Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!canon!rjf From: rjf@canon.co.uk (Robin Faichney) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Testing for machine consciousness Message-ID: <1990Oct31.142817.1999@canon.co.uk> Date: 31 Oct 90 14:28:17 GMT References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct4.154655.23004@canon.co.uk> <1990Oct30.091654.25318@canon.co.uk> <1990Oct31.023922.13795@watdragon.waterloo.edu> Sender: Robin Faichney Reply-To: rjf@canon.co.uk Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK Lines: 106 In article <1990Oct31.023922.13795@watdragon.waterloo.edu> cpshelley@violet.uwaterloo.ca (cameron shelley) writes: > > > I'd like to inject a few comments regarding testing for machine >consciousness. > > Firstly, why do we accept the belief that other humans are conscious? >(I use the word "belief" advisedly, since I think that knowledge of >another's subjectivity is problematic.) I would argue that we use a >genetic analogy: I am human (which is now a genetic term), and I am >conscious; therefore since this other individual is human, he or she >is also conscious. In other words, we believe ourselves to be conscious, >and we believe that the genetic connection between ourselves and other >humans is 'close' enough to preserve that property. I think cameron is on the right lines here, but I don't think he's quite got there. For one thing, his account suggests that this is an intellectual phenomenon, but I don't think that can be true. For another, he puts self-consciousness before belief in others' consciousness. I think that we identify with, and therefore by (my) definition believe in the consciousness of, other people, long before we become self-conscious (even if we don't at that stage put it in quite those terms). Of these two points, the lack of consideration of non-intellectual aspects of this is probably more fundamental. But it can be elucidated by looking at the development of the concept of consciousness. When it's put that way, it is obvious that the concept as such is a relative late comer, whether viewed within the evolution of the species or the development of the individual. Its function is to provide an intellectual handle to at least one non-intellectual phenomenon. My contention is that this phenomenon is identification with others (other, closely related phenomena probably also being implicated). This would certainly explain the difficulties which we have in defining consciousness: we assume that because we have a symbol, there must be a referent. On reflection it becomes obvious that a concept could easily serve many purposes without actually 'standing for' any single, particular thing. This is the same sort of mistake that Wittgenstein tried to explain regarding the meaning of language: it is not the case that each word, phrase, whatever must represent some particular thing in the world, which is its meaning; in fact, the meaning of a piece of language is simply the way it is used. So how is 'consciousness' used? In more ways than one, to be sure, but I think that the common usage -- simple awareness -- is the primary one. To go back a little: what are a baby's earliest social interactions? I'd suggest (I have a reference for this somewhere) the exchange of smiles, probably with the mother. Note that mother's smile tends to trigger baby's smile and vice versa. This is modelling behaviour, and though at first it is undoubtably very low level, it is in principle the same thing as when the little girl wants to dress up like mummy (or the little boy ;-), and the teenager, having switched from the parental model to the peer group model, wants to look/talk/etc just like all her friends -- or maybe, wants to be as non-conformist as her cultural heroes. There again, any such social interaction as the feeling and expression of sympathy for someone, requires feeling for, ie identification with, that person. What I'm trying to say is that identification is fundamental to socialisation and social interaction, and you obviously can't identify with anything you don't believe to be fundamentally like yourself. So what does identification have to do with consciousness? Well, I don't think that it starts with our 'believing ourselves to be conscious'. It is deeper than that: in fact, we simply experience things, and are 'programmed' to view other humans as essentially like us, ie as 'experiencers'. The social phenomenon of identifying with others may reasonably be assumed to have arisen long before the concept of consciousness. The fact is that we *naturally* identify with some of the things in our environment, and not with others; our intellectual view of this is that some things are conscious and others are not. That could be taken as meaning that maybe our 'programming' is wrong: maybe (some?) other people are not conscious, or maybe some inanimate things are. But *that is meaningless*. We either identify with a thing or we don't. Period. The consequences for AI? I'd suggest the field has nothing to lose by forgetting consciousness. People have suggested that important things are associated with consciousness, like introspection and short-term memory, but leaving out consciousness would in no way prevent objective analogues of these, or any other mental phenomena, from being investigated. You might even look at identification with others, but that might be a little one-sided! ;-) BTW, what I am suggesting here might be taken as meaning that the mind as an individual entity is not a meaningful concept, that minds are "merely" the nodes in a social network. Maybe a better way of putting it is that some of the software cannot, for reasons of function rather than implementation, be run on a standalone machine, only on a network. This sort of view of the mind is actually quite common these days in the arts and social sciences, and if AI is ever to approach the higher level functions, the practitioners will have to start looking at postmodernism, structuralism, et al, if only to be able to say what is wrong with these approaches! ;-) If you are interested in an example of research in computing which does take recent work in the arts and social sciences very seriously, and in my view is successful in integrating these areas, where they naturally overlap, look out some of the stuff on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and groupware by the Awakening Technologies group. (They seem to be mainly P and J Johnson-Lenz, and publish themselves.) They have submitted a paper to the forthcoming CSCW Special Edition of The Intl Jnl of Man Machine Studies.