room does, they don't have anything remotely like
that astounding lookup table; the godlike thing that made the Chinese Room
knows exactly what that room will do in every circumstance, but computer
scientists don't know what their creation will do, all they can do is watch
it and see.
But you may also say, I don't care how the room got made, I was talking
about inside the room and I insist there was no consciousness inside that
room. I would say assigning a position to consciousness is a little like
assigning a position to "fast" or "red" or any other adjective, it doesn't
make a lot of sense. If your conscious exists anywhere it's not inside a
vat made of bone balancing on your shoulders, it's where you're thinking
about. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a johnkclarkian
way and other things are the way matter behaves when it is organized in a
chineseroomian way.
And by the way, I don't intend to waste my time defending the assertion
that intelligent behavior implies intelligence, that would be like debating
if X implies X or not, I have better things to do with my time.
>The King James Bible can be downloaded here
>
No thanks, I'll pass on that.
>> Only?! Einstein only seemed intelligent to scientifically literate
>> speakers in the outside world.
>>
>
> > No, he was aware of his own intelligence too.
>
How the hell do you know that? And you seem to be using the words
"intelligent" and "conscious" interchangeably, they are not synonyms.
>If you start out defining intelligence as an abstract function and
> category of behaviors
>
Which is the only operational definition of intelligence.
> rather than quality of consciousness
>
Which is a totally useless definition in investigating the intelligence of
a computer or a person or a animal or of ANYTHING.
> I use ELIZA as an example because you can clearly see that it is not
> intelligent
>
So can I, so when you use that idiot program to try to advance your
antediluvian ideas it proves nothing. If you want to make a point use
Watson or Siri or some other program that produces useful information
rather than silly evasions
> Ok, make it a million times the size of ELIZA. A set of 1,000 books.
>
That's not going to do it, make it a million million million million
billion trillion times the size of Eliza and that still will not do it if
it's just a lookup table, even scientific notation would not be sufficient
to describe how large that lookup table would need to be.
> If I'm a chef and I walk into a room, the room doesn't become a
> restaurant. Why stop at the room, why not say the entire city speaks
> Chinese? If consciousness worked this way then there could be no
> localization at all - the universe would be one big intelligence that knows
> everything about everything
>
Consciousness has no unique localization, but it's important to remember
that differences in position is not the only way to differentiate one thing
from another; "slow" is clearly different from "fast" but not because they
are in different places. The same thing could also be said about the number
eleven and the number twelve, they are different but position has nothing
to do with it.
> > Are you saying that if Watson takes 2 seconds to answer a question it is
> intelligent but if it takes 2 hours to answer the same question correctly
> is it somehow less intelligent? Speed is meaningless for this thought
> experiment.
>
But it's supposed to prove something about consciousness not intelligence.
and if your mind worked as slowly as the Chinese Room you might be
conscious of the life and death of stars but not anything that happened
faster than that.
> > We are alive because we are made of living organisms.
>
And living organisms are made of atoms, just exactly like everything else
including computers. Life generally behaves in a more complex way than
non-life but there is not a sharp line between life and non-life, and it's
getting less sharp every day.
> You can't make a stem cell out of a semiconductor,
>
Certainly you can. The difference between stem cells and semiconductors is
exactly the same
difference between my brain and last years mashed potatoes, the way the
atoms are organized.
>I don't think the brain produces consciousness.
>
Then some other organ must, your big toe perhaps?
> I think awareness produces consciousness.
>
That's not very enlightening, awareness and consciousness are synonyms.
> Machines are automatic and pre-recorded, not live and aware.
>
A computer recently figured out what the trillionth digit of PI was, do you
really think that number was pre-recorded?
> > A bullet can do that because it's causing a physical catastrophe to the
> brain as a whole, not because it is reprogramming the organization of the
> mind.
>
I don't know what your talking about, a bullet to the brain is a
reprogramming, things behave very differently after that.
John K Clark
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