Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!canon!rjf From: rjf@canon.co.uk (Robin Faichney) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: Testing for machine consciousness Message-ID: <1990Nov1.091704.6831@canon.co.uk> Date: 1 Nov 90 09:17:04 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> <1990Oct31.142817.1999@canon.co.uk> Sender: Robin Faichney Reply-To: rjf@canon.co.uk Organization: Canon Research Europe, Guildford, UK Lines: 54 In article <1990Oct31.142817.1999@canon.co.uk> rjf@canon.co.uk (I) wrote: Something quite long which, on rereading today, I find still omits a straightforward, explicit account of where the concept of consciousness comes from. So here goes: We experience things, and are 'programmed' to identify with other humans, ie to believe them essentially identical to ourselves, so we believe that they experience things. Some things we do not identify with, ie we do not believe they experience anything. We characterise the difference between the things which we believe experience things and those which we do not, by saying that the former are conscious and the latter are not. But even before this, before the concept of consciousness arises, we reach the stage of realising that just as we view other people as experiencers, so they view us, and that is the beginning of self-consciousness, though we do not yet call it that. The main consequence for AI is probably that, if you disregard the inherited predisposition to attribute consciousness to (ie identify with) other humans, such attribution is at best arbitrary and at worst meaningless. Unless there is something seriously wrong with my account, there can never be a good reason to seriously attribute consciousness to a machine. The foregoing is a clarification of what I've said before. However, since considering some fascinating arguments made recently in this group by Chris Malcolm, I would like to suggest a possible scenario: As Eliza demonstrated, people will quite readily interact with a machine as if there was 'a real person in there', even when they know there is not. I think that this phenomenon is interestingly similar to the kind of suspension of disbelief which occurs when we are 'taken in' by a good film, play, book, etc. We know that the characters are not real, but can feel, to some extent, as if they were. I'd put quite a lot of money on the proposition that this will be the main way people will interact with computers in the near future and will remain so indefinitely. All of our communications facilities are designed for human corresponents, so the best way to communicate with a machine has to be as if it were a person. Consider all the current talk about software agents. For the reasons I've tried to explain above, people will never be willing to believe that there is *really* a conscious entity in there. But, as shown by Eliza and in the arts, in practice that belief is not required for meaningful (in human terms) communication to take place. Whether the machine views the communication as meaningful is not only irrelevant but meaningless. I'd also like to humbly suggest that future generations of AI workers will look back with amusement and bewilderment at such arguments as to whether a machine could be conscious, much as we do at the medieval arguments about the number of angels which could dance on the head of a pin. (I would *not* go so far, in this forum, as to suggest that some people in AI have, when thinking about a conscious machine, been carried away by the thought of playing God! ;-)