Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

John Searle: Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

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

#41

Post by xioxox »

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…

Interesting. It's also unclear to me why a system of books and ledgers of rules couldn't be conscious if they are self modifying. Who knows what property of the system insides of heads gives it this sense of "self" and how could you even test that it has one?

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

#42

Post by toxik »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38
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 somew…

This might be very tangential, but I had a very acute sensation of learning something new the other day. There are these stereographic images, where they put the left and right eye's intended image next to each other -- and with a little practice, you can angle your eyes so each eye looks at a separate picture. Suddenly your double vision starts to make MORE sense than regular vision, because you're now able to combine the two images to get a sense of depth in the image. The tricky part is now to focus your eyes; at first, you'll reflexively correct your eyes too and the illusion (or the combination rather) goes away.

But bit by bit, you learn to control your eye's focal length independent of "where" in space you want to look. It really is astonishing.

It made me think of consciousness as a measure of ability to integrate information, because this process is truly fascinating to anybody who tries it (and I really think you should!) Perhaps that's because with this trick, you were able to integrate more information, and thus tickle your brain more?

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

#43

Post by dragonwriter »

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 has always seemed to me a powerful illustration of the problem that "consciousness" is so poorly defined as to be not subject to meaningful discussion dressed up as a meaningful argument against AI consciousness.

Its always distressed me that some people take it seriously as an argument against AI consciousness; it does a better job of illustrating the incoherence of the fuzzy concept of consciousness on which the argument is based.

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

#44

Post by sethev »

I think what it boils down to is that Searle believes consciousness is a real thing that exists in the universe. A simulation of a thing isn't the same as the thing itself, no matter how accurate the outputs. The Chinese Room argument just amplifies that intuition (my guess is that the idea of a room was inspired by the Turing Test).

I think studying the brain (as opposed to philosophical arguments) is the thing that will eventually answer these kinds of questions, though.

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

#45

Post by redwood »

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…

I disagree completely. After time the color filter will start to associate various concepts and feelings add images with various colors. This association is what starts making the colors themselves have meaning even if they can't see the colors the same way that you and I can. There's no way to prove that we all see colors the same way anyway. But that doesn't mean that we don't believe that were conscious. I think I see that you're saying we cannot make any claims about others perhaps but only can talk about how we feel. But I feel like the room example is actually misleading in this respect. Another way of thinking about it is our brain starts to associate things and if those clusters of associations that give those things meaning. The experience of experience and color is only important because experience and color has a web of other associated experiences that those colors remind us of. So extending the room experiment to the experience of a baby who throughout the entire life sees colors or the filter image version of these colors at various moments to associate with various things. In this example we can imagine that the baby will in fact associate let's say blue with I don't know this great unknown half of our outside ceiling that we see during the day. And then that will take on something more to it but it is difficult admittedly to explain.

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

#46

Post by amoruso »

Searle makes two assertions:

1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding. 2) Simulation is not duplication.

Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion when he first formulated his argument. This is obviously right, but we're already moving past this. For example, word2vec or the recent progress in generating image descriptions with neural nets. The semantic associations are not nearly as complex as those of a human child, but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.

Claim 2 is an assertion about the hard problem of consciousness. In other words, about what kinds of information processing systems would have subjective conscious experiences. No one actually has an answer for this yet, just intuitions. I can't really see why a physical instantiation of a certain process in meat should be different from a mathematically equivalent instantiation on a Turing machine. He has a different intuition. But neither one of us can prove anything, so there's nothing else to say.

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

#47

Post by DonaldFisk »

redwood wrote: post #45
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…

I disagree completely. After time the color filter will start to associate various concepts and feelings add images with various colors. This association is what starts making the colors themselves have meaning even if they can't see the colors the same way that you and I can. There's no way to prove that we all see colors the same way anyway. But that doesn't mean that we don't believe that were conscious. I think I…

> After time the color filter will start to associate various concepts and feelings add images with various colors. This association is what starts making the colors themselves have meaning even if they can't see the colors the same way that you and I can.

The filters are just pieces of transparent coloured plastic. How are they capable of forming associations?

Also, associations on their own (e.g. blue with sky, red with blood, green with grass) don't give you any idea what colours are like. Knut Nordby (and many other people with achromatopsia) knew these associations as well as you or I know them, but made it quite clear that he had no idea what it was like to see in colour.

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

#48

Post by tobiasSoftware »

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…

As a believer in Weak AI the Chinese Room argument really gave me more understanding of my position. His argument is based on the concept that interpretation of symbols is not the same as the understanding that we do. As an example, say that a person learns 1 + 1 = 2. Because that person understands the concept, he can then go apply it to other situations, and figure out that 1 + 2 = 3. Whereas because the Chinese room is just interpreting symbols, so when the computer is asked the question "what is 1 + 1?" and can answer "2" via lookup table, but the person inside the room has gained no understanding of the actual question so he can't then use that knowledge in different circumstances and know without looking up that 1 + 2 = 3.

The Chinese Room argument is that because computers can't "learn", everything has to be taught to them directly, whereas humans are able to take knowledge given and apply it to other situations. While some computers can "learn" enough rules to follow patterns, the argument is that computers can't "jump the track" and that humans can.

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

#49

Post by dekhn »

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…

So basically, the way to convince Searle (not that that is a real goal) is to build a robot automaton which passes the uncanny valley: very responsive eyes. A collection of tricks. Clever responses.

Searle would look at that and conclude it had consciousness.

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

#50

Post by pbw »

I think the argument about consciousness is vacuous. Searle admits we might create an AI which acts 100% like a human in every way.

Nothing Searle says stands in the way of creating intelligent or super-intelligent entities. All Searle is saying is those entities won't be conscious.

No can prove this claim today. But more significantly I think it's extremely likely no one will ever prove the claim. Consciousness is a private subjective experience. I think it's likely you simply cannot prove it exists or doesn't exist.

Mankind will create a human-level robots and we'll watch them think and create and love and cry and we'll simply not know what their conscious experience is.

Even if we did prove it one way or the other, the popular opinion would be unaffected.

Some big chunk of people will insist robots are conscious entities who feel pain and have rights. And some big chunk of people will insist they are not conscious.

It might be our final big debate. An abstruse proof is not going to change anyone's mind. Look at how social policies are debated today. Proof is not a factor.

Post reply on HN