Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!rutgers!rochester!yamauchi From: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Experience (was Re: Question on Chinese Room Argument) Keywords: experience Message-ID: <1989Mar4.152943.10902@cs.rochester.edu> Date: 4 Mar 89 20:29:43 GMT References: <3369@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <330@esosun.UUCP> Reply-To: yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu (Brian Yamauchi) Organization: U of Rochester, CS Dept, Rochester, NY Lines: 63 In article <330@esosun.UUCP> jackson@freyja.css.gov (Jerry Jackson) writes: > >I tried a few months back >to convince people in this newsgroup that there was a difference between >say: the *experience* of pain and the signal travelling through the >nervous system.. or the *experience* of seeing blue and anything you could >possibly tell a blind person about it. > >My conclusion: Most people who post to this newsgroup have no >subjective experience. Well, I agree with your premise, but not your conclusion :-). The difference between a seeing man and a blind man is (surprise) that the seeing man has functional visual sensors and the blind man does not. Thus the seeing man can associate the linguistic term "blue" with his sensory experience of viewing light in the "blue" frequency range. The implication for AI seems to me to be that if we want systems which can have "experiences" similar to our own, we need to equip them with sensors which can perceive the physical world (or alternately, place them in a very realistic simulated environment). One could argue that the nature of human experience is also dependent on the fact that human sensory inputs are processed as distributed analog activations over a neural network (the brain). Personally, I am undecided about whether this is a critical point. >Now, because I'm a glutton for punishment... Does anyone really think >someone can be wrong about whether or not they are in pain? Wouldn't >it seem really odd to respond to the statement: "I just stubbed my toe >and boy does it hurt!" with: "No it doesn't." I agree. Of course, the same thing applies to robots. Suppose an humanoid robot walking next to you stubbed his toe and said "That hurts!". Would you respond with "No, you're just programmed to say that when you damage yourself!" Or take a more near-term example: Suppose you are working with a mobile robot and you want to make sure it doesn't smash itself into a wall if it's vision software screws up. You might equip it with force sensors on its body and a low-level behavior which causes it to move back whenever these sensors are activated. In addition you could have the higher-level behaviors monitor these sensors as well, so that they know when the robot runs into something. Viewing this robot's behavior, it certainly appears that this robot experiences something like a primitive form of pain. I'm not arguing that this is at all similar to the complex forms that humans experience, but rather something close to what we assume the lower animals experience -- due entirely to our observations of their behavior and the way their nervous system is set up. After all, none of us really know whether animals can experience pain, but we tend to assume that they can. >--Jerry Jackson _______________________________________________________________________________ Brian Yamauchi University of Rochester yamauchi@cs.rochester.edu Computer Science Department _______________________________________________________________________________