[alicebot-aiethics] FW: [alicebot-general] ZOMBIES

[Richard Wallace]

There are two camps in A.I.: those who agree with me, and those who are
wrong :-)

Rich

Donate to the ALICE A.I. Foundation "Cooler than Humans" -- TIME
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Fahey [askROM]" <askrom@graphpaper.com>
To: <alicebot-aiethics@list.alicebot.org>
Sent: Monday, September 03, 2001 9:00 AM
Subject: [alicebot-aiethics] FW: [alicebot-general] ZOMBIES


> Richard Wrote:
>
> > Turing disposed of the "Lovelace objection" in his 1950
> > paper.
>
> I just re-read the paper - for like the 5th time. Turing's "Computing
> Machinery and Intelligence" is worth reading every few months or so just
> to see how cogent, thorough, and prescient it is. I can't punch a hole
> in it. And everything I've read where someone tries to punch a hole in
> it seems to use crazy circular- and overly-complex logic... or worse,
> relies on intangible, even mystical ideas of what consciousness is.
>
> The most widely-accepted counterarguments appear to be of the "Argument
> from consciousness" and of the "Lovelace" variety (which Turing himself
> seemed to think was the counterargument most worthy of his attention):
> Machines can't possibly think, it says, because machines cannot
> originate ideas. Original ideas are a by-product of consciousness, which
> a machine cannot have (how's that for circular logic?).
>
> What I really appreciated about Turing's paper is his forthrightness
> about where he stands personally. He believes that computers will win
> his challenge, and that they will, in fact, think. He writes:
>      "The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably
>      from well-established fact to well-established fact,
>      never being influenced by any improved conjecture,
>      is quite mistaken."
>
> What strikes me about his naysayers is this: I really can't tell where
> they stand on the nature of consciousness. They don't tell us where they
> fall on a core aspect of the definition of consciousness. It seems that
> you can only be in one of two camps:
>
> 1) Consciousness is a real phenomonon, inexplicable by the laws of
> physics (and very likely unique to humans).
> 2) Consciousness is not a real thing, but rather a perceived effect of
> an enormously complex mechanism. It is not necessarily restricted to
> human minds, or even to biological minds.
>
> Camp #1 strikes me as a magical or spiritual belief. It's fine if that's
> how you see things, but you should at least say so so that people like
> me can know where you're coming from. Me, I'm with #2.
>
> I'm very interested in the concept of ZOMBIES: A "Zombie" (in the
> AI-naysayer argument) is a creature/being whose outward behavior has all
> the trappings of consciousness - it walks, it talks, etc. But it's inner
> self is an empty place where it doesn't even know what it is doing or
> why it is doing it. It has no understanding of its own actions. The
> ZOMBIE argument says, essentially:
>      "Okay, so you've made a robot that passes the Turing
>      Test (or even what is called the "Total Turing Test": a
>      robot that is physically and behaviorally indistinguishable
>      from a person but who is nonetheless artificial,
>      engineered and built by humans.). But it does not have
>      any awareness of what it does, so it is not really
>      conscious the way we humans are.
>
> My counterargument to this is twofold:
>
> 1) As Turing himself notes, there is no way of knowing the answer to
> this even with regards to other human beings - what goes on in someone
> else's mind is a (forever?) unsolvable mystery.
>
> 2) Who is to say that real live humans even have a consciousness where
> we know what we are doing and why we are doing it, or that such an inner
> experience is all that much different from that of an ape or a pig? My
> mind is constantly doing things that I didn't necessarily ask it to do -
> I don't ask to fall in love or get angry, I just become in love or
> angry. We are beginning to understand the enormous degree to which an
> individual human's behavior is governed by often-volatile chemical
> activity and fragile psychological mechanisms - it seems inevitable that
> neurological research will eventually figure out the exact nature of
> friendship, decision making, contentedness, love, jealousy, thrills,
> fear, and all of the other things that humans think are somehow
> intangible aspects of human consciousness. Perhaps what we think of as
> self-awareness is simply an illusion, and that in fact we are 100%
> driven by explainable electrochemical forces, i.e., a Turing
> state-machine.
>
> Anyway, my real question is: Shouldn't AI theorists be required to
> choose which of the above two definitions of consciousness they
> subscribe to? I think many AI-naysayers subscribe to #1 (Searle, for
> example) but refuse to admit it since it is, at its core, utterly
> unscientific.
>
> -Cf
>
>
>
>
>
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