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John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

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Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#21

Post by deepnet »

drdeca wrote: post #6
chubot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

I thought the idea was that because the only part of the room actually doing things (the person), doesn't understand chinese? I mean, agree with it or not, but I think that's a bit stronger than just, making it seem intuitively worse because its a room instead of "a computer"? I think the important part isn't the swap of "room" for "computer", but instead the swap of "person" for "cpu"?

The person in the room performing the lookup is a red-herring and can be replaced by suitable algorithm, e.g. a convnet - which could learn the lookup task.

Consciousness resides in the minds that created the lookup tables: they were constructed by conscious beings to map queries to meaningful responses.

The lookup tables are the very sophisticated part of Searle's Chinese Room.

The recent emergent semantic vector algebra discovered in human languages by Mikolov's word2vec [Mikolov et al] demonstrate that some of the computational power of language is inherent in the language ( but only meaningfully interpretable by a conscious listener.

Meaning requires Consciousness but language is unexpectedly sophisticated and contains a semantic vector space which can answer simple queries ("What is the Capital of...") and analogise ("King is to What as Man is to Woman") algebraicly. [Mikolov et al]

This inherent semantic vector space is discoverable by context encoding large corpii.

Language is a very sophisticated and ancient tool that allows some reasoning to be performed by simple algebraic transformations inherent to the language.

-

[Mikolov et al] : Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781

& https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#22

Post by cromwellian »

The systems response is pretty much the right answer. You can put yourself at any level of reductionism of a complex system and ask how in the hell the system accomplishes anything. If you imagine yourself running a simulation of physics on paper for the universe, you may ask yourself, how does this simulation create jellyfish.

I think people fall for Searle's argument the same way people fall for creationist arguments that make evolution seem absurd. Complex systems that evolve over long periods of time have enormous logical depth complexity and exhibit emergent properties that really can't be computed analytically, but only but running the simulation, and observing macroscopic patterns.

If I run a cellular automaton that computes the sound wave frequencies of a symphony playing one of Mozart's compositions, and it takes trillions of steps before even the first second of sound is output, you can rightly ask, at any state, how is this thing creating music?

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#23

Post by dnautics »

chubot wrote: post #3
bhickey wrote: post #2

There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=38m51s ). Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at…

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

I was never satisfied with the chinese room thought experiment. Let's momentarily replace the thing in the chinese room with a human, to parse Searle's notion of "understanding". Searle would argue that a human trained in to emit meaningful chinese characters would still lack understanding. But I think this is backwards and speaks to your identification of Searle begging the question: the only way a human could emit meaningful chinese responses would be if it had an understanding of chinese. Consequently if a machine is outputting meaningful chinese, it too must already understand chinese, and any argument otherwise is kind of a pro-biology bigotry with a shaky underlying logic at best.

This then devolves into semantics. Can a person locked in a room really come to "understand" chinese culture, for example, if only non-experiential learning were used as data inputs? I think we have to say the answer is yes. I am a chemist. I have never seen an atomic orbital with my bare eyes, yet I can design chemical reactions that work with my understanding of chemistry. Because I have not experienced an atomic orbital does that mean I do not understand? Even, when I set up my first reaction, I did not have any experience, and knew what I was doing only through what could be described as sophisticated analogy. I would say my understading was low, but it was certainly non-zero. Where does one draw the line?

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#24

Post by vixen99 »

chubot wrote: post #12
dang wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point was to construct an example that most people agree wouldn't count as consciousness, then ask how a computer is any different.

Maybe, but there are too many holes in the construct to make it useful IMO. It just provokes endless confused debate rather than illuminating anything. IMO Kurzweil's response is actually spot on, although not that hard to come up with. You could make the argument: in your brain, there are just atoms following the laws of physics. The atoms have no choice in the matter, and know nothing about Chinese, or hunger, love…

Why can't meaning just be the sensation of a local minimum? When you find meaning, you temporarily pause because there's nowhere else to go in the local environment. Subsequently of course, you might be jolted out of that and be compelled to find a new minimum.

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#25

Post by nnq »

This guy so smart but at the same time such an idiot. SYNTAX and SEMANTICS are essentially SAME THING. It's only a context-dependent difference, and this difference is quantitative, even if we still don't have a good enough definition of what those quantitative variables underlying them are. You must have a really "fractured" mind not to instantly "get it". And "INTRINSIC" is simply a void concept: nothing is intrinsic, everything (the universe and all) is obviously observer dependent, it just may be that the observer can be a "huge entity" that some people choose to personalize and call God.

