Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!isi.edu!vaxa.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Definition of (was Re: Testing for []) consciousness Summary: Why are we interested in consciousness? Message-ID: <15438@venera.isi.edu> Date: 26 Oct 90 15:46:15 GMT References: <27608@usc.edu> <1990Oct22.150143.13858@canon.co.uk> <3331@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <1990Oct25.085556.12119@canon.co.uk> <3374@aipna.ed.ac.uk> Sender: news@isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 85 In article <3374@aipna.ed.ac.uk> cam@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes: >In article <1990Oct25.085556.12119@canon.co.uk> rjf@canon.co.uk writes: > >>So the question "can we ever build a conscious machine" is functionally >>equivalent to the question "can we ever build a machine with which >>people are willing to socialise". > >Yes, I think you're right. Of course, you know the story about >Weizenbaum's secretary and Eliza? She knew perfectly well that "Eliza" >was just a trick, an automated phrase-book, yet Weizenbaum was startled >and dismayed to find that she actually wished to "talk" to Eliza in >*private* -- about some of her personal problems. He drew some heavy >morals about the philosophical immaturity of the human race from this, >suggesting that we were too gullible and naive to play safely with such >dangerously suggestive toys as AI could build. > >I think he made much too much of a meal of a perfectly simple and >straightforward social relationship between a woman and a machine. > >I don't think she was at all gullible or naive. She was perfectly well >aware of the nature of Eliza. But with a common-sense female pragmatism >which horrified Weizenbaum's delicate theological sentiments (which like >many rationalist sceptics he disguised as philosophy) she saw no reason >why the creature's mechanical nature should stand in the way of a useful >relationship. She realised -- as W. did not -- that intelligence, >consciousness, and all the rest, are, like beauty, in the eye of the >beholder. I think she was married, which probably helped. > >This puts a new light on the Turing test, too: we should not be >struggling to build a machine that will confuse a misguided sophist >about whether or not it has certain properties (which the sophist >mistakenly supposes to *justify* the ascription of varieties of >mentality); rather we should be trying to build machines with which >people can have useful relationships -- a much simpler task. > I have no trouble with this argument; but I think it points out that, as we continue to observe about "intelligence," the word "consciousness" has a wide variety of interpretations. Therefore, we have to be very careful about trying to collapse all those interpretations into a single word. Having "useful relationships" is a relatively ill-specified task. It is quite true that many intelligent people have had useful relationships with implementations of Eliza. This should not surprise anyone (with the possible exception of Weizenbaum, who had long been looking for an excuse to mount a Holy War against hackers). After all, many of us have equally useful relationships with pet dogs and cats. Left alone with them, we tell them all sorts of things and usually cannot avoid attaching significance some some gesture like rolling over or barking or purring. The REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of this argument was a recent fad in the United States: the Pet Rock. You could talk to this thing to your heart's content, and it would never exhibit ANY response. Nevertheless, if you really wanted to treat it as if it were a pet, it could probably provide the same sort of psychological effect as a living pet . . . if not a dog then perhaps a guppy. However, while such socialization is clearly easy to implement, I am not sure that it touches on other aspects of consciousness which may be more germane to questions of the implementation of "intelligence." Consider, for example, issues of introspection. One school of thought argues that one of the things which makes us conscious is our ability to introspect upon our experiences and to engage that introspection as part of our behavior. This is something which separates us from lower forms of animal life. Among other things, it implies that trying to take on the question of what it means to be a bat may be a bit misdirected, since a bat need not necessarily have any great introspective powers about being a bat. (Note, for example, that being able to detect and made with a female bat does not require, as a precondition, that the agent in question "know" that it is a male bat.) The point is that we are now talking about an aspect of consciousness which is orthogonal to the question of socialization. Having convinced ourselves that there are aspects of socialization which can be implemented, we should not now lull ourselves into believing that we have "solved" any problems about consciousness. Rather, we should be seeking out other aspects of our behavior which are related to what we choose to call "consciousness" and ask how THEY might be implemented. We may also do well to follow a path suggested by Edelman in which we attempt to view certain forms of pathological behavior as "diseases of consciousness," so that we might be better able to analyze them in terms of any subsequent implementations we develop. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar 5000 Centinela Avenue #129 Los Angeles, California 90066 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "It's only words . . . unless they're true."--David Mamet