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From: jude@sdbio2.ucsd.edu (Jude Poole)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: intelligence definition, reasons for
Keywords: intelligence, awareness, implications
Message-ID: <14759@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Date: 6 Dec 90 18:15:56 GMT
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I've been watching the definition of intelligence debate and its 
associated chinese room arguments and I have an observation.

Few people have spoken much of why we want to define intelligence.
I see two possibilities which have quite different implications.

1. We may want to define intelligence to give us a practical tool
for AI type research.  It would presumably help define goals, measure
progress and communicate meaningfully about such research.

2. We may want to define intelligence (or awareness) to learn when we
have constructed or contacted beings we regard as 'moral equals', that
is deserving the same ethical considerations humans warrant.  (or for 
the more extreme among us the same considerations other life forms
deserve).

The first reason above is fairly narrow in its implications.  If we are
merely defining a technical term for use within the AI communitey it
might affect funding, our internal thoughts about feasibility, etc.  

The second however has very pervasive legal, ethical, and practical
considerations.  The 'Turing test' may be a good tool to gauge success
in AI research, and yet a miserable failure as a useful means of
distinguishing awareness for the second purpose.  

We would certainly want to know if some purportedly self aware computer
performing a critical task 'asked' to be relieved of the task because it
didn't want to do it was doing so because it was really sentient or
merely had been programmed by some malcontent to do so.  I personnally
don't believe you can create awareness in a computer at all.  My reasons
are largely philosophical and the 'Turing test' does nothing at all to
address them.  To me a machine that passes the 'Turing test' is a
tremendous accomplishment and a vindication of the pie-in-the-sky AI
types, but ultimately in ethical terms I'll consider such a thing to be
merely an interesting machine.

Jude Poole
jpoole@ucsd.edu