State of Artificial Intelligence

Typoz said:
I understand that this is your position, and to be honest I agree with you. You make some good arguments.

However, this thread is nominally about artificial intelligence, while in the previous post I think you veered at least momentarily, into the idea of artificial consciousness.

I don't think these two concepts, consciousness and intelligence, are interchangeable, however in my replies I was addressing those aspects relating to consciousness, rather than intelligence.
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Well two concepts, A and B may be distinct, and yet it may not be possible to obtain B without A.

I find any of my thought process is saturated with qualia - I don't believe intelligence exists without consciousness.

David
 
David Bailey said:
Effectively yes. An ordinary computer is operates according to rules that could be embedded in clockwork - so proposing that a program is conscious with no particular restrictions on the type of hardware used, is saying that in principle, a piece of clockwork could be conscious!
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It's just a bit difficult to work out why someone should want to characterise an advanced digital computer as a "can opener". I imagine Mrs Huse must get quite a few surprises when she sends her husband shopping. "But darling, I asked you to get a potato peeler, and you've brought back a tactical nuclear missile." :eek:
 
malf said:
You are asking the same questions of the AI mind that the physicalist is asking of the human "mind". What does it mean to have anybody "at home inside"?
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The mystery of consciousness - (nearly) everyone knows for certain that they have it although no one understands what it really is, and there is no sign of anyone even getting in sight of a solution. Some materialists get around this by believing it doesn't really exist - it is just an illusion. This is an extreme position that I think can be dismissed as ridiculous. The human intellect may, because of its own limitations, be fundamentally incapable of comprehending the essence of it's own existence.
 
nbtruthman said:
The mystery of consciousness - (nearly) everyone knows for certain that they have it although no one understands what it really is, and there is no sign of anyone even getting in sight of a solution. Some materialists get around this by believing it doesn't really exist - it is just an illusion. This is an extreme position that I think can be dismissed as ridiculous. The human intellect may, because of its own limitations, be fundamentally incapable of comprehending the essence of it's own existence.
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Can you cite anyone who thinks that consciousness is entirely an illusion? I think you're misinterpreting what people like Dennett are saying.

~~ Paul
 
nbtruthman said:
The mystery of consciousness - (nearly) everyone knows for certain that they have it although no one understands what it really is, and there is no sign of anyone even getting in sight of a solution. Some materialists get around this by believing it doesn't really exist - it is just an illusion. This is an extreme position that I think can be dismissed as ridiculous. The human intellect may, because of its own limitations, be fundamentally incapable of comprehending the essence of it's own existence.
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What I don't understand - or rather one of the many things I don't understand - is how, if no one understands what consciousness really is, so many people can be so sure that it's impossible for a machine to have it.
 
Chris said:
What I don't understand - or rather one of the many things I don't understand - is how, if no one understands what consciousness really is, so many people can be so sure that it's impossible for a machine to have it.
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Even stranger, those people claim to be the open minded ones, while they base their beliefs on what is not possible.
 
David Bailey said:
I don't believe intelligence exists without consciousness.

David
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I guess that that completely depends on your definition, as so much in these discussions.
If, for instance, a computer system can come to solutions that are not predicted by it's initial programming, we say it is an intelligent system. That is intelligence without consciousness.
But if you define intelligence as only possible with consciousness, of course you are right, but also begging the question. Some will take this even one step further, and claim single cell organisms are conscious because they behave intelligently.
A form of intelligence that is probably easily replicated on a computer, but somehow that computer is not conscious?

It seems that definitions are doing the heavy lifting here, and that always leads to some form of circularity.
 
I like John Searle's "Chinese room argument". A computer or machine certainly will be able to simulate consciousness to an outside observer but will never be conscious with everything that means.
 
erickh said:
I like John Searle's "Chinese room argument". A computer or machine certainly will be able to simulate consciousness to an outside observer but will never be conscious with everything that means.
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It's funny. Searle wanted to talk about the capabilities of computers, but he chose to put a human in the room. There are so many restrictions on the sorts of questions that can be asked. What is the room to do when asked:

What is the headline in the China Daily today?

What is the opposite of the last answer you gave?

What is the English word for "horse"?


~~ Paul
 
David Bailey said:
...........

The basic problem is that it doesn't understand anything, it just manipulates symbols - just as conventional programs don't understand what water is, even when performing hydrodynamic calculations.

David
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How do you define understanding?
Chris said:
What I don't understand - or rather one of the many things I don't understand - is how, if no one understands what consciousness really is, so many people can be so sure that it's impossible for a machine to have it.
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I think this applies here too, how can we say a computer can not understand, if we do not know how understanding works?

Let us say we have an artificial neural network we have trained to differentiate between apples and oranges, does this program not 'understand' what an apple is?

In the program there is not a single line of code that describes what an orange is. There is no algorithm to recognize color, shape, or any other trait, and yet the program is able to recognize either fruit to a high degree of accuracy. The understanding purely happens through its training with positive or negative feedback.

By some definition of "understanding", we can definitely say the program understands what an apple ,is or an orange is; It are the two only things this program understands in the whole universe, but still, it understands.

We could also say the program has a concept of what an apple or an orange is, it does not need a concept of what 'green' is or what 'round' is

Of course this is a vastly less complex level of understanding than human understanding, but i think it works by the same principles. It is also the reason why i think the qualia idea comes at the problem from the wrong side, i think our mind is much more based on concepts rather than qualia.
 
There is a "who" in consciousness that does the understanding. In computers, there is no "who". There is no self-awareness. No self-awareness has ever been detected in a can opener or a computer. A who can be simulated in a computer as can self-awareness. But a simulation is not the real thing.

Consciousness is likely as fundamental to the universe as the quantum wave function is. The mistake is the materialist's reductionistic faith that all reality must be explained as being made up of atoms, molecules and particles - including consciousness. Given the scientific evidence we have in psi and ndes, we know now that consciousness possesses non-local attributes. There is still a lot we don't know, still plenty of unknowns - but we do know that consciousness is not simply a local function of the brain.

My Best,
Bertha
 
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Go on then, Bertha - how is it possible to detect self-awareness? And why, oh why, didn't anyone tell Alan Turing about this? :D
 
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