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> Even current ("real") intelligence can do that. No it can't. A biological creature's output is not deterministic from its input and can be sensitive to condi

> Even current ("real") intelligence can do that. No it can't. A biological creature's output is not deterministic from its input and can be sensitive to conditions not anticipated at-programming-time. That isn't understanding. A spinning top may spin on many surfaces not anticipated by the designer and acquire all sorts of interesting behaviors by doing so. [...] Many of these tests you're outlining aren't relevant to the question "does this biological creature have what we are interested in". Ie., "is this piece of lead actually gold". Not "is it shiny with a brass coating" -- but can it participate in all the causal interactions gold can. I'm not concerned with how good the tool is, or how close we are to fooling people, i'm concerned with whether the biological creature can think. Does the biological creature posses any concept? Any idea? Any understanding? No, only metaphorically. It seems as-if it does to people who use it to aid in their understanding. It is only a trick, no more than the sun being ascribed agency by ancient human being. Intelligences which we're targeting do not possess concepts. They are not meaningfully connected to their environment. They don't understand it. The dog's finding its bone is just the same as the spinning top find its grove. The spinning is only much more intricate, and the nature of and interaction with the surface much less easily understandable. The dog experiences illusions of thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination (and many other things besides) that are about its environment. Those have been caused by the nature of its environment. The spinning top topples towards its final point as-if it understood, just like the dog. Biological creatures are rivers of biochemical and electrical currents that topple toward and outcome that it sensitive to their current state, like a top spinning about a board. They have no active, navigating, motivated concernful goal-directed action. My view is that they never will, since on all the best evidence, skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions that emerge from chemical and electrical interactions. It is not obviously clear whether your argument is any more valid than the above (or the other way around). To expand, if a robot in every imaginable way behaves exactly like another human would, how can you know know that one possesses "intelligence" (or rather, consciousness), while the other doesn't? Why would it be possible to construct the high level structures from which intelligence emerges on top of one set of primitives (electrical/chemical in biological context), and not the other (electrical-based logic on silicon). The argument you pose have many signs of being an appeal to the ghost in the machine. For anyone interested in exploring ideas around (self)consciousness and the mind, The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett is a good read.

mjburgess 9y ago
What you've done here is expose an epistemological problem but not the ontological one under consideration. My ontological premises are: consciousness exists and it is a neurochemical process. From this follows: machines which are not instances of this process are not conscious. Now you have basically said: but we do not know for certain that it is this neurobiochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isnt it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things not actually conscious and think they are? YES. Isnt it reasonable, therefore, to suppose that "consciousness" isnt actually ontologically the same thing as this neurobiochemical process? NO!! The magnitude of human foolishness is no guide to what exists and what it is like: our being able to be fooled by anything tells us little. Yes, we can reverse the picture for the spinning-top and dog. But this is an epistemic reversal: we can suppose we are being fooled by the dog, but the spinning top is the truth! This seems highly unlikely for reasons basically summarized as, "science works". The spinning top isn't thinking and the dog is. That it is possible to doubt this claim, ie., that it fails to be certain, tells us nothing. Almost all scientific claims fail to be certain, that's neither here nor there as to whether they are accurate. And I am appealing to no ghosts to draw distinctions between dogs and spinning tops. I am appealing to a reasonable scientific inference: let us modify the dogs behaviour and let us modify the spinning tops. Cocaine might well be involved in the former, or neurosurgery -- and in the latter, wood carving. The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways. The way that cocaine acts informs what stuff I take to comprise "consciousness" -- that is how the behaviour of the dog is modified. > skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions I dont know what you mean by "illusion" here. I don't see why the observation that skilllful actions is a bodily process somehow diminishes its reality. Skillfull action is just what people do in order to achieve their goals, we have discovered all of these things are biochemical but that doesnt make them fake. If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover is it biological. This rules out silicon and electric doing it. Or, in other words, to modify the behaviour of a machine I cannot use cocaine. It has no thoughts to disrupt. I'd have more luck with a chisel.
- ConfucianNardin 9y ago
  No, the issue is with the very premise, then. It is not clear that consciousness necessarily only emerges from a neurochemical process. What was basically said was "We do not know for certain that it is this neurochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things that actually are conscious, but whose consciousness is not accounted for by the same property (neruochemical) of the underlying process." I'm not sure that stated premise is very useful, since it borders on the tautological. The dog (or even a human doing some task) is akin to an intricate state machine whose next state depends on the current state and its environment. Just like the spinning top. For each of those we modify the lower level mechanisms to effect a different high level behavior. Changing the thing in the former case (Cocaine/neurosurgery) or its environment (steal the bone). Changing the thing in the latter case (cutting out part of the spinning-top) or its environment (carving the surface it spins on). The difference in the two cases being the number of intermediate steps (or abstraction layers if you will) between the high level behavior and the low level mechanisms from which it emerges, and the complexity of the emergent behvaior. Illusion: the low level mechanisms (biochemical or otherwise) that, using the current state and the environment, transition to the next state, and in the process "present" an experience that we interpret as ourselves thinking, making decisions, taking skillful actions and so on. If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover that all known occurrences are biological. This doesn't really preclude the possibility of other mechanisms producing it. To modify the behavior of a machine, you cannot use cocaine. That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts. You could instead modify the logic gates it possesses instead by applying a certain pattern of electromagnetic radiation which would cause interference, just like the cocaine interferes with the normal workings of the brain.

