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John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

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

#31

Post by nsns »

nnq wrote: post #25

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 intrins…

Well, it's Searle after all. It's always funny to re-read Derrida's attack on his problematic line of thought[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_Inc

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

#32

Post by gpderetta »

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…

The Chinese room argument is actually needlessly convoluted. Just imagine a piece of paper on which I draw a face that looks sad. Now is there anyone who believes that this piece of paper is actually feeling sad just because it looks sad? Of course not. Now, suppose we replace this piece of paper with an organic machine made of cells, blood and neurons which 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 organic machine 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]

#33

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

escape_goat wrote: post #13
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.

I think that there's a fundamental cognitive-shift style problem with Searle's argument, because I remember encountering it when I was in my tweens and wondering why anyone thought there was any 'there' there. I think that -- from memory -- this is approximately what Searle believes himself to be saying: 1. Imagine that you're having a conversation with a person in another room, in Chinese. You're writing stuff down…

> [...] we must conclude that notion of consciousness is ill-founded and inarticulate, that our understanding of consciousness is incomplete, and that our sense of "knowing" that we or another person are conscious is likely an illusion.

I think I mostly agree with you, but I would argue that if your notion of consciousness is ill-founded and inarticulate, you can't really decide whether it's an illusion either. After all, the subjective experience quite definitely does happen/is real, thus obviously not an illusion, while the interpretation offered for that subjective experience is incoherent, thus there is no way to decide whether it's describing an illusion or not.

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

#34

Post by DonaldFisk »

I think Searle's mostly correct and Kurzweil's completely wrong on this. It took me a long time to understand Searle's argument, because Searle conflates consciousness and intelligence and this confuses matters. Understanding Chinese is a difficult problem requiring intelligence, but I don't think it requires consciousness.

It is important to distinguish between "understanding Chinese" and "knowing what it's like to understand Chinese". We immediately have a problem: knowing what it's like to understand Chinese involves various qualia, none of which is unique to Chinese speakers.

So I'll simplify the argument. Instead of having a room with a book containing rules about Chinese, and a person inside who doesn't Chinese, we have a room, with some coloured filters, and a person who can't see any colours at all (i.e. who has achromatopsia). Such people (e.g. http://www.achromatopsia.info/knut-nordby-achromatopsia-p/) will confirm they have no idea what it's like to see colours. If you shove a sheet of coloured paper under the door, the person in the room will place the different filters on top of the sheet in turn, and by seeing how dark the paper then looks, be able to determine its colour, which he'll write on the paper, and pass it back to the person outside. The person outside thinks the person inside can distinguish colours, but the person inside will confirm that not only can he not, but he doesn't even know what it's like. Nothing else in the room is obviously conscious.

A propos of the dog, this is the other minds problem. It's entirely possible that I'm the only conscious being in the universe and everyone else (and their pets) are zombies. But we think that people, dogs, etc. are conscious because they are similar to us in important ways. Kurzweil presumably considers computers to be conscious too. Computers can be intelligent, and maybe in a few years or decades will be able to pass themselves off over the Internet as Chinese speakers, but there's no reason to believe computers have qualia (i.e. know what anything is like), and given the above argument, every reason to believe that they don't.

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

#35

Post by Chathamization »

drdeca wrote: post #11
Chathamization wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the system would be the person + the lookup tables, not just the person. The problem is, we don't tend to say "does a room with a person in it and several books have this knowledge?" Relying on a system that doesn't tend to get grouped together (there's no term for the system human + book inside room), and having only one animate object (so that people think of the animate object as the system instead of th…

I think this is called the "systems response". Which, well there's a whole series of responses back and forth, with different ideas about what is or is not a good response. One idea describes a machine where each state of the program is pre-computed, and the computer steps through the states one by one, but in each state, if the next of the pre-computed states was wrong (i.e. would not be the next step of the program…

I don't think it actually brings up any relevant issues. For instance, you mention a p-zombie, but that's another one with glaringly obvious problems that are immediately evident. Does bacteria have consciousness? Or did consciousness arise later, with the first conscious creature surrounded by a community of p-zombies, including their parents, siblings, partners, etc. Both possibilities seem pretty detached from reality.

Pre-computation is another one that seems to obfuscate the actual issue. No, I don't think anyone would think a computer simply reciting a pre-computed conversation had conscious thought going into it; but that same is true for a human being reciting a a conversation they memorized (which wouldn't be that different from reading the conversation in a book). But that's a bit of a strawman, because no one is arguing that lookup table-type programs are conscious (you don't see anyone arguing that Siri is conscious). And the lookup table/precomputations for even a simple conversation would impossibly large (run some numbers, it's most likely larger than the number of atoms in the universe for even tiny conversations).

So I don't see these arguments as bringing up anything useful. They seem more like colorful attempts to purposefully confuse the issue.

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

#36

Post by DonaldFisk »

simonh wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Neither the size of the room nor the speed of the computation is important to Searle's argument. You could replace the person in the room with the population of India (except for those who understand Chinese), and pretend to the Chinese speaker that the communication is by surface mail. Or use a bank of supercomputers if Indians aren't fast enough.

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

#37

Post by kriro »

It's pretty frustrating to watch. Feels like an endless repetition of "well humans and dogs are conscious because that's self evident". There's no sufficient demarcation criterion other than "I know it when I see it" that he seems to apply. [I guess having a semantics is his criterion but he doesn't elaborate on a criterion for that]

The audience question about intelligent design summed up my frustration nicely (or rather the amoeba evolving part of it).

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

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #34

I think Searle's mostly correct and Kurzweil's completely wrong on this. It took me a long time to understand Searle's argument, because Searle conflates consciousness and intelligence and this confuses matters. Understanding Chinese is a difficult problem requiring intelligence, but I don't think it requires consciousness. It is important to distinguish between "understanding Chinese" and "knowing what it's like to…

This is basically just the Hard Problem of consciousness. It's been a hard problem for decades, and we're no closer to having an answer.

>But we think that people, dogs, etc. are conscious because they are similar to us in important ways.

Specifically, mammals have mirror neurones. More complex mammals also seem to have common hard-wired links between emotions and facial expressions - so emotional expression is somewhat recognisable across species.

I'm finding the AI debates vastly frustrating. There are basic features of being a sentient mammal - like having a body with a complicated sensory net, and an endocrine system with goal/avoidance sensations and emotions, and awareness of social hierarchy and other forms of bonding - that are being ignored in superficial arguments about paperclip factories.

It's possible that a lot of what we experience as consciousness happens at all of those levels. The ability to write code or find patterns or play chess floats along on top, often in a very distracted way.

So the idea that an abstract symbol processing machine can be conscious in any way we understand seems wrong-headed. Perhaps recognisable consciousness is more likely to appear on top of a system that models the senses, emotions, and social awareness first, topped by a symbolic abstraction layer that includes a self-model to "experience" those lower levels, recursively.

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

#39

Post by Scarblac »

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…

AND YET, human brains are an implementation of such an algorithm. By all reasoning, we shouldn't be conscious.

Yet here I am, I am the one who is seeing what my eyes see and I am distinct from you. Science still has no idea how that happens, as far as I know.

So how knows, maybe all computer programs are in fact conscious in some way.

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

#40

Post by Scarblac »

vixen99 wrote: post #24
chubot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that explain consciousness, qualia et cetera?
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