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For me, the key insight came from the following quote regarding Searle’s Chinese Room argument [1]: *> And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant

by bmh100 12y ago

For me, the key insight came from the following quote regarding Searle’s Chinese Room argument [1]: *> And while it was true, the critics went on, that a giant lookup table wouldn’t “truly understand” its responses, that point is also irrelevant. For the giant lookup table is a philosophical fiction anyway: something that can’t even fit in the observable universe! If we instead imagine a compact, efficient computer program passing the Turing Test, then the situation changes drastically. For now, in order to explain how the program can be so compact and efficient, we’ll need to posit that the program includes representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning, and all sorts of other internal furniture that we would expect to find in a mind. Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. This captures what I had intuitively thought regarding the link between computation and consciousness: consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation embodied in human physiology. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

ZeroFries 12y ago
This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered. This was never mentioned in the "Minds, Brains, Machines" course I took, so I don't think it's talked about as much as it should be among philosophy of mind circles?
- Retra 12y ago
  >This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered. Really? I'd think that the fact that someone saying 'lookup tables aren't thinking' without ever saying what thinking is would be presenting an obviously self-refuting argument. Like a judge saying "I know crime when I see it: I don't have to write down what it is." It's simply not a basis for rational decision making, so it's certainly not a convincing assertion. The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition. There are genuinely competent people doing competent work in the field of philosophy. They just don't make up enough of the peer-review boards to throw out everyone who isn't as competent as them. The continuing influence of mathematical logic and its attendant "general axiom to specific theorem, As Above So Below" style of thinking does not help.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  The whole Turing Test thing is massively overblown. It's a thought exercise and not a particularly great one. It's gotten completely out of hand, with Kurzweil, Chomsky, Searle etc all weighing in. Computer passes Turing Test, Human fails Turing test - vice versa - that's all there is to it.
  - arvinjoar 12y ago
    Yeah well, context is king. The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on their internal structures isn't very fair, since that's not how we judge humans. There's no real way of knowing about other people's "qualia" or whatever you want to call it. To skirt that problem, Turing suggested a behavior-based approach. I think we probably judge others to be conscious actors in more ways than this though. We probably accept that other people have "qualia" from the fact that we have it, and then we kind of learn that our parents have it, and so on, until it's not a huge leap to generalize that to all of humanity. Of course it's not like people have always assumed the same kind of "qualia" for all of humanity, in a lot of conflicts this has probably been thrown out of the window so it will be easier to kill your enemies. Either way, it's probably quite complex how we determine that other people are conscious, Turing tried to skirt the metaphysical issue (that we can never really know, this goes for both humans and other machines). I think this was a huge step in the right direction.
    - throwawayaway 12y ago
      "Computing machinery and intelligence" wherein the test is outlined, with background. aka "The Imitation Game" http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML > The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on... That wasn't the aim at all, again I think you are reading way too much in to it. The aim was to pose a test that would fool people. Alan Turing: "an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes" "The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." The test is a very simple thought exercise where he shows a machine will be able to pass for a human, and a human will fail to identify a machine. That's it. No questions of consciousness, metaphysics! In fact he dismisses such questions in the paper. His belief was that in 50 years time, the words may have changed, and people's opinions about what constitutes thinking would have changed to the point where: someone could say "a computer thinks" without challenge. That hasn't happened, when somebody says "a computer thinks" they are saying it with tongue firmly in cheek. Maybe in another 65 years time his belief will come true.
disputin 12y ago
"..representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning... consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation ..." -- But would it love?
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. It's not so much the difference between polynomial and exponential complexity. It's the difference between a coinductive (ie: infinitely looping, like a game loop) computation that adds new information to its "memory" in each iteration (which sounds monadic), compressing its inputs to accommodate that information, and then generating an output... vs a super-exponential lookup table that performs the input-output mappings without actually engaging in any side-effecting or monadic computation at all. So yes, when you think of these two vastly different ways of writing down a "cognitive-style" computation, it becomes clear that one of them maps relatively well to what we think of when we say "mind", while the other doesn't, and Searle is conveniently eliding the distinction.
- bmh100 12y ago
  Hm why does adding information to memory sound monadic to you? I am not questioning you, but just curious. My knowledge of monads is limited. I would argue that Searle's Chinese Room is posed in a way that presupposes what forms computation might take or the limits it has. Since this was posed decades ago (1980), it makes sense in his time. If Searle had begun teaching today (instead of 1969) and seen convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks deployed in massive data centers, Watson win Jeopardy!, neural Turing machines, or a worm's brain emulated and embodied in a small robot, I doubt he would have posed his Chinese Room the same way. Maybe he would not have posed it at all, being convinced in light of those achievements.

by bmh100 12y ago

ZeroFries 12y ago

This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered. This was never mentioned in the "Minds, Brains, Machines" course I took, so I don't think it's talked about as much as it should be among philosophy of mind circles?

