candice schuster wrote:
Hi Richard,
I'm beginning to feel sorry for you, do you not tire of endless challenges ?
Back to the AI debate then....still parallel to what you think....
In all of my previous posts, most of them anyhow I have mentioned
consciousness, today I found myself reading some of John Searle's
theories, he poses exactly the same type of question...The reason
computers can't do semantics is because semantics is about meaning;
meaning derives from original intentionality, and original
intentionality derives from feelings - qualia - and computers don't have
any qualia. How does consciousness get added to the AI picture Richard ?
How can I summarize my feelings about Seale? His stuff generated a
humungous literature, and in my opinion almost all of it was a waste of
time.
Point number 1: Searle himself is confused. When asked for
clarification about what he actually claims, he dodges, shifts position,
becomes vague, gets aggressive, etc etc. Pleaaaase don't ask me to say
exactly why I make this claim: I'm summarizing hundreds of debates,
several books and piles of articles. Please believe me, when you get
down into the details of his argument, it is not at all clear what he
really means, and when you ask him, he does not answer.
Point number 2: Searle's argument is completely and utterly broken. It
is broken in many ways, but the one that really kills it most thoroughly
is as follows. He uses a thought experiment (his Chinese Room) that
contains an extremely weird situation (An intelligent system being
implemented ON TOP OF a system that is already intelligent at a lower
level), and then he SAYS that artificial intelligence researchers would
make a certain claim about this weird system (He says: "AI researchers
would say that this system understands Chinese"), but in fact, AI
researchers would never make that claim.
He basically puts words into the mouths of AI researchers that they
would never utter, then he destroys the plausibility of this claim that
they would never make, THEN he generalizes his conclusion to say that
other claims made by AI researchers are "obviously" wrong.
It is a bogus argument. In simple terms, AI researchers would say that
the weird system he proposes has TWO intelligences inside it, not one,
and that because of this you cannot talk about whether the "whole"
system understands this or that or the other: it is entirely possible,
in this weird system that is not likely to ever exist in the real world,
for one of the two intelligences to "understand" Chinese while the other
does not. So when Searle says "The system clearly does not understand
Chinese" the AI researchers say "Which system are you referring to,
John, because there are two of them?!". John, of course, starts dodging
at this point, trying to push words into the mouths of the AI folks
without ever answering the question. If Searle wants to talk about the
bottom-level intelligence, the AI folks agree with him completely:
"Nope, that one does not understand Chinese, and we never claimed it did."
It is unbelievable that so much time could have been wasted by so many
people on so much nonsense.
Searle himself, meanwhile, is arrogant and triumphalist when you
actually meet him (I did, at a conference last year). He simply struts
around, mocking the AI folks and saying "I proved them wrong. They
argued back. I won!".
The truth is that qualia are something that computers can very much
have, and semantics, and all the rest. It will be a while before the
reasons why this is so penetrate all the way down to the street, but
that will eventually become clear.
At the same time I find myself moving back to Charles Darwin again and
his study of the human smile...how come tribes in the Amazon who have
had no outside contact to the world (back then anyhow) still smile when
they are happy when they have never encountered the human world, which
part of our genetic make up equals a smile...then back again to AI...as
Searle said...it's got something to do with biological qualities of the
brain. We are organic, we cannot be replicated no matter how much each
one of us thinks of the human brain as a machine.
Hmmmmm.....
I don't understand why a smile reaction proves anything about the issue.
I guess I am confused about what you are trying to claim here.
I won't say anything more about your mention of Searle, here, but there
is something important lurking in your mention of "... no matter how
much each one of us thinks of the human brain as a machine."
Would it surprise you to know that some of us believe that it is
possible to build a complete, thinking, feeling, qualia-experiencing,
semantically-complete machine that is every bit as intelligent as us,
BUT that we would never say that this means the mind is "just" a machine?
This is a subtle point, but I assure you that even though I think minds
can be made, it is not the case (and NEVER will be the case) that all
the things we experience as minds can be explained by objective science.
I'm not talking about telepathy (as Turing did: I am open minded on
that point), but simply about subjective consciousness.
We can predict that a machine of the right sort would be conscious, but
that does not mean that consciousness can be "explained" in any
conventional sense. Nothing will ever explain away what consciousness is.
Instead of thinking of intelligent machines as some kind of depressing
bring-down for the human species ("Horror! They made an AI, so we're
just machines after all!!") you should think of it the other way round:
if we build machines that can think, more consciousnesses come into
the world: each one has an inexplicable subjective consciousness that
can never be fully explained, just as mysterious as any other
consciousness in the universe.
I say all this, not because I am guessing it to be true, or jumping to
conclusions, or wanting it to be true, but because it is a direct result
of what I think is the best theory of consciousness around at the
moment, which I think will eventually come to be the mainstream theory.
Richard Loosemore
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