It's amazing to me that people with such a pathological disconnect between mind and intuition can get so far in life. He's incredibly smart, has a great intuition, but when exposed to some problems he simply can't CONNECT his REASON with his INTUITION. This is a MENTAL ILLNESS and we should invest in developing ways to treat it, seriously!

Of course that "the room + person + books + rule books + scratch paper" can be self conscious. You can ask the room questions about "itself" and it will answer, proving that it has a model of itself, even if that model is not specifically encoded anywhere. It's just like mathematics, if you have a procedural definitions for the set of all natural numbers (ie. a definition that can be executed to generate the first and the next natural number), you "have" the entire set of natural numbers, even if you don't have them all written down on a piece of paper. Same way, if you have the processes for consciousness, you have consciousness, even if you can't pinpoint "where" in space and time exactly is. Consciousness is closer to a concept like "prime numbers" than to a physical thing like "a rock", you don't need a space and time for the concept of prime numbers to exist in, it just is.

His way o "depersonalizing" conscious "machines" is akin to Hitler's way of depersonalizing Jews, and this "mental disease" will probably lead to similar genocides, even if the victims will not be "human" ...at least in the first phase, because you'll obviously get a HUGE retaliation in reply to any such stupidity, and my bet it that such a retaliation will be what will end the human race.

Now, of course the Chinese room discussion is stupid: you can't have "human-like consciousness" with one Chinese room. You'd need a network of Chinese rooms that talk to each other and also operate under constraints that make their survival dependent on their ability to model themselves and their neighbors, in order to generate "human-like consciousness".

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#26

Post by [deleted] »

spooningtamarin wrote: post #20

Consciousness and understanding are human created symbolism. Talking about it seriously is a waste of time. I could be an empty shell imitating a human perfectly, all other humans would buy my lack of consciousness, and nothing would be different, from their perspective I exist, from mine, I don't have mine. How does one know that I really understand something? Maybe I can answer all the questions to convince them?

[deleted]

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#27

Post by simonh »

chubot wrote: post #3
bhickey wrote: post #2

There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=38m51s ). Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at…

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

It's just obfuscation. In reality the 'room' would have to be the size of a planet and if one person was manipulating the symbols it might take the whole thing the life span of the universe to think 'Hello World'. But by phrasing it as a 'room' with one person in it he makes it look inadequate to the task, and therefore the task impossible.

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#28

Post by rjsw »

dnautics wrote: post #23
chubot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

I was never satisfied with the chinese room thought experiment. Let's momentarily replace the thing in the chinese room with a human, to parse Searle's notion of "understanding". Searle would argue that a human trained in to emit meaningful chinese characters would still lack understanding. But I think this is backwards and speaks to your identification of Searle begging the question: the only way a human could emit…

I have always felt that the human in the room would start to recognize patterns and develop an "understanding". Their "understanding" may have no basis in reality but I don't see that it is any less valid to them.

If Searle is right then we should be able to perform a MRI on a blind person while they are talking to someone and spot the point where their brain switches into "symbol manipulation mode" when the conversation subject becomes something visual.

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#29

Post by alfapla »

chubot wrote: post #3
bhickey wrote: post #2

There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=38m51s ). Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at…

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

The Chinese room argument is actually needlessly convoluted. Just imagine a piece of paper on which three words are printed: "I AM SAD". Now is there anyone who believes that this piece of paper is actually feeling sad just because "it says so"? Of course not. Now, suppose we replace this piece of paper with a small tablet computer that changes its displayed "mood" over time according to some algorithm. Now in my opinion it is rather hard to imagine that all of a sudden consciousness will "arise" in the machine like some ethereal ghost and the tablet will actually start experiencing the displayed emotion. Because it's basically still the same piece of paper.

Re: John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

#30

Post by [deleted] »

alfapla wrote: post #29
chubot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah honestly I don't get what he is really contributing (and I'm sort of an AI skeptic). In 2000 in undergrad, I recall checking out some of his books from the library because people said he was important, and I learned about the "Chinese Room" argument [1] in class. How is it even an argument? It doesn't illuminate anything, and it's not even clever. It seems like the most facile wrong-headed stab at refutation, by…

The Chinese room argument is actually needlessly convoluted. Just imagine a piece of paper on which three words are printed: "I AM SAD". Now is there anyone who believes that this piece of paper is actually feeling sad just because "it says so"? Of course not. Now, suppose we replace this piece of paper with a small tablet computer that changes its displayed "mood" over time according to some algorithm. Now in my opi…

[deleted]
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