Retra 12y ago
>This is the first good refutation of the Chinese room I've encountered. Really? I'd think that the fact that someone saying 'lookup tables aren't thinking' without ever saying what thinking is would be presenting an obviously self-refuting argument. Like a judge saying "I know crime when I see it: I don't have to write down what it is." It's simply not a basis for rational decision making, so it's certainly not a convincing assertion. The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >The fact that anybody thinks the Chinese room is an interesting philosophical quandary is far more interesting. It means these are primitive times and you don't actually need to be very smart to beat the competition. There are genuinely competent people doing competent work in the field of philosophy. They just don't make up enough of the peer-review boards to throw out everyone who isn't as competent as them. The continuing influence of mathematical logic and its attendant "general axiom to specific theorem, As Above So Below" style of thinking does not help.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
throwawayaway 12y ago
The whole Turing Test thing is massively overblown. It's a thought exercise and not a particularly great one. It's gotten completely out of hand, with Kurzweil, Chomsky, Searle etc all weighing in. Computer passes Turing Test, Human fails Turing test - vice versa - that's all there is to it.
- arvinjoar 12y ago
  Yeah well, context is king. The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on their internal structures isn't very fair, since that's not how we judge humans. There's no real way of knowing about other people's "qualia" or whatever you want to call it. To skirt that problem, Turing suggested a behavior-based approach. I think we probably judge others to be conscious actors in more ways than this though. We probably accept that other people have "qualia" from the fact that we have it, and then we kind of learn that our parents have it, and so on, until it's not a huge leap to generalize that to all of humanity. Of course it's not like people have always assumed the same kind of "qualia" for all of humanity, in a lot of conflicts this has probably been thrown out of the window so it will be easier to kill your enemies. Either way, it's probably quite complex how we determine that other people are conscious, Turing tried to skirt the metaphysical issue (that we can never really know, this goes for both humans and other machines). I think this was a huge step in the right direction.
  - throwawayaway 12y ago
    "Computing machinery and intelligence" wherein the test is outlined, with background. aka "The Imitation Game" http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML http://cogprints.org/499/1/turing.HTML > The aim of the Turing Test is to say that judging machines based on... That wasn't the aim at all, again I think you are reading way too much in to it. The aim was to pose a test that would fool people. Alan Turing: "an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes" "The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." The test is a very simple thought exercise where he shows a machine will be able to pass for a human, and a human will fail to identify a machine. That's it. No questions of consciousness, metaphysics! In fact he dismisses such questions in the paper. His belief was that in 50 years time, the words may have changed, and people's opinions about what constitutes thinking would have changed to the point where: someone could say "a computer thinks" without challenge. That hasn't happened, when somebody says "a computer thinks" they are saying it with tongue firmly in cheek. Maybe in another 65 years time his belief will come true.

disputin 12y ago

"..representations of abstract concepts, capacities for learning and reasoning... consciousness is some sort of sophisticated, elegant computation ..." -- But would it love?

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Personally, I find this response to Searle extremely interesting—since if correct, it suggests that the distinction between polynomial and exponential complexity has metaphysical significance. It's not so much the difference between polynomial and exponential complexity. It's the difference between a coinductive (ie: infinitely looping, like a game loop) computation that adds new information to its "memory" in each iteration (which sounds monadic), compressing its inputs to accommodate that information, and then generating an output... vs a super-exponential lookup table that performs the input-output mappings without actually engaging in any side-effecting or monadic computation at all. So yes, when you think of these two vastly different ways of writing down a "cognitive-style" computation, it becomes clear that one of them maps relatively well to what we think of when we say "mind", while the other doesn't, and Searle is conveniently eliding the distinction.

bmh100 12y ago
Hm why does adding information to memory sound monadic to you? I am not questioning you, but just curious. My knowledge of monads is limited. I would argue that Searle's Chinese Room is posed in a way that presupposes what forms computation might take or the limits it has. Since this was posed decades ago (1980), it makes sense in his time. If Searle had begun teaching today (instead of 1969) and seen convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks deployed in massive data centers, Watson win Jeopardy!, neural Turing machines, or a worm's brain emulated and embodied in a small robot, I doubt he would have posed his Chinese Room the same way. Maybe he would not have posed it at all, being convinced in light of those achievements.