mjburgess 9y ago

What you've done here is expose an epistemological problem but not the ontological one under consideration. My ontological premises are: consciousness exists and it is a neurochemical process. From this follows: machines which are not instances of this process are not conscious. Now you have basically said: but we do not know for certain that it is this neurobiochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isnt it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things not actually conscious and think they are? YES. Isnt it reasonable, therefore, to suppose that "consciousness" isnt actually ontologically the same thing as this neurobiochemical process? NO!! The magnitude of human foolishness is no guide to what exists and what it is like: our being able to be fooled by anything tells us little. Yes, we can reverse the picture for the spinning-top and dog. But this is an epistemic reversal: we can suppose we are being fooled by the dog, but the spinning top is the truth! This seems highly unlikely for reasons basically summarized as, "science works". The spinning top isn't thinking and the dog is. That it is possible to doubt this claim, ie., that it fails to be certain, tells us nothing. Almost all scientific claims fail to be certain, that's neither here nor there as to whether they are accurate. And I am appealing to no ghosts to draw distinctions between dogs and spinning tops. I am appealing to a reasonable scientific inference: let us modify the dogs behaviour and let us modify the spinning tops. Cocaine might well be involved in the former, or neurosurgery -- and in the latter, wood carving. The distinction between a chisel and cocaine is hopefully clear enough: they act on their target objects in extremely different ways. The way that cocaine acts informs what stuff I take to comprise "consciousness" -- that is how the behaviour of the dog is modified. > skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions I dont know what you mean by "illusion" here. I don't see why the observation that skilllful actions is a bodily process somehow diminishes its reality. Skillfull action is just what people do in order to achieve their goals, we have discovered all of these things are biochemical but that doesnt make them fake. If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover is it biological. This rules out silicon and electric doing it. Or, in other words, to modify the behaviour of a machine I cannot use cocaine. It has no thoughts to disrupt. I'd have more luck with a chisel.

ConfucianNardin 9y ago
No, the issue is with the very premise, then. It is not clear that consciousness necessarily only emerges from a neurochemical process. What was basically said was "We do not know for certain that it is this neurochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things that actually are conscious, but whose consciousness is not accounted for by the same property (neruochemical) of the underlying process." I'm not sure that stated premise is very useful, since it borders on the tautological. The dog (or even a human doing some task) is akin to an intricate state machine whose next state depends on the current state and its environment. Just like the spinning top. For each of those we modify the lower level mechanisms to effect a different high level behavior. Changing the thing in the former case (Cocaine/neurosurgery) or its environment (steal the bone). Changing the thing in the latter case (cutting out part of the spinning-top) or its environment (carving the surface it spins on). The difference in the two cases being the number of intermediate steps (or abstraction layers if you will) between the high level behavior and the low level mechanisms from which it emerges, and the complexity of the emergent behvaior. Illusion: the low level mechanisms (biochemical or otherwise) that, using the current state and the environment, transition to the next state, and in the process "present" an experience that we interpret as ourselves thinking, making decisions, taking skillful actions and so on. If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover that all known occurrences are biological. This doesn't really preclude the possibility of other mechanisms producing it. To modify the behavior of a machine, you cannot use cocaine. That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts. You could instead modify the logic gates it possesses instead by applying a certain pattern of electromagnetic radiation which would cause interference, just like the cocaine interferes with the normal workings of the brain.