Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!uwm.edu!ogicse!pdxgate!eecs!erich From: erich@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Erich Stefan Boleyn) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Split from AI/CogSci (was -> Re: Testing for machine consciousness) Keywords: language, conciousness, intelligence, encoding Message-ID: <507@pdxgate.UUCP> Date: 2 Nov 90 19:50:44 GMT Sender: news@pdxgate.UUCP Lines: 90 In my article <492@pdxgate.cs.pdx.edu> I commented on the current state of discussion in AI/Cognitive Science about the topics of "conciousness" and "intelligence" primarily, and an e-mail reply was sent to me commenting on the length of my article (280 lines) and asking that I make a shorter version of it. (Here it is, don't flame it too badly ;-) I had four main points and here they are in short: 1) A lot of discussion in AI/CogSci about "conciousness" and "intelligence" (etc) is inhibited by the lack of a language (metaphorically speaking) that we can use for it. The terms we are using are borrowed from our normal social useages and from psychology/sociology (although I think that they are at best marginal even there), and from what I have seen of discussion going on in comp.ai/comp.ai.philosophy and an e-mail group , I would definitely say that they are inadiquate. There is a differentiation of concepts that happen when one learns about a new subject, and for myself, at least, I passed up the adiquacy of the language to be clear a while ago, and I have yet to see (admittedly from my somewhat scientifically naive point of view) the existence of such a language. 2) On a similar note, I think that the assumptions brought in from psychology and sociology, etc. by using *their* admittedly adopted language are naive in the useful sense. They are useful since they work with the best known examples we have, but we are wedding ourselves to too much of the human paradigm. In mathematics it is an old saying that the hardest things to prove are the ones we normally take for granted, and I certainly agree in this case. The connotations are part of what are confusing us to much. Just because the terms and useages we know are so eminently useful and practical in the social sense of useage (not scientific, that is), does not imply in any way that they are useful to transfer into a scientific domain. Maybe "conciousness" and "intelligence" are naive questions? I am not sure, but it is looking more and more so. A related one that comes to mind is our concept of intentionality, or "purpose". I have come to think that it is a useful thing to have in terms of object-level description, but that it may also be a naive notion, one that we should try to look away from. It was good for a start, but it is apparent me that we are tripping over ourselves to get anywhere as a community. So what if we have finely developed ideas of what is going on, I know I do... but can you communicate it in any kind of believable way without a considerable amount of persuasion? It has been my experience that I have developed my notions to a fine enough extent that it takes a hell of a long time to communicate it to anyone. We are re-inventing the wheel far too much. 3) An interesting (but hardly origonal) consideration would be to think about how we arganize the world internally. There seems to be a consensus of sorts amoung a good percentage of posters in this general thread that "higher intelligence" (This so badly illustrates what I am thinking) is a modeling ability of sorts. An idea that comes from this is to think of intelligence as an encoding scheme between inputs and outputs (over time) that on the low end would be a constant output, and on the high end a sort of maximal look-up table over time. Our brains certainly don't handle *all* of the information in from the senses, so in a sense we are in the middle somewhere. 4) On a related tone to 3, I (and some others, I think), put forward the idea of attempting to develop a "Turing Test" theory, that would work at studying invariants in "intelligent" or even "concious" behaviours or even given some of the internal structure would work from that... Anyway, it would attempt to try to find ways of difinitively testing certain things (this is where a language of "AI" would be a lot of help ;-). An idea would be to think about some kind of complexity rating for a hypothetical encoding scheme (both "complexity" and "encoding" are wrong, and possibly inadiquate for this, I know that if one was to develop something like this, a "complexity" factor would be only on amoung many), which is what I am working on now, although badly, as can be seen. This is abbreviated (at least the justifications are), so for a better reference look to the origonal article, or of course, I'll respond to specific inquiries. All comments are welcome, and appreciated. I really think something needs to be done about this, as this "problem", as I see it, has been around for long enough. I'm willing to work on this, and would like to know of others who are too. Erich / Erich Stefan Boleyn Internet E-mail: \ >--={ Portland State University Honorary Graduate Student (Math) }=--< \ College of Liberal Arts & Sciences *Mad Genius wanna-be* / "I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it."