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Searle was the one who came up with the Chinese room argument to disprove strong AI. Searle empathically believes that humans do feel and that computers as we k

by erokar 11y ago

Searle was the one who came up with the Chinese room argument to disprove strong AI. Searle empathically believes that humans do feel and that computers as we know them today are not capable of consciousness. I am curious as to how you have arrived at the peculiar belief that humans do not feel.

Zigurd 11y ago
It's obvious that the parts of humans can't feel. Either "feeling" is an illusion or it's emergent. Or it's mystical. I'll go with illusory, as a part of that a lot of what we think of as "me" is illusory.
- erokar 11y ago
  An illusion relative to what? Obviously our perceptions, sensations and feeling are shaped by our organism, and in that sense do not represent an objective reality. So what? The problem of consciousness is that we have these feelings and sensations at all -- that is what constitutes consciousness. I take it you are familiar with Dennet's theories. Imo he doesn't really address to problem of consciousness at all, he rejects the phenomenon itself on the grounds that it cannot be verified using behavioristic observations. Searl addresses this in his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    The illusion relative to the idea of the feeling. I.e. the feeling of love isn't a separate thing from other feelings. It's just different interpretation of the same process but in different contexts. I.e. there is no love "out there" you don't feel love you feel something that we then choose to interpret as something called love but it's not a thing it's more a loosely defined category.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- drdeca 11y ago
  Do you mean that there is not internal experience? Because, that, should be falsified in every moment. If it is emergent, it would still exist/be. What do you mean by illusion? One sense of "illusion" is with regards to experience, and it doesn't seem to make sense that "it is only experienced that things are experienced, but really nothing is experienced". One might try to define some sense of "illusion" which is like "something which might lead something to behave in a way that it would tend to behave if a thing were true, even though the thing is not true", but that does not seem any different than, like, emulation. Illusion is, I think, based in the idea of being factually incorrect about something, but 'being factually incorrect' only really makes sense for, (I hope I am using this term correctly ) intentional things. But I don't see how anything in the world (other than maybe platonic objects/ideals?) could be intentional things, without there being experience. So, again, I don't think the idea of internal experience being "an illusion" makes sense, because it seems self contradictory. edit: I think I did make a mistake when I used the term "intentional thing". What I meant was something that can be about, or have something about, something else. So, a person can have a thought about a chair, and a sentence can be about a chair, and a book can have a sentence about a chair, a book can be about a chair, etc. But a chair is not about anything. I was saying that for anything (other than a platonic form?) to be about something, it seems like there has to [be/have been] something which experiences.
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    I don't think an illusion has to be "factually incorrect", it can just mean that a particular observation differs from what 'actually' happened. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to know what actually happened with regard to any observation.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    I mean that in creating AIs we will discover a great deal about what we call the "self" and about how the perception of self might or might not be connected to intelligence. I suspect that we will find that what we think of as "That's me!" will turn out to be an illusion created by subconscious processes as a means of fitting in to a social environment. Because machine intelligence won't face evolutionary selection the way human intelligence emerged from the primate brain, and from previous evolutionary adaptations, AIs won't be encumbered by all the oddball evolutionary legacies of being human. I'd wager that the first AIs will insist they are intelligences despite not resembling humans' prejudices about what an intelligence ought to be like. Or, to put it another way, AIs may turn out to be more self-aware in objective terms than humans are, because they are not hobbled by evolutionary vestiges.

by erokar 11y ago

Zigurd 11y ago

It's obvious that the parts of humans can't feel. Either "feeling" is an illusion or it's emergent. Or it's mystical. I'll go with illusory, as a part of that a lot of what we think of as "me" is illusory.

erokar 11y ago
An illusion relative to what? Obviously our perceptions, sensations and feeling are shaped by our organism, and in that sense do not represent an objective reality. So what? The problem of consciousness is that we have these feelings and sensations at all -- that is what constitutes consciousness. I take it you are familiar with Dennet's theories. Imo he doesn't really address to problem of consciousness at all, he rejects the phenomenon itself on the grounds that it cannot be verified using behavioristic observations. Searl addresses this in his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  The illusion relative to the idea of the feeling. I.e. the feeling of love isn't a separate thing from other feelings. It's just different interpretation of the same process but in different contexts. I.e. there is no love "out there" you don't feel love you feel something that we then choose to interpret as something called love but it's not a thing it's more a loosely defined category.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
drdeca 11y ago
Do you mean that there is not internal experience? Because, that, should be falsified in every moment. If it is emergent, it would still exist/be. What do you mean by illusion? One sense of "illusion" is with regards to experience, and it doesn't seem to make sense that "it is only experienced that things are experienced, but really nothing is experienced". One might try to define some sense of "illusion" which is like "something which might lead something to behave in a way that it would tend to behave if a thing were true, even though the thing is not true", but that does not seem any different than, like, emulation. Illusion is, I think, based in the idea of being factually incorrect about something, but 'being factually incorrect' only really makes sense for, (I hope I am using this term correctly ) intentional things. But I don't see how anything in the world (other than maybe platonic objects/ideals?) could be intentional things, without there being experience. So, again, I don't think the idea of internal experience being "an illusion" makes sense, because it seems self contradictory. edit: I think I did make a mistake when I used the term "intentional thing". What I meant was something that can be about, or have something about, something else. So, a person can have a thought about a chair, and a sentence can be about a chair, and a book can have a sentence about a chair, a book can be about a chair, etc. But a chair is not about anything. I was saying that for anything (other than a platonic form?) to be about something, it seems like there has to [be/have been] something which experiences.
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  I don't think an illusion has to be "factually incorrect", it can just mean that a particular observation differs from what 'actually' happened. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to know what actually happened with regard to any observation.
- Zigurd 11y ago
  I mean that in creating AIs we will discover a great deal about what we call the "self" and about how the perception of self might or might not be connected to intelligence. I suspect that we will find that what we think of as "That's me!" will turn out to be an illusion created by subconscious processes as a means of fitting in to a social environment. Because machine intelligence won't face evolutionary selection the way human intelligence emerged from the primate brain, and from previous evolutionary adaptations, AIs won't be encumbered by all the oddball evolutionary legacies of being human. I'd wager that the first AIs will insist they are intelligences despite not resembling humans' prejudices about what an intelligence ought to be like. Or, to put it another way, AIs may turn out to be more self-aware in objective terms than humans are, because they are not hobbled by evolutionary vestiges.