Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!canon!rjf From: rjf@canon.co.uk (Robin Faichney) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: emergent properties Message-ID: <1990Oct4.154655.23004@canon.co.uk> Date: 4 Oct 90 15:46:55 GMT References: <1990Sep29.213139.2876@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Sender: Robin Faichney Reply-To: rjf@canon.co.uk Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK Lines: 48 In article <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes: >The amazing thing is how rarely anything resembling an "inexplicable >emergent" has ever reigned for very long in the history of Science -- >except for transient periods before better theories remove the need >for the assumption of extra, special laws. The moral is that, >whenever you're pretty sure you are dealing with a "genuine emergent", >you're proably making a mistake that reflects the primitive scientific >culture of your time. The longest holdout was "life", or the vital >spirit, whose reduction commenced with Pasteur (and Darwin) and was >pretty much buried with Watson-Crick. > >A present-day holdout is "consciousness", and this is well illustrated >by Penrose's dogmatic naivites. Amazing, isn't it, how a person with such a reputation in one field, can come such a cropper in an unrelated one! >It is no accident, I suppose, that he >does not cite the suggestions I made about consciousness in "The >Society of Mind", in which I suggest that most of the phenomena >involved are related to (limited amounts of) short term memory. If >so, future AI machines will be much more conscious than humans are, >and may also have much less sense of mystery about it. I'm afraid I haven't read "The Society of Mind" (though as it happens I noticed it on a colleague's desk earlier today), but I'm interested in the concept of consciousness as related to function. I had occasion several years ago to look into work on consciousness by experimental psychologists, and I came to the conclusion that though it is obvious that certain functions are closely associated with consciousness in us, the presence of such functions in a machine would not be sufficient evidence that the machine was conscious. Simply because it could always be asserted that in the machine, the functions were being performed by an unconscious mechanism. My problem is that I cannot imagine any counter-argument to this -- if we agree that no current machine is conscious, why should we believe any future machine to be so -- it could perform indistinguishably from a person, while being "nothing but" an unconscious object. This is why I think that deciding that something is conscious -- whether that thing is your kid brother, your PC, or an android which has fooled you that it's your mother -- says more about you than about the thing your're talking about. Seriously, though (and maybe I should say that I haven't looked at comp.ai in a couple of years), what could ever be sufficient evidence for machine consciousness?