Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

And yet volumes are written on the topic, and you have no trouble dismissing this particular approach as not really answering "consciousness". Well what do you mean exactly then?

>and while a human would pass all the possible models of humanity, a computer would surely pass only the ones it's programmed for.

I don't agree with either the first nor the second assumption a priori. Would a schizophrenic, or autistic or infant brain pass "all the possible models of humanity". And second, why would a computer pass only the models it was programmed for?! We know that isn't true with today's software and today's AI. IBM's Watson wasn't programmed with every single fact it used to win Jeopardy, nor is any rudimentary video game AI programmed with a specific set of behaviors that it executes regardless of player actions. If you want to go deeper, I can also claim the human brain itself was shaped by natural selection for a finite and very specific set of tasks, and the neural machinery is as deterministic as software since both are subject to the fundamental laws. So tell me why can't software simulate human behaviour again?

>Another thing is that in order for a computer to truly mimic a human, that is, to fool people for 20 years about movies/music/sports/family/relationships, but also other abstract experiences, the computer would need to experience them

No necessarily. It can lie. Or it can live them by ingesting huge amounts of information from digital content, or maybe it was trained in a lab or adopted by a family and raised like a human. Whatever.

> and especially, elaborate them in a human way.

Define "human way", because that's the entire point. I don't see intrinsically why such a computer program could not be built. What's so special about the "human way".

>You can achieve it in a static picture, but once you freely move in a 3D world, you see the flaws that show that what you're experiencing in reality is a limited set of limited algorithms, which are used to workaround hard problems

And you base this on what? I mean you're just asserting it can't be done, why? Because human brains are powered by magic!?

>I think exactly the same arguments stand, that is, in order to mimic a human in such a high level of faithfulness, very hard problems would need to be solved, not just worked around.

I'm not sure what the difference is between solving problems and merely working around them, in your context. But yes, we're not there yet, obviously. I think the Turing test is actually deeper than most people give it credit to be. And you illustrate this perfectly. All your objections are hand-wavy appeals to some vague notions of the "human way".

Because human brains are magic?

> And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really).

You have your answer, the effect of consciousness clearly arises from physical matter that is subject to natural laws of physics and shaped blindly by natural selection. That should tell you that it is quite possible. For example, for a related concept of Free Will, I think we can confidently say that for all intents and purposes we don't have any, and yet our brains produce a very powerful subjective feeling of having it. This is why I think Consciousness is a much simpler problem than it really is. We have a cognitive bias for seeing the world in a very specific way, just as we have a cognitive bias in visualizing 3-dimensional spaces and we have incredible problems visualizing higher dimensions (heck, we can't even visualize a 2-D or 1-D space without embedding it in a 3-D space).

Consciousness and free will are very powerful illusions hard-wired into our brains, unless you think the particles that make us up, somehow don't follow deterministic (or random in case of QM) natural laws?

That's actually a great point many people misunderstand, largely due to nobody pinning down a definition for "Strong AI."

I prefer the term "computational consciousness" instead of Strong AI. It gets the point across better about future AI actually _thinking_ and _experiencing_ instead of having people misconceive AI as just a clever if/else decision tree.

Strong/Hard AI (and human consciousness) is a combinations of algorithms and data. People have hard-wired algorithms for processing data from their senses. Some people have better hard-wired algorithms than others. But, if you take the smartest person alive today back in time and raise them in an isolated environment (i.e. limit their data intake), they won't be the same person and they won't be able to think the same thoughts.

Summary: AI = mostly data, with algorithms to help organize/cluster/recall things. You can't have recall and intent of agency without a self-directed consciousness controlling the internal stateexternal world feedback gradient.

See, this is the problem with this virulent strain of Scientism making the rounds right now. There's this tendency to divide ideas into two camps: "explained by our current understanding of physics" and "magic". It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to religion, like anyone that posits that we don't have a complete understanding of reality is therefore a crypto-theist. It completely misunderstands the nature of scientific progress, the evolution of our conceptions of reality in response to empirical evidence.

It's easy to picture human progress as millennia of trudging through continually-decreasing ignorance and finally arriving at the Correct Answers, but this can be a dangerous view. Science works best when we aren't constrained by dogma -- when we're allowed to "think outside the box" and consider the world in new and revolutionary ways.

People in the thrall of this Scientism often act like raising the Hard Problem of Consciousness is some kind of intellectual weakness, that we're just not able to "get over" the fact that subjective experience happens to emerge from physical matter. Nobody here (or at least not me) is saying that the Hard Problem means that subjective experience is "magic" or that we have anthropomorphic souls that float up to heaven with angel wings when we die. The Hard Problem of Consciousness is still a scientific problem, and I'm not saying it can't be solved by science. But telling me that Strong AI will basically solve this issue (and that any protestation is an appeal to "magic") comes across as hand-waving; the simulation of a conscious entity does not help me understand why being in the world feels like anything.

What about arvioida? Would that be used for compute?

This might be an instances where the Sapir Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir_Whorf) comes in to play. The idea would be that you don't consider computing and calculating to differ from thought because the [primary] language you use [or grew up using] doesn't make that differentiation.